—Helene Cixous, Un vrai jardin (1971)

A True Garden was an interactive audio performance based on French writer and feminist theorist Helene Cixous’ short story Un vrai jardin. Participants could download the .mp3 audio file of the performance onto their personal media device between 25 September – 7 November 2015. Participants received instructions as to how, where, and when to access the System Garden at the University of Melbourne – the selected site where the work was designed to be experienced by a solo listener.

The reading, translation, and mistranslation of Cixous’ story as a bedtime fable within a public garden invites reflection on both the experience of intimacy with nature and the overwhelming global challenges to rapid environmental change that threaten this fragile and fraught relation. The interactive performance was placed within the only system garden in the Southern Hemisphere – a design that aims to demonstrate the evolutionary development of plant species. The audio performance invited participants to explore different parts of the garden, bringing together rationalist enlightenment science, religion, poetry, and the politics of human-nature relations.

PRESS PLAY TO STREAM THE AUDIO FILE

OR DOWNLOAD THE AUDIO FILE HERE, A True Garden

‘Original music and production by Hugh Crosthwaite’

EVENT GUIDE
(Click images to view full size or download the A-True-Garden-instructions-and-map PDF)

Walking Interconnections, and the resulting audio-play, Walk With Me, recognise and respond to the fact that disabled people’s voices have been largely absent from the sustainability debate. Representing one-fifth of the world’s population, disabled people have unique contributions, often overlooked, to help build resilient societies and communities. Setting as its foundational tenet the fact that disability does not mean inability, Walk With Me uses walking with as a way to identify and make tangible the everyday, embodied knowledges of disabled people – their habitual experiences of their environments, and their persistent enactments of resilience within these.

What can we learn from disabled people’s experiences of walking? How might these experiences help us create more sustainable futures? Join us for a 30-minute audio walk. Listen out for performances of creativity, commitment, risk-taking, resilience and interdependency. Walk as if in someone else’s shoes.

Aboriginal and Maori people have expressed and shared these ideas through oral history and language, which have been threatened (and sometimes eliminated) by colonial structures, identities and formations. Walk on Fallow Lands #2 thereby draws on a Maori view of history that requires an understanding of whakapapa in affirming identity. The saying ‘I nga wa o mua’ alludes to the past being something that lies in front of you, rather than something you leave behind, and illustrates a cyclical view of history as each person is added to whakapapa, and the story moves forward, bringing the past with it.

In honouring the memories and myths of significance to the first peoples of Australia, and presenting these through a Maori lens, the artists seeks to disrupt Western narratives of place by removing dominant hierarchies. ‘Just as when I am walking, my feet are the waka and I carry the embodied knowledge within me.’

This walk is being conducted with blessings from the Wurundjeri Tribe Land and Cultural Heritage Council. With the support of Creative New Zealand.

The clandestine-like movements of the black sphere reveal a hidden interior motive, for these acts of blind navigation produce a milieu in correspondence with each terrain encountered. Surfaces, materials, spatial qualities, rhythms, and other movement systems are gently intruded upon: a dark intrusion creating alternative, non-linear, nomadic narratives in relation to landscapes. A condition of blindness reveals tensions between the body and the geological, geographic, cultural, technological, and architectural terrains encountered.

In the specifically Australian context, walking country has particular significance as a mode of culturally-located knowing, resonant with the ‘songlines’ of Aboriginal tradition. Arriving in this ‘storied terrain’ of the Australian continent, this work by Sam Trubridge – whose formative childhood was spent under stars living on his parents’ sailing boat – performs as an autopoetic register of intersections between mobile spatial practices, non-linear narratives, and the organisational fixity of the state polis and urban architecture.

Following an experimental journey in the Murray Riverland, Night Walk journeyed through city spaces at irregular times over two periods of 48 hours in relation to the two Performing Mobilities gallery sites. Temporarily lodging at the entrance thresholds of the galleries and their spaces within, this nomadic object unsettles the architectural loci of the gallery with a provisional spatiality; inviting entry into its own interior; opening out the potential for multi-dimensional re-inscriptions of moving with and knowing the environment.

In 2015, a series of directed yet meandering cross-town journeys have continued to be generated by a play of exchange between one person (the player) and the response invoked by throwing a passer-by (the other players) a Frisbee. A GPS locator on the player records the winding pathways and accumulate as a series of mappings that make visible the meandering and haphazard nature of the overall trajectories – exposing the dynamics between the intended direction and the actual manifestation of each journey. Understanding that cartography is an attempt to fill geographic spaces with knowledge in a graphical form that we can communally understand, the exhibited maps reframe the hegemonic values granted to notions of efficient and economic trajectories of human activities across space and time.

