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. Surrounded by mangroves, 4 musicians (accordion, trumpet, violin, zither) gather on small separate boats along The River Goolay’ari (Cooks River) performing music and engaging in eco-acoustical awareness, forest therapy, and sensory activation.
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 influence how we relate to the world. The project draws 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, its structures, systems, its hidden processes, material exchanges, dispersals of energy, and how we are part of its history— its pollution, and mistreatment from colonial-based negligence—seen as ‘undesirable’. Footage from a much more abundant mangrove (Badu, Olympic Park) are combined with footage of The River Goolay’ari mangroves to give the illusion they are one in the same, offering a glimpse into what it may have been like before European settlement.
The performers engage in a perceptual openness, appreciating the higher order purpose of the river, and are given names that embodies one aspect of the mangrove: rhizophora (root system), biota epiphytic microalgae, vivipary, and pneumatophore.
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.