My Masters Project explores modes of participatory and performance engagement in order to activate and interrogate existing knowledges of site. Much of the work centres on a site-specific investigation into the human relationship with a local waterway however, just like the many tributaries of a river, side projects and investigations flow from the pandemic fed spring of Melbourne’s long lockdown in 2020, leading to several parallel projects exploring the reactivation of public space in a post Covid world.

Utilising soft sculptural and textile objects and audience agency River Work employs participatory methodologies and performative processes to tell a story of the river in the age of the Anthropocene. “The Anthropocene” is our new era- the geologic age in which ‘humans have become the major force determining the continuing liveability of the earth.’

‘Some earth systems scientists describe the Anthropocene as the“Great Acceleration”: the sharp rise in the destructive environmental effects of human industry since the second half of the twentieth century. The massive increase in carbon dioxide, methane, and nitrate emissions into the atmosphere from industrialized agriculture, mineral extraction, petroleum-driven production, and globalized shipping/transportation networks has outpaced all other rhythms of life. Yet the Great Acceleration is best understood through immersion in many small and situated rhythms. Big stories take their form from seemingly minor contingencies, asymmetrical encounters, and moments of indeterminacy. Landscapes show us’ (Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet, Anna Tsing, 2017)

These smaller moments of human interaction with localised sites across greater Melbourne is what I am seeking to explore. Drawing on a practice led research experiential methodology, I articulate this practice within a performative paradigm of research/making. Engaging with the materials, audience/participants and site, I am able to think creatively through performative practices. Barbara bolt describes ‘the performative model (as) bring(ing) into being that which it names.” (A performative paradigm for the creative arts, Barbara Bolt, 2009) This project seeks to both memorialise site and re-imagine connections and relationships with the river.

In the book, A place for a Village, Gary Presland points out that it is ‘perhaps a fundamental aspect of human existence that we continually reshape the environment in which we live. Human culture is without exception built upon a constant modifying of the physical world, simply to serve human needs.’ He says that in Melbourne’s past a range of actions occurred ‘that had significant impacts on the local environments…the altering of landscapes began almost immediately and gathered pace as greater and greater numbers of immigrants arrived to settle Melbourne. ln some case the changes were small and unnoticed, probably unintended. The original vegetation was soon stripped away and native fauna essentially removed….in the immediate area of the settlement of the Yarra River…the scale of landscape modification extended beyond the flattening of (Batman’s) hill(s) to the draining of wetlands, undergrounding of streams and even the diversion of the Yarra River itself.’

River work explores these told and untold histories.  Throughout this project I engaged with the site in various interdisciplinary ways: through fieldwork; site visits, photography, sound recordings, guided river walks, observation, swimming and researching both its history and how the sites are being managed and utilised in the present. I engaged modes of guerrilla performance, pop up incursions and tactical urbanism to create disruptions to the everyday at chosen sites along the river. Inserting the action into these sites was a way to engage with the history and ecology of the river. Through the act of performance I am seeking a way in to reflect upon the history of the site and to find the common language for the present. Anna Tsing says “Every landscape is haunted by past ways of life” (Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet) How do we as post-colonial contemporary Australians, reconcile the colonial ecological and cultural damage that came before us? How can we embody a remembering of this past? I am exploring ways to create an embodied acknowledgment or performative memorial to a site. This project seeks to discover if it is possible, even for just a brief moment in time, to rewrite the histories of a place, to offer up another version of events, to seek new futures…

The performances take place in the public spaces along the river. These spaces are government department managed sites. The sites chosen are easily accessible by both a pedestrian and vehicular public. Each action is documented though video, on my iPhone. The iPhone was chosen as through lockdown it was an only means of creation. It affords discretion when used in public spaces. Without creating attention to high production values, it refocuses public attention on the action itself and not its performative qualities.

The starting point for this investigation was Onsite/Insite for Integrated Project 1. This drew on guerrilla tactics to activate an urban site. I chose Birrarung Marr for the first unofficial action, installing River Scape adjacent to ArtPlay for a few hours on a sunny school holiday. This site is a place of recreation and play. It is a site of art-making and performance. Public art staged here (even unsolicited) I hoped, should be accessible and readable as another place of engagement. It was. It worked well as an act of gift giving to the public and was well received. Placing the river themed work here blurred its edges with the surrounding landscape. It extended the work to encompass themes of the river location. In turn the site informed the future direction of the project, examining the threatened native fish species of the river.

