Exhausted Vocalities ongoing - 1986
Exhausted Vocalities is a vocal action in which the artist uses her voice as a resonant engine—extended through petrol-infused economies, and off-road singing in the form of inherited peasant tongues. She sits beneath a grief ramp, an aspirational instrument crafted from hand-grown crystal and metal, inspired by her collaborator Matthew Cassar’s journey of riding dirt bikes blind, including his ambition to achieve the world’s highest jump. This parallels the artist’s own aspirations as she moves through the many modes of becoming a professional artist in her first major solo exhibition.
Through the intimacy of voice, improvisation, and its material extensions, the space transforms into a site for new vocalities and class relations, where exhaustion, aspiration, and notions of visibility coalesce.
Exhausted Vocalities arrives from Tina Stefanou’s background as a vocalist, and practice as an improvising vocalist, performing across new music, contemporary classical, and experimental music contexts. Tina Stefanou uses voice as form and medium in all her works, singing solo and with others for over twenty years.
Artist and Performer: Tina Stefanou, Curator: Elyse Goldfinch, Dramaturgy: Anna Nalpantidis, Production design: Romanie Harper, ramp fabrication and project management: Ellen Sayers, photo documentation: Sarah Walker.
8mm, 16mm, digital colour film, single-channel, 17-channel sound, installation, Commissioned by Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, 17:39 min loop.
You Can’t See Speed, 2025
The film follows the arc of Stefanou’s surreal and performative interventions with different communities and places, leading to a collaboration with blind motorbike rider and mechanic Matthew Cassar.
The making of the film began three years ago through an encounter on Facebook Marketplace. Stefanou’s life partner, the film’s composer, Joseph Franklin, was searching for a dirt bike to ride. When he met Matthew to test the bike, Matthew remarked, Please don’t ride off with it—I can’t see where you’re going. A collaboration was set in motion, born from chance and back-road exchanges.
In the film, we hear Matthew sing and speak his own creative vocal captions—a poetic description of what is happening both on-screen and within. Dressed in evil eye totems, lace, and crystals, he rides through green paddocks, rests in a quarry where asphalt is mined on the outer edges of Naarm, and sits at home, watching fish in a tank through what he calls blind vision. For Matthew, the bike is a way of moving through and between sighted and non-sighted worlds. He sings, hums, and mimics the sounds of his beloved dirt bikes as he rides through three cinematic formats—8mm, 16mm, and digital.
The horse, a recurring friend in Stefanou’s work—whether costumed or sung to—now becomes a specter, haunting the history of cinema and its deep entanglements with the zoological gaze and the nation state. The film grapples with existential questions of representation, social class and materiality—the absence that emerges from the ease with which privilege names and organises the world with nonchalance and certainty. It reflects on how working-class experience is flattened, co-opted by middle-class (+) representational politics, linking these tensions to histories of labour, race, ableism, and animality, particularly in the construction of the moving image.
The film shifts between resolutions, flashes, fluctuating in and out of visibility, abstraction, obscurity, risk, and pleasure—mirroring the precarious and often unseen experiences of the working class, particularly within Australia’s enduring myth of a classless society. The crystal coated dirt bike becomes a totem, an evil eye—magic against magic, representation against representation...It stands as an antidote to the afflictions of visuality and advocates for a type of accountability of what and where we learn to see. The motor carves a path through the trapped circuitry of moving image—Muybridge’s horse, the death drive, that relentless force—where the blind man momentarily masters his symbolic fate, transforming into something beyond sight. This moment crystallises through a cornucopia of sensorium, working-class sonics, multispecies kinship, and apotropaic symbols.
