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One week deep.
I’m writing this post from Melbourne but currently my ears dislocated from my body—transported to Australia’s North and the Kimberley. Madelynne and I enjoyed a brief but frenzied bit of video editing last weekend while we waited on the arrival of Jeremy and James. Now I’m at SUPERFIELD, an exhibition at the RMIT Design Hub to see the results of what she’s been working on. I immediately feel a relevance here. An exhibition formed out of a series of remote listening and looking experiments. A project orchestrated by the B–CSC’s Madelynne Cornish and Philip Samartzis. Over the last week my ears have grown accustomed to Bogong’s everpresent hums, murmurs and babbles—it’s brooks, plant equipment, winds and birds. Now those same ears focus on a different murmuring: the ratcheting sounds of the Northern Territory’s insects—a series of percussive lawn sprinklers that lack water.
With B–CSC as our basecamp, I’ve been working alongside two other artists: Jeremy Bakker and James Geurts. Together we’ve been in the process of experiencing and doing what this exhibition is built around; it has been a week of listening, of looking and of discussion. We’ve made our way round and through Bogong Village’s Lake Guy, round and through the Lake’s dam and round and through Lake’s feeding rivers: these are actions made to feel a site. There is a shared interest in this body of water—this partially-natural partially-man-made collector—this space where gravity pulls rain by the rivulets into a pool of liquid power—this space where starlight trickles through Earth’s atmosphere and accumulates on our retina.
The gravity seems particularly convincing in Bogong. Even when listening to the Kimberley, I can feel its pull.