Walking Upstream: Waterways of the Illawarra has roots in the avant-garde practices of the past century: conceptual art, socially-engaged art practice, land art, and happenings, for example. It is at this site, between land and sea, that these three intrepid artists actively adopt Donald Brook’s definition of art as ‘unspecific experimental modelling’. Through embodied acts of walking as a trio, and in consort with fellow walkers, they seek to be in these places as they traverse the diversity of landscapes.

The walkers begin at the sea, at an identifiable ‘mouth’. They walk their way upstream along named and unnamed creeks, hacking through weeds and undergrowth, skirting along property boundaries, talking their way into people’s yards. They continue for as long as geography, topography, and social boundaries allow.

Through this simple methodology, their trajectories intersect with various cultures of land use – mining, bush regeneration, weed infestation and suburbanisation. These walks are a form of ‘ground truthing’ – a means of comparing official maps and aerial photographs with the lived experience of tramping along actual creeks. Walking Upstream: Waterways of the Illawarra is a resolutely local project – born from the desire of the key walkers to engage more deeply with the topographical, ecological, and social fabric of where they live.

Sal de Sal activates three sites through which the human body can register global and local dynamics. At RMIT Gallery, a body of salt is encountered, recently collected from an area of increasing salinity exacerbated by agricultural irrigation demands on the Murray-Darling Basin. At Margaret Lawrence Gallery, a body of water is encountered, linked with the Wonthaggi desalination plant established in times of drought to meet metropolitan Melbourne’s water demands, that has not yet been required to supply desalinated seawater to Melbourne. Passing between Galleries one crosses the lower reach of the Yarra River, where freshwater and saltwater are in constant seasonal negotiation.

David Thomas and Laurene Vaughan draw on previous work to present this performance installation as an outcome of their practice-based conversations on the nature of place, and modalities of articulating invisible/intangible aspects of (spatial) transition. Within this practice, colour is used as a navigation device.

Taking a Line for Walk, extends the artists’ articulation, with the development of a two-part installation/event linking the RMIT Gallery and Margaret Lawrence Gallery in Melbourne. At each site, a series of different coloured and sized lines are stacked in the gallery, presented and waiting to be taken to the streets. Members of the public will be invited to draw their path – a line – from, between or around one gallery to the other gallery. These lines ‘walked’ and thus drawn in space will connect experiences of exteriority and interiority, nature and culture, by making visible the ephemeral experiences and connections of daily life.

The action is not prescribed in a way that participants must make their way from one gallery to another – participants may elect to perform more or less movement – and it is anticipated that, as a public-sited work and situation, there will be a multiplicity of sociocultural engagements. It is part mobility, part encounter.

The project encourages active looking and greater awareness of the spatial practices of mobility. It will be variously documented and represented with small colour images and photographs accumulating in the galleries. No matter what the distance of the journey, the work makes visible individual passages through space, embodied and accompanied, from one location to another.

Aidani has been working with Iranian asylum seekers and refugee artists who have recently arrived in Melbourne. With backgrounds in Iranian film and theatre, Omid Movafagh, Mike Fard and Mohsen Panahi formed a small group that became immersed in Aidani’s text as a prism through which to find locations of affinity and belonging. Together the group made a short film.

This new installation of A Few Steps Not Here Not There creates an intimate setting for experiencing the looping film and encountering the original text. Together, these layers of the installation reveal two generations of asylum seeker experience endeavouring to come to terms with trauma, hopes, movement of identity, and forms of self-authorised creative expression that negotiate cultural displacement.

> The third play production since 2001 of the text A Few Steps Not Here Not There was presented at La Mama 18-29 November 2015, directed by Lloyd Jones >

Always active, never passive, these artists are in control of their representations at all times. First staged in Western Sydney in March 2015, OTD developed a process that is a template for site-specific, community-engaged performance that works anywhere asylum seekers or refugees live.

‘Who are we? Who is ‘one of us’? What codes must we live by? Who are we part of? Whose humanity do we recognise as akin to ours? And a further terrible question: What do we owe those whose humanity we fail to recognize?’ (Sevendrini Perara, 1968). With 60 million displaced humans on the move today seeking havens (UNHCR), how can the rest of the world, particularly those privileged to live in peace and relative justice, respond ethically? In OTD we invite, inveigle, and coerce audiences into a space of identification, recognition, curiosity.

