The Life We Live Is Not Life Itself at 9th International Video Poetry Festival in Athens

“The life we live is a series of illusions… a fleeting smile… mistaken decisions… dangerous, unpredictable… yet, we will meet again, as lovers… parents… children… and you will know who I am…”

It’s with immense pleasure that my most recent video The Life We Live Is Not Life Itself is now out and about as a selection for the 9th International Video Poetry Festival in Athens. This has been an inspirational collaboration with Greek poet Tasos Sagris and musician WhoDoes, both of whom I met at the 8th IVPF in Athens in 2019.

Tasos Sagris’s poem, with its haunting soundtrack by WhoDoes, offers us an extended exploration of lives lived in parallel, at cross-purposes, in and out of love, around the world, from the innocence of children to the wisdom of elders. There are the good times when summer seems to last forever, and the bad, when persecution and misadventure could land us in prison, with nothing but rain to hear our voice. But what is the reality? What is mere illusion? Can there be more to life than simply living?

The raw footage for the video was shot mainly in and around the city of Adelaide, its suburbs, … Click here for more.

The Ferrovores at the 9th International Video Poetry Festival in Athens

The 9th International Video Poetry Festival in Athens is on-line this year. The program is large, diverse and guaranteed to be amazing. I’m delighted my video The Ferrovores is part of this.

This is now the 5th consecutive year I’ve been part of this Festival. Hopefully, next year we will be able to visit Athens again for the 10th Festival.

The Ferrovores – The Iron Eaters – explores a future where we subsist on rusted iron, using metabolic pathways symbiotically acquired form bacteria.

“this time, this place… beyond open circulation closed reciprocity… closed hydration spheres wrought cast smithed… this is what we are what we eat … “

Colony Collapse at Broto Art-Climate-Science: Agency

My video Colony Collapse has been selected for an international on-line exhibition, Agency, hosted by Broto Art-Climate-Science in Cape Cod. It’s associated with their conference on 15-16 May entitled Greetings, Earthing: How does global citizenship affect our climate response? As part of the conference, I’m also taking part in a discussion on Agency: Arts as Civics Teacher.

Curated by Margaret LeJeune, the show asks “What exists at the intersection of empowerment, the climate crisis, and radical empathy?  What does agency look like in a post-human world? And, can it be ascribed to non-human species, rivers and/or ecosystems?”

As well as my work, the show features Caspar de Gelmini, Susan Hoenig, Sydney Parcell (in collaboration with Ildiko Polony), Nicole Lehne, Se Jong Cho, Daniel Ranalli, Jacqui Crocetta, Espen Tversland, Paloma Marquez, and DM Witman.

Here is the video of our wide-ranging discussion: Agency: Arts as Civics Teacher.

And here is a link to all the talks from the conference:
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCmUCpgkFxuy171_LFMEzKaQ

… Click here for more.

Three videos at Bologna in Lettere international multidisciplinary festival

After receiving an invitation to submit work, I have three videos in the 2021 Bologna in Lettere International Multidisciplinary Festival, IX edizione Dissoluzioni running throughout May, 2021. The Festival runs across 12 sessions with 175 authors representing 27 countries. My videos, Warranty & Conditions of Use, The Long Slow Effect of Gravity and future perfect are in the Arte-fatti Contemporanei session, curated by Maria Korporal. Two of these videos Warranty & Conditions of Use and future perfect were selected in the Top Ten Best of Bologna in Lettere 2021!

A Captain’s in Verity La

“Here again, not well, likely a turnspit, jiggered … whose trajectory scours my sleep? What worriment forths mildewed landsend?”

Massive thanks to Michele Seminara and Verity La for presenting my video A Captain’s.

A captain, out on the high seas, on commission from his king, heading to the colonies, reliant on rigging and caulk and the charade of polite society to keep afloat … Is there a prick of conscience? An element of doubt? When duty calls, how much is lost? Most of the  footage for this poetry video was recorded on my iPhone on a series of boat trips taken in Sweden during May 2019. The audio includes recordings from inside an old wooden windmill on the island of Öland. The concluding wave action was recorded at Moana, South Australia, in the summer of 2019. 

Many of the captain’s unusual words are my inventions.

The video was a official selection at Carmarthen Bay Film Festival (Wales, May, 2020) and was screened at Kino Klub Split: Blending Perspectives, powered by AGITATE:21C (Split, Croatia, December, 2019). A slightly different version of the text was originally published in Transnational Literature 8.1 (2015).

Click here to see “A Captain’s” in Verity La… Click here for more.

The Ferrovores and after-image at the 2021 Carmarthen Bay Film Festival

“I see them and look them away … see stinger-ray hide in bush … climb for a better view … afraid of spider-snake-lizard … we watched them watched us … “

Two of my videos, The Ferrovores, and after-image, have been selected for the Carmarthen Bay Film Festival in Wales, which runs in May 2021 and is one of the leading film festivals in UK.

after-image was shot around Port Adelaide, the Adelaide CBD, and Belair, and considers the lives around us that we may or may not see…

But an after-image is also the residual image you see if you look away at a blank wall or something similar having stared at a brightly lit scene. The after-image is a negative of the original in terms of light-dark and colour. It is mostly due to the photoreceptors in the retina becoming desensitised by the original scene. It fades after a few seconds as the receptors reset. The text was originally published in e•ratio 29 (2020).

The Ferrovores, which is about a future life-form dependent on iron for survival, was shot mostly in the Flinders Ranges of South Australia.

Iron is the most common metal on earth. … Click here for more.

Shared Reckonings: Catherine Truman at the Museum of Economic Botany

  • Shared Reckonings
  • Restless Calm
  • Ghost
  • Eclipse

Santos Museum of Economic Botany and The Deadhouse, Adelaide Botanic Gardens.
24 February – Sunday 2 May, 2021

In Shared Reckonings, renowned South Australian artist, Catherine Truman, explores the impact of light on human vision and the growth of plants. The exhibition combines thermoplastics and photo-luminescent powders with exquisite, thought-provoking results. Catherine’s work, which is presented as part of the Adelaide Festival, was created following two concurrent residencies at the Botanic Gardens and State Herbarium, and the Flinders Centre for Ophthalmology at Flinders University. It was influenced by powerful themes: the catastrophic bushfires that swept the country last summer, climate change-induced biodiversity loss, and the global pandemic.

I’ve been fortunate to have worked with Catherine for nearly 15 years now on a wide range of projects. For Shared Reckonings, we collaborated on a series of videos which are part of the exhibition. I also wrote a piece for the exhibition catalogue.

“What can we do when surrounded by fire, when the atmosphere on which we depend is choked with smoke and replicating particles, not quite dead, not quite alive, that have the potential to destroy our very ability to take another breath? … This … Click here for more.