the place one lives.,
1 Aug - 30 Oct 2020
Curated by Josephine Mead
BLINDSIDE SATELLITE SCREENS ONLINE at BLINDSIDE + ON PUBLIC SCREENS at BUNJIL PLACE, NARRE WARREN; HARMONY SQUARE, DANDENONG; LIVERPOOL, SYDNEY and BEENLEIGH, QUEENSLAND.
SCREENING:
Leyla Stevens, Scenes for solace (2020), HD video, stereo sound, 8:28 min. This work was commissioned by Prototype.
Miko Revereza, DROGA!, Super 8, B & W, 8:00 min.
Talia Smith, Look Up, HD Video, 3.26 min.
Amrita Hepi, Precedent piece, video, 0:57min. This work was commissioned by Kaldor Public Art Projects.
Download Of home as self by Anabelle Lacroix.
Leyla Stevens, Talia Smith, Miko Revereza, Amrita Hepi
I trace you
as I erase you
I am dispersed
your confidence puzzles me
and I’ve refused to think about you
as you are tension
you smoke a lot
you are alone
and you wait
your lack of words
disappears
in the night’s stillness
not surprising me
you insist
you are the flight
you flicker
in the absence that contains you
you are movement
like a slow, and deep
stretch in a plane’s bathroom
you are a bit aloof
drifting by sensing
you reach out
you are process, adventure, journey
always there
you live fully
like siblings
fighting on a couch
throes of a magic high
you drive into me
you surround me
on the rim
you move away
ships in the night
you and I
you are not ashamed
of your desire
for sex
for language
for geographies to merge
to cross over
you are warm
you are I
singular multiple
home as self
home as w-hole
This creative piece is the result of a collective writing process. It was written as a letter to home—and a portrait—as I came to think of home as an interior space. Home as being within ourselves. Not a feeling. Not an architecture or a place. Home as something in motion and plural. How to write about it then, to be true to myself? It would mean moving beyond binary structures of thought, and a process of writing that challenges a singular point of view. Therefore—and inspired by David Carlin’s piece Essaying as method: Risky accounts and composing collectives (TEXT Vol.2 N.1, 2018)—I embarked on an exercise of collective writing. Carlin argues for writing as a tool for recomposing the world through cooperative processes—such as workshops—and presents a method for collective writing that embraces not knowing, fragments and risks, and that follows ideas of attunement, uncertainty and vulnerability. Based on his principles I created my own rules. I asked lovers and friends to send me texts, poems or notes giving a personal account of myself in order to write a collective portrait. I collected textual responses that I used as my own material, as preliminary notes and atmospheres for my writing. To this, I added my notes from Jean-Luc Hennig’s Bi (Gallimard, 1997), a book about bisexuality from a man’s perspective. Of Self as Home is the result of this process. Thank you to my contributors, and to Josephine Mead for inviting me to respond to the place one lives.,
Of home as self, Anabelle Lacroix , 2020.
I was born in Naarm (Melbourne). I grew up in the Eastern suburbs and have lived in lots of different share houses throughout the inner North over the past several years, with some brief stints back at my family home when I needed periods of rest. This area feels familiar. Although I am ever-aware that I am living on unceded land — currently making, resting and learning on the land of the Woiwurrung and Boonwurrung language groups. I am occupying someone else’s home and I am deeply lucky to be here. I will forever be a guest. At different stages over the past several years I have left home to follow my curiosities, make new work and find beauty. I have traversed high mountain passes in Tibet; watched birds fly in circles overhead in Istanbul; gazed into Indonesian volcanoes, created new work in studios in Turkey, Mexico, Portugal and Germany; watched hands dance in a market place in Gianyar; circumambulated the Buddha’s Bodhi tree in Bodh Gaya; seen souls released through fire in Varanasi; and been wrapped in operatic score in Vienna. I have laid my head to rest in many homes that have not been my own — I have been incredibly blessed. I have watched others build a sense of home through family, friendship and art-making. No matter where I am, the same old moon hangs overhead and my family remains in my heart, grounding me. At the beginning of this year I moved to Berlin to create a new home and a new life. After two months I returned to Australia due to Covid19. I am back home - settling into a new life, a new relationship, a new house and a new studio. I am putting the pieces back together and creating art in an attempt to make sense of it all. I am feeling more settled than I have before, yet am still somewhat adrift. As I constantly recalibrate where and what constitutes home to me, one thing remains certain – art is my home, a place I can always return.
For the place one lives., four artists have been invited to submit works that respond to notions of home. Balinese-Australian artist Leyla Stevens was recently commissioned to create Scenes of solace for Prototype. Stevens intended “to make a video for sleep, to make a space for slow looking”[1]. The work can be seen as a meditation between notions of passage and stillness, through gestures of arrival, moving, leaving, transition and acts of return. The subjects in the work — captured by Leyla while travelling and drawn from family archive — are found within acts of calling and seeing. The viewer is encouraged to understand that home is something to be found, changed, re-found and re-configured, in an ongoing sense. The definition and role of home in one’s life can change and remains in flux. It is clear that Stevens has found a sense of home through the camera. Creative bodies employ modes of art-making to find, seek and decipher notions of home through place, space, time and the body.