OTD is an activist work, driven by a refusal to be silent and a determination to engage in uncomfortable conversations. It deals with our societal complicity in government policy and community collusion in the dehumanising discourses passing as debate in media representations of people seeking asylum. OTD insists on the audience taking steps to walk in another’s shoes. It builds layers of experience, shared dilemmas, laughing and singing. It simultaneously introduces small discomforts – relinquishing a mobile phone, entering a blue light space alone, being assigned a name or number. It is at all times an invitation to speak.

For two years, Barry has been a daily co-driver, as well as being contracted by Tangentyere Council as Studio Manager. During this period, Barry developed a close relationship with six of the women and together discussed the possibilities of making a video project based on their relationship and the everyday lived experiences of those lives.

‘Cruising’ is a term the women enjoy using when they have the opportunity to drive around Alice Springs looking for fellow artists in multifarious locations, and engaging with other kin walking around town. ‘Driving’ is a form of accessibility into their mutual inter- and intra- subjective lives. The concept of journeying also registers the complexities of living under the propriety of a hegemonic community, and its inherent ‘expectations’. In contrast, cruising suggests the unexpected, ad hoc, incremental, provisional, and multivalent nature of Aboriginal life-worlds.

The project Cruising continues Barry’s ongoing interest in the ‘performative moment’ set in culture and a practical methodology. The performative moment positions all subjectivities – those in front of the camera and those behind it. It becomes a reworking by performance, a space of proximity, mobility, wherein the camera acts as a catalyst and not as a neutral recording device –  its actual ‘presence’ is responsible for creating the responses of the participants being filmed.  Photography and performance form part of an act of auto/biographical re-presentation. By using a handheld camera, Barry enacts both mobility and proximity. In cultural terms, proximity suggests accountability, reciprocity, and the potential for enduring relationships.

Pan activates an accumulating collection of moving panoramic images – provided by Kaya Barry and PSi Fluid States participants from around the world – that visitors may interactively inhabit. The visitor manipulates relationships between an image projector mounted upon a dolly track, and a trackpad that scrolls the projected panorama. The live event of constructing-perceiving panoramic tracking shots opens up in ways that expand sensory experience beyond usual peripheries.

Zoom co-opts the ‘dolly-zoom’ effect in cinema – wherein the camera zooms in while moving backward or zooms out while moving forward – resulting in the image expanding to amplify an intense moment of realisation. Hitchcock developed this technique in Vertigo to show audiences how the protagonist experiences his fear of heights. Jondi Keane pulls apart the double movement of the camera effect by himself performing the pulling back and forth of a moving wall as a backdrop. Moments of realisation are created between visitors who take up the camera operation, and an improvising actor’s role, to accompany Keane’s durational wall moving. An updating collection of filmic moments made throughout the installation duration screen ‘on-set’.

Amongst the pervasive languages of cinema, photography, television and mobile media, Pan & Zoom explores how audiences here are performative inter-actors, rendering the image toward the body’s expansive inhabitations of space, and challenging the grip of technological seduction.

Sanctioned by each fancier, as an envoy between place and magnetic pull, the artist travels to each fancier’s location of attraction, accompanied by their birds. A spy camera secured in a purpose-built harness is attached to the breast of one pigeon. On release, the birds leave their fancier’s selected site and, by drawing on minute magnetic particles in their beaks, navigate their way home using the earth’s magnetic field, as the site and aerial journey home are recorded on the video camera.

At the completion of all flights, the aerial footage is previewed in a one-off screening at the Moonah Pigeon clubhouse, (re)connecting the fanciers to their sites of enduring attraction. The footage then migrates to Melbourne to be screened as simultaneous individual flights, indexing journeys travelled and connections performed as persistent loops within the TRACES exhibition for Performing Mobilities.

Friction Atlas is an ongoing critical archive, where laws regulating behaviours and gatherings in public spaces, sampled from different contexts, are represented and collected. Friction Atlas is also the enactment of such choreographies through staged performances in public spaces. Addressing the issue of legibility of public space, it aims to make regulations explicit, through graphical devices. By drawing 1:1 diagrams, and enacting laws on public surfaces, the project makes legal prescriptions and loopholes debatable. Through the engagement of the public, the dynamics of authority become discernible.

The diagrams represent cases from different cities, including Athens, Genoa, Cairo, Washington, Stockholm, Sydney, New York, and Rome. We invite the public to participate in a choreographed debate, in a rereading of urban space, highlighting some of its hidden aspects. Friction Atlas was initiated in 2014 during BIO 50, the 24th Biennial of Design in Ljubljana, Slovenia. A second iteration took place within the programme of Adhocracy Athens, at Souzy Tros in July 2015.