Making Space series - Sydney Environment Institute
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Making Space series

Making Space is the latest public program from the Sydney Environment Institute, and this time, we’ve added a twist. Curated by Michelle St Anne, this off-campus series partners with 107 Projects to ask what happens when performers, artists and academics approach the act of ‘making space’ hand in hand.

The future of our planet is unlikely, unpredictable, innovative and deeply interwoven; an improvisation at a planetary scale. As our world continues to warm, we are learning to expect the unexpected, learning to flow, move, collaborate and make space.

Each month, we explore questions of evolution and creativity in uncertain times, by throwing together unlikely bedfellows to recraft and react though conversation, performance, improvisation and collaboration. The intimacy of the performance space becomes an incubator within which we can examine the different methods to approach and communicate the act of ‘making space’ in the ever-shifting global environment.

Post conversation, there will be a bespoke experimental music performance, curated by E M U S (Exploratory Music Sydney) an organisation promoting improvised, exploratory, experimental music and sound art in Sydney and its surrounds.

With this series, we hope to create an environment that celebrates making space for dreaming, imagination, collaboration in the face of uncertain futures, and most importantly, making space for each other.

This series was presented off-campus from March - May 2019.

Listen to the podcast


The series

Bodies, Space and the Anthropocene builds on the 2019 Sydney Festival event Talking Dance: Hacking the Anthropocene by Critical Path and Strange Attractor. This event, in partnership with Museum of Applied Arts and Sciences, prefaced a week long workshop which brought together choreographers and specialists from other disciplines, that asked artists and academics to respond to the idea of the Anthropocene. We pick up this conversation again, this time including the choreographers to reflect on the process of making work in artist-non-artist collaborations and ways of thinking-through-practice in the Anthropocene.

Speakers

Astrida Neimanis is a feminist writer, researcher, and teacher. She is currently a Senior Lecturer at the Department of Gender and Cultural Studies and a Key Researcher with the Sydney Environment Institute at the University of Sydney on Gadigal land, in Sydney, Australia. Often thinking and making in collaboration with others, her work focuses on water, weather, and other environmental bodies in the Anthropocene. Her most recent book is Bodies of Water: Posthuman Feminist Phenomenology (2017).

Bek Conroy is an artist, critical thinker and writer across interdisciplinary and intercultural contexts, and has been active in developing an artist led practice and philosophy in Australia, the USA and South East Asia. She has worked with key arts organisations across Australia: Vitalstatistix, Diversity Arts Australia, Performance Space, Campbelltown Arts Centre, Pact Theatre, ArtSpace, Urban Theatre Projects, Watch this Space, Lismore Regional Art Gallery, as well as collaborating with many leading artists in Sydney and internationally.

Sarah Pini is a choreographer, anthropologist and PhD candidate at Macquarie University working interdisciplinary on embodied cognition in distinct dance practices. Her PhD project adopts an ethnographic approach to the study of the cognitive ecologies and the dimensions of variation in the enactment of ‘stage presence’ across different dance genres and performers. Sarah is currently developing a longitudinal documentary dance film series (INFINITO) that explores the relationship to illness and its transformational aspects from a phenomenological and autoethnographic perspective.

Jodie McNeilly-Renaudie is an independent choreographer, researcher and dance dramaturg working across the disciplines of dance and philosophy. Her performance work has been focused upon making group choreographies (Performance Space, Carriageworks, Seymour Centre, Riverside, Campbelltown Arts Centre) and researching transitions for a compositional system (Critical Path, Dirty Feet, Sydney Conservatorium of Music). Jodie has lectured in choreography, theatre and performance at Monash, Macquarie and UNSW. She holds a doctorate in Performance Studies (Sydney Uni) and is completing a second doctorate in philosophy on the phenomenology of belief at ACU.

Sound Artists
Clare Cooper & Eric Avery

This conversation brings together milliner Rosie Boylan and drummer Simon Barker with museum curator Jude Philp to discuss the art of translating knowledge and experiences into creative outlets and social enterprise. Rosie and Simon work within their own fields making space for global thinking through skill sharing and cross-cultural collaborations to amplify marginalised voices and draw focus to the unobserved.

