laneway proposals
we do not claim to be from here or there... the only position we assume is that of assimilation... we grew up in a place, decided to be elsewhere and currently spend most of our time kilometers away from the networks that shaped our minds... so the questions are... do we inhabit the land we walk with the baggage we have been carrying? or can we become the land we step on?... to what extent do we understand it?... if we do so... what can we do with all that information?... how can we process it?...
we always find an exuberant number of similarities, between the myths we grew up with and the myths that always will be...
many years ago in melbourne we stumbled upon a book... about a reality or a myth that took place in a jungle during the nineties... from those words, something resonates with our steps today... it reads as it follows “...together but separately and in agreement...”and we intend to start the conversation with a series of intentions that depict dancing... we feel dancing is a personal and free expression that comes from deep within... and this precise moment when dancing has become prohibited, regulated and unauthorised... we celebrate movement at the rhythms of whatever we find most important... whether it might be questions, songs, stories... if it is meaningful, it moves our limbs, our minds... so in a land that always was and always will be... the dance will be danced as the geographies of scars merge onto our skin...
we do not claim to be from here or there... the only position we assume is that of assimilation... we grew up in a place, decided to be elsewhere and currently spend most of our time kilometers away from the networks that shaped our minds... so the questions are... do we inhabit the land we walk with the baggage we have been carrying? or can we become the land we step on?... to what extent do we understand it?... if we do so... what can we do with all that information?... how can we process it?...
we always find an exuberant number of similarities, between the myths we grew up with and the myths that always will be...
many years ago in melbourne we stumbled upon a book... about a reality or a myth that took place in a jungle during the nineties... from those words, something resonates with our steps today... it reads as it follows “...together but separately and in agreement...”and we intend to start the conversation with a series of intentions that depict dancing... we feel dancing is a personal and free expression that comes from deep within... and this precise moment when dancing has become prohibited, regulated and unauthorised... we celebrate movement at the rhythms of whatever we find most important... whether it might be questions, songs, stories... if it is meaningful, it moves our limbs, our minds... so in a land that always was and always will be... the dance will be danced as the geographies of scars merge onto our skin...
st laurence lane installation consists of a black steel sculpture that resembles a lattice, it portrays a woman in the foetal position... femenine power in a calmed and unthreatening position, her heart wraps the iconic bennelong's object as her eyes witness how north and south of the city merge... a geography of scars... the piece will be propped off the wall... we want to celebrate the residual space of the blocked entry to the building... a gift from the city and its constant changes provides a niche for the piece... almost as one of those altars we remembered from our childhood where religiousness met our eyes and ears... what have we done with our land? we will not stop to leave traces of our behaviour over the land... but we are deeply connected to all the networks we see and inhabit... as long as we walk this land opportunities will arise for us to do…
barrack’s street installation consist of a bronze sculpture... we were compelled to move to the rhythms of caroline rothwell’s youngsters in materiality... the reasons are simple, those pieces can be accessed with three hundred and sixty degrees of freedom...
from far away the sculpture could resemble an organic nature like branches... but a closer examination will show a folded closeup of sydney's streetscape with an overlay, you might recognize the lines of a foot... and we celebrate pedestrian streets and sculpture conversing with urban and architectural scales... may our steps into the future be clear and mark our landscape in gentle ways...
so, we virtually do, propose... because by doing we transgress, we reach one more eyes, time becomes a continuum... we have conversations with those who are alive and have not crossed our paths and those who left... we will use their continual momentum to increase the inertia that fuels our actions and lights our heads on fire...
for little hunter street there are two steel sculptures matching the colours of sol lewitt's mural on one end of the street... this pieces come out as we analysed the streetscape, we extruded the outline of the streets and subtracted the geometry to emphasize the similarity with the shapes in the background... the sculptures are attached to the wall.
we were compelled to move to the rhythms of australia’s square dance hall to find seidler, calder, nervi and lewitt... the reasons are simple, the piece can be accessed with three hundred and sixty degrees of freedom... and as if sol’s words reached our brains... “the idea becomes a machine that makes art”... so, we virtually do, propose... because by doing we transgress, we reach one more eyes, time becomes a continuum... we have conversations with those who are alive and have not crossed our paths and those who left... we will use their continual momentum to increase the inertia that fuels our actions and lights our heads on fire…
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on central street the piece consist of five different steel installations over the voids left behind as scars on the building... the shadows will cast into the voids and the voids will act as frames for the steel work...
depending which direction you come from, central st leads to the biggest cinema and a number of events spaces in the city... maybe once upon a time someone payed respects to the local fauna... maybe once upon a time, through that alley someone came into a building, or day dreams escaped through the windows... today, we find residual spaces... blocked doorways and windows... forgotten spaces, broken rituals...something lingers in our thoughts... wendell berry’s words... “a geography of scars”... corroboree silhouettes overlaid with sydney's lines, assimilation in progress history, the urban and ritual attempting to be in syntony… the entire design created for this work hides and only where voids exist an part of the image will be displayed…
the proposal for barlow street consist of making a simple intervention to the light boxes in the base of the building, adding screens that would display a long video broken by the space that currently separates each of the boxes.... our investigation has found that the geographies of scars are closely related to names... the majority of streets have a name in memory of notable people... landmarks have architects and now developers or brands attached to them... our video displays an oscillating object... an abstraction to the common sticker used by graffiti artists or group dynamics... the iconic, red over white sticker with black lettering... displaying "hello my name is ____" ...we pose a few ideas.... one; to start the conversation and aligned to our studio’s intention of leaving aside protagonist interactions and hierarchies... would we be less harmful in any way if we were to consider us part of a bigger interaction?... would we protect and respect as if everything belonged to us?... and two, in order to keep the project alive... could this "new screen" become a notice board for the passer by... there's so much we do not need to see in our environment, there is so much we miss from our context... if the piece becomes a platform, it becomes greater than the precedent... can we please let these screens be hackable? could we upload a video and have the city share it without censoring?
for temperance lane the piece consist of a video projection that covers an entire façade... as an extension of our enquire of how landscape changes... we have created a video that shows a moving network of streets, from our research and work materials displaying sydney's cbd... overlayed and always finding the dark spots in the map, lines emerge denoting the location of buildings, we created a layer that simulates a changing topography... as if we could witness the perpetual digging that the cities we inhabit go through... what ever happened a few hundreds of years ago compares little to the amount of digging we require to elevate our new infrastructures of consumption... and what we do now, will change in the future... so this piece is a little homage, to the land we step on... the geography of scars we leave as trails of out presence... the colours green and black, respond to the darkness of the truth and the green that once was all encompassing over the land…
on wynyard lane the installation consists of 39 steel volumes that pend off the wall... each volume is laser cut with the same pattern then folded into the desired geometry... the difference between each geometry creates a complex system... this system becomes a gift... a fake canopy that could provide maybe a smoker some cover in the rain... the idea came to us when we were walking through wynyard lane... we found a lot of construction material waste... and using that as a guideline we attempt to create an object that might linger between visual discarded materials and unfinished object... but the reality is that the cutting pattern belongs to a map of sydney... a geography of scars... there seems to be always an evolving process in cities, where do all the discarded materials go? so when paying attention you might find a street folded over and over again…
