AQUA LOCI Pavilion
(WATER PLACES) - A pavilion for The Wrong Biennale - from 1/11/2023 to 1/3/2024
Participating Artists
Marsha Berry | Liz Burke | Peter Burke | Diane Charleson | Lisa Cianci (Blackaeonium) | Natalie Davey | Andrea Draper (I dream in RGB) | Peter George | Greg Giannis | Catherine Gough-Brady | Lyndal Jones | Patrick Kelly | Derek McCormack | Mark O’Rourke | Toni Roberts | Marg Quinn | Stefan Schutt
Acknowledgement of Country
We acknowledge the people of the Woi wurrung, Boon wurrung and Wathaurong language groups of the Kulin Nations on whose unceded lands we live, work, and create.
We recognise that knowledges and creative practices have been produced, exchanged and applied by Aboriginal and Torres Straight Islander peoples of this country for thousands of generations, and the relationship with these knowledges and practices contributes to and extends our work and our relationship to place.
We acknowledge Ancestors and Elders, past and present. We also acknowledge the Traditional Custodians and their Ancestors of the lands and waters we are connected to across Australia.
About our pavilion...
We are drawn to the water. Waterways and water places sustain life and have been gathering places since our most ancient times. They are used and misused as dumping sites and places for waste removal and treatment, and their health is an indicator of the health of our environments. The works in our pavilion are diverse in format and content, but all are responses to place - to the waterways and water places of our urban, rural and wilderness environments. Naarm (Melbourne, Australia) and nearby regional locations are the sites for our work, which contain many real and imagined water places.
We are using a GIS map to locate our digital artworks within these water places, creating experiences closely linked to the spaces we know and inhabit. Anyone can engage with our map from anywhere in the world. The project will evolve over the course of the Biennale. Participating artists begin in November with just a few artworks each on the map. Artists will continue to add artworks to the map over the four months until the Biennale closes. We will post regular updates on social media, and the website itself, about new content in our pavilion as it evolves.
Follow our Facebook page for frequent pavilion updates.
Aqua Loci Pavilion Interactive map of artworks
Aqua Loci Pavilion Map Select interactive elements to view the artworks located on the map. Open the legend (bottom-left) to identify the different coloured pins for each artist
About the artworks and artists
Walking and wondering in water places – a series of video poems
Marsha Berry
A series of video poems engaging with the Melbourne/Naarm’s bayside coastline.
Motion is important to me in my creative practice – motion and mobility, movement, placement, and displacement – binaries fusing into many and one. I see it like a Zen Koan – it’s all about paying attention to minutiae and the slight nuances between and then expanding out where these details become dynamic pixels in an infinite unfurling universe – where details cease to matter...
Overflow
Liz Burke, Peter George, Catherine Gough-Brady
Short pieces of audio will accompany images of floodwaters and wastewaters. Some of these are personal memories experienced by the contributors, and some will be fictional ‘memories/experiences’ created for the images...
Sdrawkcab Gniklaw
Peter Burke
In ‘Sdrawkcab Gniklaw’, I explore the physical act of walking backwards in my local environment. When I began walking backwards while exercising it somehow seemed liberating. It felt as though I was moving against time and evading restraint...
Hidden Secrets
Diane Charleson
Lurking beneath the surface of such beauty is a darker underbelly. An almost lost memory. This area was home to the Yarra Bend Asylum and Cemetery. Yarra Bend was established in a curve of the river outside Melbourne. My contribution to this project will be the production of video responses to this dark mysterious place...
Space-time distancing and the loom of the land
Lisa Cianci (Blackaeonium)
Video artworks - digital fabrications formed from the capture of moving image and audio from the wetlands and the banks of the Maribyrnong River. This audiovisual footage is subject to many processes of breaking and reforming to convey the depth and multiplicity of these water places...
Sounding the Bay
Natalie Davey
Sounding the Bay is an eco-acoustic story walk, created in partnership with local community. It is designed to be heard as you imagine walking (or actually walk) along the foreshore in Geelong, Port Phillip Bay/Naarm. People can listen to the recording with headphones to guide their foreshore walk or follow a map if listening remotely...
Afterglow
Andrea Draper (I dream in RGB)
Concealed from the road, the Merri Creek Trail is an oasis of lush greenery, small native creatures, and stories from the past. Afterglow adds to the environs’ narrative as the once familiar under-bridge structure transforms with unanticipated dynamic light....
Guerrilla Gardens on the Verge
Greg Giannis
Photography, interviews, music and online locative technologies creatively explore the theme of ‘guerrilla gardens’ in Melbourne's northern suburbs - private garden extensions on the verges of local waterways including Edgars and Merri Creeks. These gardens have been created by the locality's post-war migrant communities - and are now disappearing due to generational change...
Recurring Rain Fantasy
Lyndal Jones
Now, in the Spring/Summer of 2023, they say the El Niño pattern will return (after some years of La Niña), bringing increased heat and drought. Flemington will become dust once more. Perhaps a rain fantasy, even if it taken from sub-tropical NSW, will help…
Patrick Kelly
I am interested in how queer acts of nature involving waterways can be observed, layered, explicated, and further problematised. My contribution to this project are focused along parts of Merri-bek and Yarra Yarra – from Coburg to Abbotsford – and seek to give voice to quantum leaps, molecular memories, and multispecies entanglements that defy clean, clear utopias and dystopias...
Seven sounds: a record of life by the Maribyrnong
Derek McCormack
Over the past 15 years I have lived at 7 different addresses near the Maribyrnong River. I am developing a series of 7 site-specific sound-art pieces inspired by 7 locations along the Maribyrnong River in Melbourne’s inner west. Contributions from other artist participants will be incorporated into the work...
Surface tension
Mark O’Rourke
Naarm (Port Philip Bay) is the focal point of Melbourne. Like an eye in the head of the Metropolis it filters the detritus from stormwater, rivers and creeks and sheds tears of human debris into the Southern Ocean through the Rip. From light penetrating the murky depths, video excerpts reveal the ebb and flow of life beneath the surface at a number of bayside locations...
Inklings: unforgetting our watery bodies
Toni Roberts
Inklings is an iterative project of making, performing, recording, and re-making. With its beginnings on the south coast of NSW, Inklings now inhabits the waters of Bayside, on Bunurong Country.
“As I slide into the water, I feel my dorsal fin expand, the webbed skin stretching taut between bony spines. I plunge into the salty water of the bay; it is a return home, a reconnection to my aquatic evolutionary origins, my amniotic beginnings and to the water within me.”
Works on Paper
Marg Quinn
As an artist my interest is in interpreting creatively what is in front of me. My photographs and works on paper are part real and part distortion. I have worked with water colour for the past 16 years. I love the way the wet in wet process randomly creates its own atmosphere. Port Phillip Bay particularly around Mentone and Beaumaris has been an inspiration for much of my painting...
Lifeblood
Stefan Schutt
Through this project I seek to understand my personal relationship to the city I have lived in for most of my life, Narrm (Melbourne), through the process of mapping traces of Kulin Nation life along its arterial waterways including scarred and modified trees, artifact scatters, and stone constructions. A first-generation, uninvited, economic migrant from across the globe, I explore my own hesitant attempts to educate myself about the deep and ongoing Kulin Nations history of Narrm, and the absences this speaks to...