Credits:
Tina Stefanou – Artist/Director
Matthew Cassar – Performer/Collaborator/Rider
Petra Leslie – Director of Photography
Joseph Franklin – Composer/Sound Designer/Music Producer
Anna Nalpantidis – Creative Producer / Dramaturg / 1st AD
Romanie Harper – Production Designer
Wil Normyle – Second Camera Operator
Hamish Palmer – Gaffer
Zac Millner Cretney – Editor
Daniel Stonehouse (We Are Crayon) – Colourist
Timothy Harvey – Recording Engineer (Creative Vocal Captions)
Tina Stefanou with Matthew Cassar: Creative Vocal Captions
Alistair McLean – Sound Spatialisation and installation mix
Steve Berrick – AV Technologist
Buster – Equine Performer and Collaborator
Tina Stefanou - Horse Worker
Sacajawea - Equine Specialist
Wayne Sullivan – Riding Coach
Scott McConnachie – Bike Rider (Field Recording)
Tom Goodman – Artist Assistant/Runner
Sarah Walker, Tom Denize, and Otis Filley – Camera Assistants
Werner Winklemann: 16mm film processing
MemoryLab: 16mm scanning
Richard Tuohy: 8mm film processing and scanning
Supported by: Arts House and Creative Australia
Music Credits:
Hymn to the Dirt Bike Rider, 2025
Composer/Vocals: Tina Stefanou
Additional Vocals: Lisa Salvo
Recording: Timothy Harvey
Mixing: Joseph Franklin
Brass Orchestration: Joseph Franklin
Flugelhorn/Trumpet: Callum G’Froerer
Additional Recording: Callum G’Froerer
Exhausted Vocalities, 2025
Composer/Vocalist: Tina Stefanou
a thousand tiny mutinies, 2023 (obscured)
Composer/Contrabass Guitar and Artefacts: Joseph Franklin
Recording: Timothy Harvey
Mixing: Timothy Harvey and Joseph Franklin
Mastering: Magnus Lindberg
Label: Nice Music
Music: an incomplete history of the art of the solo violin, 2024 (excerpt)
Composer: Joseph Franklin
Violin: Miranda Cuckson
Dance the War of Proximity, 2024, is a performance action and live filmic event featuring 10 young performers, as part of the 18th Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art: Inner Sanctum. Through embodying a metaphorical nervous system and enacting certain functions, these performers integrate singing, speaking, vocalisation, and movement, drawing inspiration from nature, art, music, and popular culture.
The action serves as a self-organising system, resembling a form of poetic automaton, that moves through different sites of exhibition in Adelaide city, shedding light on various facets of coming-of-age politics. Whether delving into themes of valuation, social class, the sun, puberty, resource distribution, elderhood, or symbiosis, Dance the War of Proximity aims to forge strange solidarities within sites of collection and surveillance (including botanic gardens, zoos, and summits), questioning their historical contexts, the politics of acquisition and the gaze, using the body-voice as an instrument to explore more-than-human and more-than-bourgeoisie modes of making-sensing, which are always commoning through collective labour formations and technologies of improvisation.
This work is an extension of Hym(e)nals, a four channel video and sound work that features the artist's long engagement with a herd of elderly horses and their teenage female horse riders, currently showing in the Adelaide Biennial at AGSA.
Performance details
Wed 24 Apr, 12-1.30pm
Mount Lofty Lookout
Fri 26 Apr, 1-2.30pm
Adelaide Botanic Garden at the Amazon Water Lily Pavilion, Palm House and the Bicentennial Conservatory
Sat 27 Apr, 2-3.30pm
Adelaide Zoo
Sun 28 Apr, 3-4pm
Art Gallery of South Australia in Gallery 13
Credits
Lead artist
Tina Stefanou
Creative producer
Jennifer Greer Holmes
Co-choreography and performers
Lily Potger, Alice Heyward and Celina Hage
Youth ensemble and co-choreography
Victoria Mackay, Kaz Rogers, Cooper Faull, Scarlett Jankowiak, Jade Porter, Maree Fong, Sahara Soliman, Jazmine Deng and Indigo Fossey
Live film documentation
Andrew Kaineder and Wil Normyle
Live sound documentation
Nick Steele
Poster design
Rose Williams
This work was made and witnessed on Kaurna Country.
Back-Breeding, 2023, performance, film stills, wool, on Amangu Country, eight voices and field recordings, John Deere 1986 Tractor, 11:00 mins.
Intertwining vocal workshops, community rituals, and farm practices, Tina Stefanou's work considers the value of grain and wool to her Wheatbelt host. Stefanou reimagines activities originating from a romanticised perception of regional life. In doing so, she draws on the emotive force of nostalgia for a past commonly seen in rural communities.
