ecologies of practice, place and body
Slow, immanent, seeping permeation of relation with place and each other (whisper, ripple, shimmer, rumble); nourished by deep listening and field work.
[I confide in your texture]
Soundcloud
Vimeo
ecologies of practice, place and body
Slow, immanent, seeping permeation of relation with place and each other (whisper, ripple, shimmer, rumble); nourished by deep listening and field work.
[I confide in your texture]
Soundcloud
Vimeo
Wurundjeri Biik: ‘Macaulay Station’ to ‘Docklands’
Audio Recordings:
To start. Scent of portaloos
‘Cleaning’ chemicals ~ sanitation . excrement, waste shrouded by it
the big fish have come to the place where the creek trickles over some rocks, maybe there is more oxygen there ?
cormorant
purslane and plantain (’white man’s footprint’)
but also - food and medicine
I am bone tired, achey in my legs and feet. Pre menstrual, swampy feelings. The stinky swampy muck at the temporary bridge made sense to me. And how the bodies of water start as other bodies of water, bodies moving through bodies within bodies, flowing free and clear or meandering slow and brackish, sometimes the environmental waste gets sludgey and begins to stink, I can smell my own sweat and the dirt of the day, it’s ok, grit from the pier on my legs.
Jasmine throws a rock into the swamp. It is so pungent, ripe, so viscous that the rock doesn’t even sink. Bikes rattle the little bridge. We talk about gathering some of the sludge.
I wonder
Does the creek want to rest, to move a little and slow and steep in ponds and swamps...? salt marsh memories in the shimmer stain on the bike path bitumen
The directional mic made me feel like I was encased inside, spatial dynamics changed, I listened a lot to my feet. I sing a bit, along to my own heart and to the creek, the industrial noise, the birds.
end of walk: at the birrarung
- smells like portaloos again. hm.
The ant stayed with me, for a long time. On my shoulder, my bag, my phone, A little wiry brown bush ant, from the pier where the fish gut dust and the bird shit blended with the brackish birrarung. The huge cavern under the bridge, these hidden gathering places, infrastructure hollows shadowing out the sun.
And the continuous slipstream of cars, trucks, trains, production, fabrication, the salt marsh whispering in the limn of crystalline seeping across the track. The black oily goop that splashed up onto the bridge, the rock still sitting in it, head of a turtle. To the white crust of saline memory, and the soft grasses that are returning, sweet fronds.
Scratch my ankles, the lightness of wonder, the weight of decay and loss. Over and over. Looping? Seeking, returning, circuitous. Rambling, meandering.
layers of memory in our bodies, in our ancestry, in the plants, land, water. Shadowtime,1 the superimposed inter-temporality of place. What will it sound like when those buildings are finished? Sound reflected, richoceting? At night when the construction pauses? Buildings and cars and trucks gone, when they were/will be, what does it sound like, how does it feel-
1. Saskia Beudel, ‘Fossils in the City,’ in Open Spatial Workshop: Converging in Time (Monash University Museum of Art: Melbourne, 2017), 38.