On the next visit to Birrarung Marr I left behind 7 small pieces of work. Images of Red Dward Galaxias and Grayling were ink jet printed onto disposable, biodegradable food containers. These fish were once an important part of the ecosystem. The works returned them to site, like urbanised fossils. Further research of the historical wetlands of Melbourne led to another intervention for a Docklands location. Post colonisation, slaughterhouses replaced the pre-existing wetlands at this site. As a site specific response to this research, ink jet printed images of the fish that once thrived here were this time imprisoned into gelatine moulds. Placed around the wharf in solid puddles, they told a different story of the site. In the rain, they washed backed into the water, mirroring the abattoir and industrial refuse of history that used the river as a dumping ground. The rain dissolved the gelatine and the ‘fish’ were set free into the river. This guerilla act served to disrupt the urban, gentrified space of the modern Docklands.

Exploring the Anthroprocene further, the initial idea for this project was called The River Cutting. This was to be a site specific participatory work on the banks of the Yarra. An ecological Cut Piece, but instead of Yoko Ono, a textile river landscape that beckons the audience to destroy it!

Whist in lockdown, with participatory projects suspended indefinitely, I adapted my methods to create a series of test pieces for this proposed work. I filled large brown (river-water hued) envelopes with maps of the Yarra river, images of RiverScape, a questionnaire and blank paper.  Along with a set of instructions for the package I then sent them out to friends and members of the local community asking them to complete them at home. I hoped to use this process as a starting point for a deeper conversation about how people interact with and inhabit the environment of the Yarra River.  By giving them these tasks, I asked the question what might happen if I give people scissors and ask them to cut up the map of the river? What meaning if any might they derive from this process? Would it reflect human intervention on the site of the non-human waterways? What might happen if this was enacted up on the real fabric river? Could I or an audience re-join the pieces afterward? Would this reflect attempts to repair damage post-colonial disruption made to the river environment?

 In addition I asked a series of questions in the tasks, seeking to learn what people know about river ecology. I asked them to share a memory of a river, and what they can find at home in lockdown that, to them might visually represent a watercourse. The results and information received back were surprising and each one unique in its response and helped inform the art-making processes to follow. From this process I learned that instructions can be very broadly interpreted! My vision of how things would unfold is not what happened in reality! I went on to test this work in Studio 50 with my fellow classmates as participants. I placed a swatch of blue fabric down on the studio floor with a pair of scissors. I indicated that they may interact, then sat back and observed.  Intentionally, there was no direction given as to how they may approach this task. This process of co-creation and collaboration was to become a performative response to the work. My vision for this piece was that these metaphoric scissors would be weld by the audience, telling this story of post-colonial impact upon river ecologies. The cut pieces would demonstrate how easily humans disrupt and inflict damage upon ecosystems that have existed in delicate balance for many thousands of years. In a different context scissors are a useful and creative tool, not a weapon of violence. At the site of the work however a seemingly simple task has an immediate, devastating consequence. The artwork will be forever changed. No longer the whole it once was. It is fragmented, left in tatters. The change enacted upon it is irreversible. Fundamental to this project is audience agency and how it serves the work. The gestures of participation create space for an embodied experience of engagement that hoped to heighten the ecological urgency of its message.  

Questions raised during this process included if my audience would make any connection to the fabric representing a waterway? I felt not being on site of the river may impact this connection and was correct. It was also, as a test piece only 4 metres long and physically abstract, not really readable as a representing a watercourse. The metaphor was oversimplified. The audience had fun with the process, creating wacky garments, performing and dancing in and around the fabric, cut weird shapes out of it, scrunched it into a ball….not quite the tattered remnants I expected. In all, the process made me very nervous about giving participants 40 odd metres of beautiful, expensive fabric and scissors!

Without the opportunity to invite participation with the materials in a public setting, The River Cutting was shelved, the surveys and audience participation saved for future musings. I instead sought other ways to activate my materials in a public setting. I adopted a performative approach, engaging modes of public performance, pop up incursions and tactical urbanism to create disruptions to the everyday at a series of chosen sites along the river.

