“I am going to share two ongoing projects which consist of films and some fields notes from two different sites and focus on performative co-inventions with communities, animals, and environments living with automated farming practices and technologies and their co-emergence with the art market. The field notes and films act as a call and response to one another, and interrogate the role of the artist-researcher in these spaces.
The initial trilogy of films emerged from sixteen weeks of fieldwork conducted in Carnamah, situated on Amangu country, approximately four hours northeast of Perth. This exploration focused on grain production utilising performance, para-ethnographical practices, and vocal workshops within the Wheal Belt region. The concluding piece, an animation serving as a precursor to a forthcoming series of actions, was born from experiences at the Dookie Agricultural campus and Robotic Dairy Farm in regional Victoria, located on Yorta Yorta country.
I won’t have time to talk through all of the details of the films and their multitudes. This is also the first time that the films from Carnamah have been shown to the public outside of the community. I have no map for these stories and my methodological approach is grounded in the sensorial and relational experience of vocalising with places, animals, machines, and people. Condensing the myriad paradoxes and complexities I encountered during my time into this twenty-min talk is beyond my capacity. Attempting to do so would mean succumbing to a form of writing and expression Michael Taussig terms "agribusiness writing." This type of writing obfuscates the processes of production, operating under the assumption that writing's primary function is to convey information, distinguishing it from writing that embraces attributes such as poverty, humour, failure, loss, luck, drought, animality, fibres, the ecstatic, and more. It erases the page's chaotic and vibrant collaborators, spirits, and tricksters. These cheeky paraontological collaborators and extra affects challenge established power structures inherent in using language not only as a tool for ownership, territorial claims, and careerist individualism. These transindividual forms of language encapsulates what I refer to as 'more-than middle-class+ aesthesis,' embodying a range of intricate vulnerabilities and relational poetics beyond the production of distinct art selves.”
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