2000
Research started on the current performance / installation project with a journey to central Australia. Staying in and around Alice Springs we became interested in the relationship between the landscape and the cultural and artistic practices of the area. The current piece ( in progress) is exploring a resonance between the ancient indiginous practice of making and telling stories linked to the landscape and the practice of writing in a digital context.
The text/monologues below, along with images( to follow), are being used in the first phase of developing the project.
MONOLOGUE 1
I'm too young to
know my country.
Because theoldman told the story then about it only once
and not again that's all
there now
I can try now to remember
what it felt like in that place in that so small town in the
middle of the
middle
of the country when we listened to the story
listen now
because
this is taped.
(To tell ..... rewind and go back to the beginning. Where there's some space for a story..... Not here. Not just now. You go over what's coming up just now if you don't you've got to go back to the beginning because whats at the beginning doesn't matter - no. Then you finish the story before you get to what's just happened just now.)
It feels good to be here
still
in the centre place
where we were all still born in.
Now we still walk around in the town
in the middle country
around at
our christmas holidays.
when we all meet and this place thrives
again
and we thrive again.
Heavens
but it wears so thin the topsoil in the
longsummer
This is the story of the power plant
if you want to
know how the power plant works
you have to ask me right.
And I can take you to the right
place and show
you.
This the story was told to me
(One night i couldn't sleep and
working away in the cold on line and out of step and out of time it was
told to me)
the story was
my custody now
to see the story
you should turn around
look left to see left and up to see up and if
you need help
shout help outloud
so everyone in the country can hear you
now walking quickly down the slight slope follow me
you will see in the
grey green where it lives.
On a good day if you touch with your first
finger the topsoil here
yes
you see what I mean
don't lick it
( there was once a girl called timid suzy lived in our town and licked her finger just the once when her time came to stop the pain and all at once she was in l.a. drinking coke in levis with the snowfalling and that's why she gave birth to a foreigner who couldn't even get a passport when the time came and had to join an alien army)
look where the sun falls at 5 to 3 and
the shadow of that big rock
there look
can you see it?
"In the Aranda-speaking area it was believed that the totemic ancestors and ancestresses had left a trail of "life" behind them throughout the landscape that they had shaped and over which their feet had passed. According to the reincarnation beliefs, some part of this "life" could enter into the body of a human mother who crossed these trails, and could then take on a fresh existence as her human infant" T.G.H.Strehlow: Central Australian Religion - Personal Monototemism is a Polytotemic Community . Flinders Press 1978