The Falls was the very first performance that took place. This occurred at Queens Bridge. Seeking a way in to speak to the history of the site, I took the components of the riverscape piece and installed them across the bridge’s pedestrian path. First I rolled out the river fabric (all 40 metres!) and placed all the faux rocks on top of it, in a line across the bridge. Then I walked across them, ignoring the footpath below and methodically balancing on each rock as I went. The aim of this gesture was to call into play the history of this site. Queens Bridge (originally Falls Bridge) was built at the site of The Falls. A significant geographical site, it played a huge role in the choosing of the location of the future city. The Falls was a waterfall. A ledge of rocks spanned across the river and separated the incoming tidal salty water from the fresh water coming downstream. It was also a natural river crossing and it was possible to walk from one bank to the other here. The Wurrundjeri had been using this crossing for generations and the colonialists quickly adopted it as a faster means of travel than upstream from the port by boat. The natural and regular flooding cycles of the river proved inconvenient for the development of the settlement and by 1839, a bridging process began. In the 1840’s a dam was constructed across the line of rocks. A second timber bridge (to replace the first that was washed away by floodwaters) followed but by 1884 it was replaced with the current bridge, officially opening in 1889. The construction of this bridge meant the destruction of the waterfall. The basalt ledge, that had been in place for 400 million years was literally blasted away with dynamite. This allowed tidal waters to travel much further up the river than before, destroying the existing ecosystem and disrupting the natural rhythm and flow of the river.

This reenactment of walking the basalt ledge connects me to this natural and social history, to the stories of people who crossed here, who worked here, who drowned here, and to a past that has been erased. It is a geologic, ecologic, social and political history I connect with through this embodied remembering. The work serves as an ephemeral memorial to a site. Yet I cannot know exactly what transpired here. I can interpret from stories, history and research. I can react and respond to the site as it is the here and now. I can imagine. “Imagination is a site of interplay between material and perceptual worlds, where concepts cohere, forces pull and attract and things, discourses, subjects and objects are framed, contested and brought into being.” Elizabeth Grosz says. “It is not…the reconstruction of the past that helps explain our present, but an understanding of the present and it’s dislocations that helps bring about unknowable futures.” (Climate change and the Imagination, 2011) By contrast however, one can argue it takes a knowledge of the past to interpret the present. Anna Tsing asks “how can we get back to the pasts we need to see the present more clearly? Anthropogenic landscapes are also haunted by imagined futures. We are willing to turn things into rubble, destroy atmospheres, sell out companion species in exchange for dreamworlds of progress.” (Ghosts of the Anthroprocene, Arts of living on a damaged planet, 2017)

Continuing on from Queens Bridge, I visited a series of bridges spanning the river at urban and outer suburban sites. Through performance and playful gestures I could explore the known and documented history of these places and imagine and propose possibilities of engagement spanning, like the bridges themselves, from the past into the present and future. At each site I cross the bridge and lower the fabric down over the railing. The river glides by underneath. The fabric cascades down, catching the breeze as it goes, to touch the surface of the water. Here is the entanglement. The fabric dances on the current, barely making contact then dipping below the water’s surface or catching the breeze again and flying above the river before being hauled, fishing net style, back up over the bridge railing.

The unreal river connects to the real river connects to me. It creates an ‘animate circuit that focuses and maps connections” (Ordinary Affect, Kathleen Stewart) Perhaps it is one of Timothy Morton’s weird loops? In Dark Ecology, Morton postulates that “the Anthroprocene binds together human history and geological time in a strange loop, weirdly weird.” (Dark Ecology, Timothy Morton, 2019) Do I become the river? Or was I already the river? Performing this action creates a moment of embodied transcorporeality. Through the materiality of the object/medium, this act of lowering the fabric, the human made constructed/play and pretend river, serves as an act of transformation where I am connected to the present, the past and the future. Stacey Alaimo describes transcorporeality as “a literal entanglement of biological, technological and economic, social, political and environmental systems.” (Exposed: Environmental Politics and Pleasures in Posthuman Times, Stacey Alaimo, 2016) Through this creative practice, entangling bodily with materials and site, the performance serves as an epistemological transcorporeality in that it seeks to engage experientially with “what the scientific knowledge of Climate Change does in the world.” These incursions could be viewed as a way to democratise climate science by ‘reorienting the models of practice and politics of expertise and re-imagining the experience of environmental data and the possibilities of its use with a diverse public.’ It is these ideas that impact and inform the site of my work and my creative practice. (Climate change and the Imagination, 2017)

Do these performative gestures make the history of the site seen? Is it a way to call into the space, the stories of the river?