"Back-breeding" refers to the process of breeding livestock to revive disappearing traits, including those of extinct species. This attempt to reverse the past contrasts with current realities influenced by climate crises and socio-economic shifts.
Concept/Director
Tina Stefanou
Cinematography
Wil Normyle
Edit
Wil Normyle
Production Assistance
Donna Franklin
Sound design
Joseph Franklin
Colour grade
Tim Wreyford
Co-producers
The North Midlands Project, Andrew Bowman and Louisa Cole
Featured performers
Marcell Billinghurst, Jessica Parker, Cassie Ulijn, Cody Parker, Kane Parker, Jaydee Wilmot, Jazmyne Wilmot, Tina Stefanou, Jackson the Horse, Mikey Turner, Scott and Frankie Bowman, and Angela Dring
Installation documentation at Art Gallery of Western Australia for the Rural Utopias exhibition
Dan McCabe
Curator
Miranda Johnson
Support from Creative Australia and SPACED
The Ball, single-channel black and white video, two-channel sound, Amangu Country, 16:10 mins.
Lead Artist/Director: Tina Stefanou
Cinematography/ Editor: Wil Normyle
Field recordist: Eduardo Cossio
Sound design: Joseph Franklin
Colour grade: Tim Wreyford
Set dressing: Wren Richards and Christopher Williams from Dadaa Gallery
Co-producers: The North Midlands Prject, Andrew Bowman, David Bowman-Bright, Siobhan Beery and Richelle Essers.
Support from: Creative Australia, DADAA, West Australian Opera, and Morawa District High School.
Featured performers: Jenny Hickinbotham, Pia Harris, Jun Zhang, Joshua Harris, Morawa District High Brass Band, Choir and DHS Rock Band, Don Blue, Lyndon Blue, Scribes of North Midlands, Carnamah-Perenjori Football Club and local open mic performers from Sebastian Essers and Shire Boys.
Fantasy Creatures, single-channel video, two-channel sound, video-performative action, Art Gallery of Western Australia State Collection Archive, 19:38 mins.
Lead Artist/Director: Tina Stefanou
Cinematography/Edit: Wil Normyle
Sound Design: Joseph Franklin
Colour Grade: Tim Wreyford
Support from Creative Australia
Automatopoeia, single-channel 3D animation, moving fieldnotes, two channel sound and iPhone field recordings from Dookie Robotic Dairy Farm, 17:22 mins.
Concept and direction: Tina Stefanou.
Video animation and design: Henry Lai-Pyne
Performance and choral work with the Young Voices of Melbourne conducted by Mark Leary, featuring Butoh performer Yumi Umiumare, text by Diego Ramirez with rendition by Tina Stefanou, 30 mins, 17th of August, Chapter House, Naarm, photography by Sarah Walker.
Supported by Alpha60.
FAUNING, 2023, six-channel sound, voice, live Gaida performance, 20 mins, May 25th, Carriageworks.
Concept, composition, and vocal performance: Tina Stefanou
Gaida Musician : Vasili Haralambous
Sound design and engineering: Joseph Franklin
Documentation: Heidrun Lohr
Curator: Frances Barrett
There is a Dead Rabbit Under the Greek Family Unit, 2022, 16mm film, colour, two-channel sound, copyright Tina Stefanou, filmed on Wurundjeri-willam country, 10:15 mins.
Credits:
Direction/concept/composition/edit – Tina Stefanou
Cinematography - Tara O’Conal
Sound engineer - Joseph Franklin
Colour - Wil Normyle
Performers: Grandma (Irene Poutakidis), Mum (Sophia Stefanou), Dad (George Stefanou), Kotch (Constantine Stefanou), Me (Tina Stefanou), Aunty Mary (Mary Kent), and Uncle George (George Peters)
Hym(e)nals, 2022, four channel video projection, quadraphonic sound, documentation, performance, 30 mins.
Presented at Mission to Seafarers Norla Dome 3rd-5th of November 2022 with guest performances from Genevieve Fry, Rebecca Jensen, Khyaal Vocal Ensemble, Deborah Kayser and Nick Tsiavos.
