What The River Doesn't Say About Itself

Along a river on Gadigal and Wangal Country, Eora Nation, Sydney, Australia, surrounded by branches and root systems of a mangrove forest, musicians drift on a boat performing music and engaging in eco-acoustical awareness, sensory activation, and perceptual openness as a form of forest therapy. The project is inspired by the film La Pointe Courte (1955) by Agnes Varda, set in a small fishing village, along with Varda’s film concept the ‘imagination of materials’ where the musicians on boats like characters in a film are given names and personalities that embody one aspect of the mangrove: pneumatophore, rhizophora, microalgae, and vivipary. The performers filter their experience of the living system through the lens of other cinematic art concepts and techniques to challenge their subjectivity, such as the dispositif, the eco-apparatus (Foucault), noosigns, opsigns, sonsigns (Deleuze), l’imagination des matières (Varda), and a biological ‘automavision’ (Von Trier). This is derived from a post-phenomenological perspective, regarding the impact of cinema and the whole mediascape on people that subsequently affects the environment.

The boat is central to Foucault’s argument for understanding heterotopias. As a ‘displaced place’, the sailing vessel becomes for Foucault a kind of mobile here and now that others itself to the world as it is. The body is also a heterotopia as they are both moving spaces capable of inhabiting spaces of otherness. In my work, the performers combine two unexpected heterotopic spaces: ‘mangrove’ and ‘cinema’. The combinations of boat, body, instrument, living system poetically forms what I call ‘heterotopic couplings’. The changing boat orientations randomised the performers’ framing of a scene, as they scanned the shoreline to interpret mangrove root systems. Scored elements invited further head movements beyond the performers control such as changing their fields of view that was determined by a random number generator. This encouraged them to look at particular points in mangrove which they may not have looked before. The result is revelling in the somatic effects of bodily earthly sounds. I use the term ‘biological automavison’ based on a camera technique by director Lars Von Trier that is subverted into a method for navigating complex living systems.