The idea of an evolving notion of home, of it’s transience and malleability, is echoed in the flight paths of planes in Talia Smith’s Look Up. Smith is of Pacific Island and NZ European descent and is currently living in Sydney. The work documents planes flying over Stanmore, shortly after Smith had relocated there. Footage of planes in flight feels very poignant— as most flights are grounded and many people are stuck at home or unable to make it home, due to the ongoing threat of Covid19. Smith feels that “we are such global people now that there is no one home anymore but rather there are places where little bits of my heart or being lie, it is in the Mountain in Taranaki (New Plymouth), it is in the heat of the pacific islands, it is in the view from my parents deck overlooking the cemetery where my ancestors are buried in Auckland.”[2] At a time when our ability to travel has been halted, there is a certain freedom to be found in the idea that different aspects of home can remain within the self. Solace can be found in memory.
Miko Revereza was born in the Philippines and has been living illegally in the US for years. His work DROGA! is a “personal meditation about the experience of the Filipino diaspora. It explores both the physical and emotional spaces of many immigrants who are living in a state of exile in the US.”[3] Revereza’s work documents his and his family’s experiences of assimilation to American life, through new and archival footage and pop cultural reference. One cannot think about home without reflecting on the colonisation and invasion that has taken place throughout history – many homes have been and are still being invaded. Revereza reflects on notions of conquest, stating that “both Spanish and American empires have successfully employed images to colonise the bodies that inhabit ‘their territories’. I often find myself thinking about how the lens—a piece of Western technology that has been instrumental in producing and reproducing misrepresentations of “other” peoples—extends this labour of conquest.”[4] Western power has taken away many people’s right to a sense of home.
[1] Written correspondence (via email) with Leyla Stevens, 4 June 2020.
[2] Written correspondence (via email) with Talia Smith, 18 June, 2020.
[3] Statement by Miko Revereza, https://cinedroga.com/droga/droga.html.
[4] Statement by Miko Revereza (from interview with Diego Ramirez for recess), http://recess.net.au/index.php/miko-revereza/.
Josephine Mead is a visual artist and writer based in Naarm (Melbourne). She works through photography, sculpture, installation and writing to explore personal notions of support. Her recent work has positioned female family members as support-structures, considered the body as a site of discursive practice, explored notions of deep listening, and examined the temporal and sonic nature of writing and photography. She has exhibited widely locally and internationally, and has undertaken residency programs in Turkey, Mexico, Portugal and Germany. She is a current Room to Create studio artist at Collingwood Yards, through support from City of Yarra.
Anabelle Lacroix is a French-Australian curator, writer and radio contributor. Working independently in Paris, she is based at Fondation Fiminco for a year-long residency focused on the politics of sleeplessness (2020). She recently curated an exhibition for the Archives of Art Criticism in Rennes (France), and an overnight radio program in partnership with ZK/U Zentrum für Kunst und Urbanistik in Berlin and Threads*sub_ʇxǝʇ radio. In Melbourne, she was a curator for public programs at ACCA, worked with Liquid Architecture, Melbourne Festival, and with several artist-run initiatives. She co-edited An Act of Showing: Rethinking artist run initiatives through place with Maria Miranda (published by Unlikely, 2018).
Leyla Stevens is an Australian-Balinese artist and researcher who works predominately within moving image and photography. Her practice is informed by ongoing concerns around gesture, ritual, spatial encounters and transculturation. Working within modes of representation that shift between the documentary and speculative fictions, her work deals with a notion of counter histories and alternative genealogies.
Talia Smith is an artist and curator from Aotearoa and now based in Sydney, Australia. She is of Cook Island, Samoan and New Zealand European heritage. Her photographic and video practice explores notions of time, memory and familial history with a focus on our relationship to land. She has exhibited in Australia, New Zealand, New York and Germany with solo shows at Bus Projects, Verge Gallery and Wellington Street Projects. She has completed residencies at Bundanon Trust and Basis Frankfurt and was a finalist for the Gabriele Basilico Prize. She is currently undertaking her MFA at UNSW.
Miko Revereza (b. 1988. Manila, Philippines) is a filmmaker raised in California and currently residing between the Philippines and Mexico City. His upbringing as an undocumented immigrant in and current exile from the United States informs his relationship with moving images. DROGA! (2014), DISINTEGRATION 93-96 (2017), No data plan (2018) and Distancing (2019) have widely screened at festivals such as Locarno Film Festival, International Film Festival Rotterdam, NYFF Projections and Film Society of Lincoln Center's Art of the Real. Aside from these films, Revereza produces expanded cinema, direct animation, performance, criticism and publishing including works such as Biometrics (2018), Live Cinema (2019-2020) and Towards a Stateless Cinema (2019). His debut feature film, No Data Plan is recognized with such honors as the Sheffield Doc Fest Art Award and San Diego Asian Film Festival Emerging Filmmaker Award, as well as being listed in BFI Sight & Sound Magazine’s 50 Best Films of 2019, Hyperallergic’s Top 12 Documentary and Experimental Films of 2019 and CNN Philippines Best Filipino Films of 2019. Revereza is listed as Filmmaker Magazine’s 2018 25 New Faces of Independent Cinema, a 2019 Flaherty Seminar featured filmmaker and MFA graduate at Bard College Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts.
IMAGE | Leyla Stevens Scenes for Solace, 2020, HD video, stereo sound, 8:28 min | Courtesy the artist.
Leyla Steven’s work commissioned by Prototype.