Speakers

Simon Barker is a drummer and Senior Lecturer in Jazz at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music. In addition to his numerous solo performances and recordings, Simon co-leads several internationally recognized collaborative ensembles. Simon has also created an ‘alternative rhythm/sticking vocabulary’ for the drum set known as ‘coiling’.  Coiling can be heard in Simon’s solo drum set compositions featured on ‘Urgency! Drum Chants for Kiribati and the Marshall Islands” which he has produced in solidarity with communities facing upheaval as a result of climate change.

Rosie Boylan’s  lucrative career has seen her create headwear for stage and screen for almost thirty years – with credits to her name including the Bazmark feature films, The Great Gatsby, Australia, Moulin Rouge  and Jane Campion’s The Piano. These high profile costume collaborations and an extensive body of theatre work have consolidated her reputation as a leading milliner for large-scale industry productions. For the past five years Rosie has been collaboration with Pacific weavers in PNG, NZ and Vanuatu to create regional and sustainable headwear for the local and international marketplace. Rosie also creates casual and contemporary headwear for men and women from her Newtown studio.

Jude Philp is senior curator of the Macleay Museum. She is interested in stimulating research into the collections and increasing the purposefulness of museum holdings through exhibition, research and events. Jude’s current research is in the world of ‘British New Guinea’ and the 19th century practice of natural history for museums. 

Sound Artists

Clocks and Clouds is comprised around  core players and composers Kraig Grady and Terumi Narushima. Their totally acoustic performances feature specially retuned vibraphone and retuned pump organ. These unique instruments, using harmonics up the the 151st, explore the beauty of room resonances via ancient sacred scales and multi-dimensional geometries. It is not uncommon for an audience to experience the sensation of harmonics sweeping through space due to the way in which sound waves from the instruments interact with the environment.

Join us for final event in the Making Space series as we ‘Launch the Ocean’ with  the release of two new books: Coral Empire: Underwater Oceans, Colonial Tropics, Visual Modernity by Ann Elias and The Aesthetics of the Undersea, coedited by Killian Quigley and Margaret Cohen. The conversation between the authors hosted by Professor Maria Byrne will be captured live and reinterpreted into a unique sound experience that will transform the gardens of 107 into imaginings of the undersea.

Speakers

Ann Elias has a PhD in art history from the University of Auckland and her research interests include: camouflage as a military, social and aesthetic phenomenon; flowers and their cultural history; coral reef imagery of the underwater realm. Ann’s current book, Coral Empire, will be published by Duke University Press and concerns photographic and cinematic representations of the underwater at the colonial tropics in the early twentieth century. She is a Key Researcher with the Sydney Environment Institute, a serving member of the International Committee of the College Art Association of America, and International Liaison for the Art Association of Australia and New Zealand.

Killian Quigley researches the poetic, aesthetic, and broader cultural histories of environments and ecosystems. He is focused, especially, on marine – and above all submarine – contexts. With Margaret Cohen, of Stanford University, he is co-editor of The Aesthetics of the Undersea, forthcoming late 2018 from Routledge Environmental Humanities. Killian is currently at work on a monograph, entitled Submarine Poetics, which proposes that cultural histories of the undersea which focus primarily on technologies of access have tended to simplify rich and polysemous legacies of subaqueous poetics and aesthetics.

Maria Byrne is Director of the University of Sydney’s One Tree Island Research Station in the Great Barrier Reef. Prof Byrne is an expert in the biology and ecology of marine invertebrates with a current focus on the impacts of climate change. In research funded by the ARC over the last 20 years, Professor Byrne has investigated the role of the evolution of development in generating larval diversity and as a mechanism underlying speciation in the sea. Professor Byrne served as President of Australian Marine Sciences Association and on the boards of the National Oceans Advisory Group and the Federation of Australian Scientific and Technological Societies. She has published over 170 refereed articles and book chapters.

Sound Artists:
Gail Priest (solo) & Baptism (Solly Frank & Charlie Sundborn)

Header image: by Nick Turner via Unsplash.