Current project (April-Dec, 2022):
Composer/sound artist Daniel Portelli’s proposal was accepted for inclusion in the Journal of Embodied Research online publication, for their special issue on Ecologies of Embodiment, 2022. The work will be in the form of a video-essay and is titled ‘What the River Doesn’t Say About Itself.
Along The River Goolay’ari (of the Pelican Dreamtime story), surrounded by branches and root systems of a mangrove forest, musicians drift on a boat performing music and engaging in eco-acoustical awareness, sensory activation, and perceptual openness – appreciating the higher order purpose of the river, as a form of forest therapy.
It’s also about how cinema and the dispositif can be used to challenge subjectivity in how we perceive and experience living systems. Derived from a post-phenomenological perspective, regarding the impact of cinema and the whole mediascape, on people. The project draws on: the dispositif, the eco-apparatus (Foucault), noosigns (Deleuze), l’imagination des matières (Varda), and a biological ‘automavision’ (Von Trier).
Through this video-essay I explore how a mangrove forest can affect sensoriperceptual meaning and into the production of thoughts and sounds. Questions like: How our body matrix, peripersonal space, and bodily consciousness affects the mangrove. How we can engage in deep embodiment practices involving motor schemas and body memories to create a neurological binding with a wider ecology? How can humans listen, relate, correspond, and synthesis with the articulations present within living systems?
The work is a juxtaposition between spaces, as illusionary processual acts of ‘self-listening’- of bodies inhabited by ‘other spaces’. Drawing from the felt sense of the river as a whole, the wider ecology, its structures, systems, its hidden processes, material exchanges, and dispersals of energy. The emphasis is on not just what we see but the processes behind what we see. For instance, when looking at the history of the river. It’s one of the most polluted rivers in Australia, which is the result of colonial-based negligence and mistreatment— as they saw the mangroves as ‘undesirable’. While waiting for its regrowth, I took footage from a much more abundant mangrove (Badu mangrove in Olympic Park) and combined with the footage of The River Goolay’ari to give the illusion they are one in the same, offering a glimpse into what it may have been like before European settlement.
Inspired by filmmaker Agnes Varda her film La Pointe Courte (1955) and her concept of the ’imagination of materials’, the performers, like characters in a film, are given names and personalities that embody an aspect of the mangrove: rhizophora, microalgae, vivipary, and pneumatophore. The boats themselves are like seed pods floating down the stream. Mangroves are viviparous, meaning they grow their young before they drop and can float down the river to propagate.
Daniel is working with members of The Music Box Project, working from a score to develop experimental music with spoken word, text, animations, and video.