Tina Stefanou
Concept/Direction/Composition
Wil Normyle
Cinematographer/Edit
Jenny Hector
Lighting Design
Romanie Harper
Costume Design
Alistair McLean
Sound Design
Alina Bermingham
Colourist
Enrico Piazza
Projection Assistance
Cem Yildiz
Lighting Assistance
Yeliz Selvi
Costume Assistance
Holly Clough
Siena Denison
Zahli Jimeno
Tanika Mathews
Cailin Mikecz
Jasmin Sekhon
Emily Shine
Amber Wilson
Performers/Riders
Axel
Buster
Breeze
Delta
Genie
Little Foot
Horses
Sacajawea
Equine Specialist
Gulten Timewell
Equine Ground Staff
Documentation from Thursday the 3rd of Nov by Sarah Walker
Supported by: Centre for Projection Art, City of Melbourne, and Mission to Seafarers
5 Minutes: Mega-Grief Phone, 2022, one hour performance at 4am on the 1.11.2022 at No Vacancy Gallery in Narrm and a participatory sonic sculpture. This work is a response to Aarti Jadu’s installation and public program with ACCA, entitled Embodiments.
The work explores ex-dustrial time loops, a naive dawn chorus interrogating the ‘functional ‘ hours of affluent techno-embodiments and aspirational being.
Or the reality of what 4 am is for the city and its population. This action is a duet between two speaker installations. A passing…a moving from voice to polis.
Documentation by Aarti Jadu and edit by Joli Boardman
A live performance work for distributed voice and body, 49 tablets, solo performer, 50 minuets.
Presented by The Substation and Chamber Made.
Commissioned by The Substation
My Self in That Moment is a new hybrid performance work for an ensemble of 49 tablets and a solo vocalist, exploring the fragmented and distributed self in the digital age.
The swiftly evolving ability to replicate, deconstruct and distribute a person’s image and voice presents a swathe of possibilities and conundrums. The edges of self are increasingly frayed as our relationship with devices and systems becomes ever more entangled, fragmenting notions of ‘me’ and ‘mine’.
Interrogating questions around identity, agency, ownership and the myriad systems that lay beneath the distribution of data, My Self in That Moment is a reflection on the voice and body and what it means to be digitally captured and archived.
Led by Chamber Made Artistic Director, Tamara Saulwick, with composition by Peter Knight, My Self in That Moment continues the company’s record of engaging with new forms and technologies in live performance and music. For My Self in That Moment Steve Berrick has developed a system where personal devices in the form of tablets are networked to function as a visual and sonic ensemble, opening up exciting possibilities for the spatialization of image and sound.
Featuring the recorded voices and images of three astonishing vocalist/collaborators, Jessica Aszodi, Alice Hui-Sheng Chang and Tina Stefanou, My Self in That Moment also incorporates a rich visual language developed for the piece by photographer Sarah Walker and designers Amelia Lever-Davidson and Geoffrey Watson.
Promo image by Sarah Walker
Production image by Pia Johnson.
Development stills by Sarah Walker.
Miming for Mines: You Can’t Hear Faith│2022│three channel digital film│two channel sound│filmed on Gunai-Kurnai country│8:06mins.
Performer│Julie Franklin
Cinematography│Wil Normyle
Edit and colour│Wil Normyle
Sound│Joseph Franklin
Camera Assistant│Mitchell O’Hearn
Song excerpt│Until That Final Day│Keith Green
Watch here: https://www.aneartotheedge.art/
The Longest Hum, 2022, single-channel HD video, two-channel sound, filmed on Dabee Country, Cementa 22, film stills, 10:00 mins.
On the day of the federal election (21.05.2022) hummers gather on the main street of Kandos (Dabee Country). The hum was broadcast on community radio echoing across the region. This film is a cinematic trace of a live action.
Credits:
Concept/Direction: Tina Stefanou
Cinemtography: Wil Normyle
Edit/colour: Wil Normyle
Sound: Wil Normyle/Tina Stefanou/Joseph Franklin
Technical Assistance: Kristina Susnjara
Participants featured: Finn Standfield, Gabriel Cremonese, Wendy Williams, Owain James and Cementa22 attendees.
