Body-Cites

An Experiment in Intervals III – Violet Desert is a video work made in response to a decommissioned industrial plant in Barreiro, Portugal operated by the Companhia União Fabril from the early 20th Century. Ushering in what was intended to be the economic boom of industrialisation, it is now a toxic, barren site, standing as a reminder of both the promises and failures of this vision. The work characterises the quality of this site as one of “monstrous architectures” — a term used by Georges Bataille to refer not only to what is against the sacred but that quality which materialises in the machinations of state violence and industrial exploitation. The smokestack, the factory, the industrial zone — these denote spatial territories that are seen to materialise a disorder under God. The title — Violet Desert — references Michelangelo Antonioni’s 1968 film “Il Deserto Rosso”, an early critique of the impact of modernity on the individual and society.

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These experiments in film will also satellite at Bunjil Place with a complimentary program being screened at. Metro Arts in Meajin (Brisbane).

TOXX meditates on the planetary inheritance of industrial residue, traversing territories of toxicity, queer(y)ing the eco-monstrous figure to reckon with the grotesque figurations of ecological presents and the radically ulterior futures that might lie beyond. The porous progeny of the Toxicocene find themselves compromised, united in their corporeal contamination across every cell, site, and species. Resisting the urge to withdraw from the disquiet of such intimate incursions, eco-monstrous figures invite a reckoning. An opportunity to turn towards the chimeric forms haunting contemporary myths of ecologic purity or return. TOXX lingers in the disquiet of these post-normal narratives, refusing the convenience of utopic/dystopic binaries in favour of the morphic muck of transition without expectation of arrival.

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These experiments in film will also satellite at Bunjil Place with a complimentary program being screened at. Metro Arts in Meajin (Brisbane).

JNK in 6 panels, was developed out of an artist residency with the Centre for Projection Art in 2020. The work takes inspiration from the academic writings of Anne McDonald and Andre Lepecki who wrote that dance embodies the experience of mourning through its ephemeral nature. In this sense, the design of this work represents a capture of the dance that has passed. The creation of the work additionally stresses an intention for hyperlocality.

This particular work features a local Melbourne dancer who was filmed in and designed for the specific dimensions of Collingwood Yards. Other iterations of this work follow similar intentions hyperlocality by emphasising the importance of using local dancers. These have included collaborations with local street dancers of Boston, Cincinnati, New York, Brooklyn, Warclaw, Beijing, Shanghai, Sydney, Tasmania and Hong Kong.

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These experiments in film will also satellite at Bunjil Place with a complimentary program being screened at. Metro Arts in Meajin (Brisbane).

Body Crysis/身體災變 is a choreographic work with (re)animated bodies, stretching the bounds of our newfound digital corporeality. For this iteration at FRAME: a biennial of dance,  recordings of the hybrid performance and digital dance work will be exhibited as a screening at Composite Moving Image Agency and Media Bank.

Body Crysis/身體災變 transmutes dance, motion capture and CG animation into a simultaneous, shared performance between Newport and Taipei, in the flesh and online. Long-time collaborators Harrison Hall and Sam Mcgilp have teamed up with NAXS FUTURE, a Taipei-based media art collective to present a hybrid live/digital dance work of impossible choreography, biomimicry and techno-morphology. Performed simultaneously at The Substation and online, Body Crysis/身體災變 is the culmination of two years of experiments in motion capture and digital choreography by two artists who are fast gaining a reputation for their visionary approach to genre-fluid performance.  is decentralised and untethered. 

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These experiments in film will also satellite at Bunjil Place with a complimentary program being screened at. Metro Arts in Meajin (Brisbane).

Utilising experimental composition methods and centering more-than-human voices, this video is the second work in the ongoing research project Interspecies Scores. The scores attempt to distress anthropocentric habits, positioning non-human actants as vital collaborators and querying what knowledge is made available by attuning to the dynamic discourse of ecologic fields, forces, and forms. Generated through the movement of 320 waves at Mullaloo Beach in Wadjuk country, Boorloo, the visual score performed/translated in Intertidal rejects the binary lure of dystopic or utopic visions, offering imaginaries of perpetual and iterative reconfiguration in their place. Reveling in the tensions and timescales of transition, the Intertidal zone embraces the transversal bleed between worlds and epochs, identifying alterity as an invitation, not the marker of collapse.

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​This choreographic experiment in film is part of the complimentary program held interstate at Metro Arts in Meajin (Brisbane)

Acts of Holding Dance was developed out of a creative arts residency with the Centre for Projection Arts 2020 and had its first public appearance in January 2021. Conceptually, this work was heavily inspired by the academic writings of researchers Andre Lepecki and Anne McDonald who articulate the efficiency of dance as a communicator of mourning and loss through its ephemeral experience. Therefore, the stylistic intentions of capturing the dance that has passed in a, “script-like”, manner emphasizes the fleetingness of time felt through dance. The work was developed and filmed in Collingwood Yards.

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​This choreographic experiment in film is part of the complimentary program held interstate at Metro Arts in Meajin (Brisbane)

Khora is a video work that accompanies An Experiment in Intervals III - Violet Desert. Working with the theme of monstrosity as opportunity, the image centres on a body sitting within the crumbling arches of the Barreiro Industrial Park in Portugal - the site of what was once the largest industrial processing plant in the country. In the work, a monstrous figure spouts milk endlessly onto the barren and toxic grounds of the site.  Historically, the monster exists as the deformation of ‘natural law’ - the corrupted off-spring of the classical Man as perturbed by the fecundity of the Feminine. In the context of colonial, patriarchal and capitalist ideologies, the children of modernity have grown to represent this off-spring; our alienation and hybridity a contemporary monstrosity.

Khora seeks to articulate this phenomenon. Referencing the Greek term associated with a philosophy of radical otherness, a transitory form, a space or receptacle of change, it invites reflection on the deconstruction and reconstruction of our present-futures. In this way, the work questions whether monstrosity can be an opportunity to arrive to our living-being despite the ideological hauntings that history imposes.

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This choreographic experiment in film is part of the complimentary program held interstate at Metro Arts in Meajin (Brisbane)

BONANZA! is a playful blend of dance/ film/ digital animation/ artist dialogue, filmed in Alpha60’s Chapter House. Created by Harrison Hall and Sam Mcgilp with Justin Kane, BONANZA! is ArtxDialogue with guests NAXS Corp (Taiwan) and Lu Yang (China).  Digital and performance practices are accelerated to dizzying speeds before colliding explosively. This is the resulting detritus, an uneasy, humanist-futurism, a lament for our physical bodies and an exaltation of digital reincarnation.

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​This choreographic experiment in film is part of the complimentary program held interstate at Metro Arts in Meajin (Brisbane)