As a light and flexible model, TOWN CROSSINGS encourages participation as an open and flexible apparatus, by valuing cultural production through non-economic exchange. The ability for anyone to participate allows for the constant propulsion of the mediating object. It is a fluid and open process, engaging with a strategy of performative acts as generative sites of social inclusion.

Sited in the everyday, TOWN CROSSINGS can also be seen as an evolving choreography of interpretation as it produces new engagements via each outing. Activated in the immediacy of the spaces, the instantly forming and dissolving of the participatory relationships that occur re-value play and playfulness in our society, and as a way to collectively produce and rethink new understandings of place.

The rigid structure of the city is re-imagined as a fluid, choreographic entity invested with organic qualities. Performances move between a series of city locations, each with differing activities. Designated ‘nodes’ in the city grid (certain streets, a square, a doorway, footpath, a hole in a wall or a particular tree), have been chosen for their imaginative, affective, or energetic resonances. These are ‘mapped’ by the perambulatory, physical, sensory, and relational engagement of all participants. This is a collective dance created through noticing the feelings and patterns of the physical self in the built, natural, and social environment.

In some sites, the artists perform, while in others they lead a participative performance. Ephemeral, self-led, performance experiments designed to disappear into the fabric of the city, will also be invited.

A mobile app enables audience participation. The app employs GPS data to trigger information specific to that site (written prompts, sounds and scored provocations).

To access the app visit: http://oliviamillard.net/nowagain/

These performances punctuated the Performing Mobilities ASSEMBLY symposium by live video feed. This relay between live performance and live video projection introduces another public audience, who witness both the solitude of the performing figure as if ‘from above’ and a dramatised close-up experience of the performer’s face as it slowly turns from side to side. Through this close-up cinematic view, the passivity of the face remains intensely active. It is not a simple antithesis of action but, rather, reveals discreet and incremental levels of mobility. As a kind of face-to-face encounter, Repeating Silence endeavours to explore a radical passivity of sensibilities beyond vision, mobility and touch.

Watch the Repeating Silence ASSEMBLY symposium performances online.

Julieanna Preston’s site-specific intervention, Bit-u-men-at-work, serves to explicate the machine-like devouring needs of perpetual mobility that our road systems manifest. The freeway, the highway, the road or the lane – across scales of distance and efficiency – these are the bitumen veins of mobility. Ever present, these are the norms of our landscape, and in Australia they run the periphery of the mainland and are repeated on our smaller islands. These veins seem to hold us together; a bitumen veiny network that is in a constant state of repair, being made by road teams, and being unmade by the vehicles that pound across its surfaces.

Via journeying, listening and broadcasting, Very Local Radio foregrounds unpredictable performances with places encountered. The project looks like a portable Internet radio transmitter assembled in a shopping trolley pushed by the artists. Audiences access the work as an Internet radio station and tune into the unpredictable sound of movements through places.

During the Performing Mobilities program, four passages of movement were undertaken amongst the spaces between the RMIT Gallery and Margaret Lawrence Gallery, taking place at midday and midnight, sunrise and sunset. Whilst moving, interesting urban sound ecologies were actively sought out, whilst the trolley broadcaster was used as a tool to explore, meet, and sometimes hand over the microphone to the community. Shared as a live sound broadcast, and generated by navigating on foot, the station was live only during the movements, and each broadcast lasted 1-2 hours.

> listen here

British artist Bill Aitchison, himself a visitor to Melbourne, guides each group around the city and describes different tours that inscribe their various narratives onto the places stopped at. Each tour ends with a convivial open conversation in a cafe. The work draws attention to both the city itself and the wider potential of the tourist gaze. In doing so, it opens up questions of globalisation, the meaning of these exchanges between local and visitor, and how we use and give identity to places. It draws out the inherent politics, both local and global, of describing the city, and collages radically divergent narratives, such as conventional self-serving histories with sex tourism, protest marches, and artist projects.

The Tour Of All Tours brings visitor and local into the same frame as equals. It achieves this by focusing upon the experience of taking tours in the city and looking at what the different tours do and don’t tell you about it. Aitchison has presented versions of the project in cities around the world, including Stuttgart, London, Beijing and Amsterdam.

Aitchison reforms the guided tour into an engaging and truly unique medium for art outside of the institution and in the public sphere… For 90 minutes, Aitchison interrupts and utilises this stage to show us, the audience, the layers of branding, expectations and reality of which it is comprised. Aitchison’s quirky and peculiar mix of disclosure and captivating storytelling offers fun and enlightenment (Time Out, Beijing).