Current project (April-Dec, 2022):
My proposal to the Journal of Embodied Research was accepted. The work is in the form of a video-essay and is titled ‘What the River Doesn’t Say About Itself. Surrounded by mangroves, 4 musicians (accordion, trumpet, violin, zither) gather on small separate boats along The River Goolay’ari performing music and engaging in eco-acoustical awareness and 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 and how technology/screens influences how we relate to the world – drawing on: the dispositif, the eco-apparatus (Foucault), noosigns (Deleuze), l’imagination des matières (Varda), and a biological ‘automavision’ (Von Trier).
Questions this work addresses: What is the relation between cinema and how we experience ecology? How does a mangrove forest affect thought and sensoriperceptual meaning? How does our neurology/bodies affect the mangrove? How can we engage in embodiment as a neurological binding within the wider ecology in which human perception is embedded? How can humans listen and relate to the articulations of nonhuman beings and 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, the eco-apparatus, its structures, systems and how we are part of its history, processes, material exchanges, and dispersals of energy. The performers engage in a perceptual openness, appreciating the higher order purpose of the river. Each performer is given a name that embodies one aspect of the mangrove: rhizophora (root system), biota epiphytic microalgae, vivipary, and pneumatophore.
I am working with members of The Music Box Project, where we will develop an experimental music theatre work with spoken word, text, animations, and video. It will be an online publication, part of the Journal’s special issue on Ecologies of Embodiment, 2022.