The Papua New Guinea Work In development 2010 - 2012
Ten years ago my aunt Margaret died of cancer. In her youth she had been a missionary in Papua New Guinea (PNG). I started imagining the PNG Work in response to my memory of Margaret's criticism of the missions in PNG. At the same time I was questioning the veracity of this memory as merely a desire for her criticality. Since that time many thoughts and stories have been spoken, forgotten and re-spoken. There is no longer a sense of truth, but only the changing of our feelings over time. |
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Additional Information & Selected Works Where Art and History Collide: About These Works Taipei Artist Village Residency NFSA Fellowship Not the Sound Bite! |
Description
The PNG Work is a large-scale performance and film installation work designed for presentation in heritage (or historic) building sites. The work uses choreographic methods with film projection techniques to explore how memory is created, how history is created, and the relationship between the two. The ideas are presented to a mobile audience as they journey through a series of filmic environments within the architectural site. Live performers also inhabit this space, leading the audience ‘inside’ the projections, while interacting, responding and moving. The work presents remnants of history, yet is not narrative-driven. Instead it focuses on visceral and sensory response, creating unique experiences of the present moment for audience participants. Impression Imagine a piece of 16mm film (the acetate kind with the small sprocket-holes on one side) as it runs through a hefty twenty-three kilogram film projector. The film is being pushed and pulled between a light and a lens. Imagine now, this film as a loop whereby each frame pounds through the projector once every three seconds or so. The light. The heat that burns. The flecks of dust that scratch the surface. The rubbing of surface on surface. The possibility of snaggling and ripping. As the film moves through the projector again and again, it deteriorates. It changes and transforms the projected image and shows us that images are unstable as are the meanings we make of them. Imagine a dancer. Her name is Adelina Larsson and she is dancing a sensation remembered from another scored improvisation where she was asked to work with memories of her first home. She touches the rough crumbling surface of the wall. She responds. She catches your eye. She responds. She flickers in the rhythm of the projected image. She responds. As Adelina moves, and remembers, remembers and moves – always responding – she is creating an experience for herself and for us that is both crafted and immediate. She is creating her own history through re-capturing and transforming her memories for us in the present moment – retelling her 'story' within a choreographic frame. In this she shows us that history is a construction that is constantly in 'motion'. Working in a post-colonial context This work is post-colonial in structure, process, intention and experience. Moving beyond the idea that identities are stable, we seek - through recognising the mutation of images, memories and contexts - to create a work which allows for a more fluid approach to identity. This destabilisation creates ways to look again at things we think we know and work toward a greater fluidity in approaches to the power relationships inherent in relationships - in this case exploring Australia's with PNG. If we can let go of identity as a solid definition to hold onto, we lose the fear of being challenged and having to prove ourselves to be what we say we are. This trajectory also relates to current thought within feminist and queer theories; theories of history; and in whatever else is happening in the wake of post-structuralism. To quote Elizabeth Grosz: Feminist theory is not the struggle to liberate women, even though it has tended to conceive of itself in these terms; it is the struggle to render more mobile, fluid, and transformable the means by which the female subject is produced and represented. It is the struggle to produce a future in which forces align in ways fundamentally different from the past and present. This struggle is not a struggle by subjects to be recognized and valued, to be and to be seen to be what they are, but a struggle to mobilize and transform the position of women, the alignment of forces that constitute that "identity" and "position." that stratification which stabilizes itself as a place and an identity. (from Time Travels, pg. 193) |