Creative arts practices, and participatory artworks in particular, offer a platform for people to interact and to use their bodies to attune to different actions, sensations, and ideas (Barrett & Bolt, 2007; Kara, 2015; Leavy, 2015; Manning & Massumi, 2014; Witzgall, Vogl, & Kesselring, 2013). Just like Barry and Keane, (Creative Measures of the Anthroprocene), I  am interested in the potential of art, and especially performative and participatory, to attune people to their surroundings through movement, attention, and sensation.

In the final work in the river series, I returned to the responses from the surveys conducted in lockdown. Using the imagery of hand drawn fish sent back to me in the envelopes, I used home printing techniques to create iron on transfers to iron onto the river fabric. Many of the drawings were created tonally with only two using colour. I chose greyscale to print the images, to keep them visually cohesive. I used these simplistic at home transfer techniques as these materials were a hand and available to me during lockdown.   The fish are collaged onto the fabric, and become a school of sorts, yet these fish are no longer the Red Dwarf Galaxias and Grayling fish I started with in my first project. These are hybrid, fantasy, imagined fish, conjured up from the participant’s knowledge and memories of fish, whilst in lockdown.  By introducing this school to the river another historical reenactment takes place. In 1857 the first non indigenous fish species were translocated from the King Parrot Creek to the Plenty River. These species and several more European species have been introduced at various times since then. ** The introduction of these ‘new’ species of fish reflect the post-colonial tragedy enacted upon river ecology.

During lockdown whilst considering the problem of reducing the need to use touch points in public spaces and how to make art that requires a tactile response from participants in a covid safe way, I developed Please Stand Here. It is a response to our newly forced navigations of public spaces and places that we once moved through with ease and little consideration, such as parks and civic squares. Using the visual barrage of instructional signage and directions we are now faced with interpreting whenever we move through these spaces as a starting point, this work aims to inject some fun and humour into the site with a playful encounter.

Public space is at the intersection of civic, social, and artistic life. This heightened awareness of public space that I think the virus is giving us is creating an opportunity for artists. Artists have fundamentally a desire to help, a desire to make change and a desire to bring people together. So who better to lead the way in healing for all of us than the arts community?” (Jay Wahl, Artistic Director, Kimmel Center for the Performing Arts, Philadelphia, USA) This work seeks to re-activate public spaces that have stagnated whilst we were in lockdown. It invites a playful physical response from the participants. Thinking further along these lines and ways to activate spaces and provoke a conversation in this current climate, the performance What Now? seeks to ask what is to become of pubic space in our new Covid normal? Anne Marie Broudehoux, the director of graduate programs at the Université du Québec à Montréal’s school of design asks “will the COVID-19 pandemic prompt a shift to healthier cities that focus on wellness rather than functional and economic concerns?” She continues “In many ways, containment and physical distancing measures have contributed to an increased recognition of the importance of public space as a gathering place and key tools for meeting people’s basic needs. Urban residents are more aware of the important role of this space as a living environment essential to their physical and psychological well-being. “ (A year without public space) Access to Public parks, open spaces and outdoor sports and leisure facilities have proven to be essential for exercise and socially distanced socialisation. Redesigning of urban spaces to reduce transmission of disease is needed and we have already seen the addition of extra outdoor dining in the Melbourne CDB, and airflow and ventilation systems added to indoor spaces of the NGV. Car spaces given over to bike lanes and wider footpaths has happened in Paris and people socialising sharing picnics in alleyways in Montreal, playing music together from their balconies in Italy are a few examples.

Public spaces, especially parks, have also proven to be essential for socialisation, especially for young people. Access to nature, wide open spaces and sports and leisure facilities has emerged as a vital need, with both individual and collective benefits. Walking, one of the only forms of exercise accessible to many, has made it possible to escape from confinement with exposure to fresh air and sunshine.

Jeff Hou, (Urban Commons Lab, University of Washington, USA, A year without public space) claims “Efforts like this created a form of public space when the actual physical space is no longer available or accessible, and that to me was perhaps the most powerful thing that I’ve witnessed during the current pandemic, one that I think challenged the common assumptions of how public realm and public space function.”