Thank you to the community of Kandos, the North East Wiradjuri cultural centre, Alex Wisser, Gabrielle Bates, and Nina Stromqvist, Virginia Handmer and the Wollemi singers, Finn Standfield, Gabriel Cremonese, Wendy Williams, Owain James, Dianna Rutter and her family of alpacas, Brent Barlow and the team at KRR 98.7 FM, Libby Varcoe, ABC Central West, and the extended Cementa team and volunteers.
Live action, radio broadcast, site-specific sound installation, ten minutes, 100+ participants, Dabee country, Kandos for Cementa22.
Photos by Ian Hobbs and Alex Wisser
Planetary Commons is a series of movements and vocalisations that explore ways of re-materlising text, ideas and relations through performative live action. Entering states of not-knowing anymore - a condition of speechlessness and collective inhabitation. The live action is part of an ongoing series exploring limited and expanded forms of the planetary commons - amniotic to agribusiness poet(h)ics and beyond.
Performed at: Gertrude Contemporary as part of Octopus 22: Baroquetopus (Humanimal entanglements and tentacular spectaculars) curated by Tessa Laird. May 12th 2022 with Lisa Salvo, Shaun Fogas and Joseph Franklin. Documentation by: Madeleine Bishop
and
Written at : Planetary Commons: a polysensorial essay—Part One for the Woman’s Art Register Bulletin Issue 69. Edited by Azza Zein.
Artist as Projector, 2021, single-channel HD video, projection, live vocal action, 3 hours, performance at Collingwood Yards on the 24 June 2021.
This work was developed during the summer residency program at Centre for Projection Art
Photo documentation by Phelan Media
Grandmother’s Started the Revolution, 2021, performative ongoing action, documentation on medium format film, hard boiled red eggs, Wattle Glen, photographic series.
Credits:
Photography - Shannon May Powell
Performers - Irene Poutakidis, Sophia Stefanou, Mary Kent, Tina Stefanou, Irene Stefanou, Kristina Dimarelos and Sophia Dimarelos
Installed at the 67th Blake Prize Casula Powerhouse Arts Centre.
A speculative response to living with death and dying.
We need affirmative,[1] non-nihilistic ways of living with death, dying and elderhood. Because death and dying are ineluctable in the ecology of life and living. [2]
Planet Hospice 2021-2061 is a 40-year project that responds to this need, conceived and led by artist Tina Stefanou. In each year Stefanou will invite makers, carers and thinkers to participate in process-oriented, speculative social practices that generate relation-research-creation.[3] Organised and exhibited in situated, virtual and potential spaces (see below).
In its first year Planet Hospice includes a writer-counsellor (Daniel Silver), onco-psychologist (Dr Kamil Wolyniec), ecologist-musician (Constantine Stefanou), writer-acupuncturist (Mattie Sempert), nurse (Sienna Cook), urban designer-illustrator (Jordan Silver) and health care policy researcher (Manjusha K Sathiananthan).
Planet Hospice is not a care facility or public service provider. It engages these environments through thoughtful and experimental creative practice. Its activities include a death salon, collective writings, cross-disciplinary making, thought experiments and events.
A note on the 40-year timeline. This reflects the artist’s anticipated period of ageing into the generative phase of her life. Aspects of the project will change from year to year. People will remain or fall away. Ideas will emerge unforeseen, others will fade. The project will move along a relational axis, guided by its collaborators, by its ethical orientation, and sustained by an enduring need to live with death and dying.
Planet Hospice traverses multiple epistemologies and death practices, weaving with non-Anglo perspectives from within its project community, theoretical perspectives from diverse thinkers more broadly, and in direct response to its geo-temporal location.
Situated
The artist currently lives on 20 acres of Wurundjeri land in Wattle Glen, where she has been undertaking multi-species living-dying relation-research-creation with horses, other animals, and members of her family for several years. The peri-urban site in Wattle Glen provides a geo-temporal ground to materialise (in concept, performance, and installation) several of Planet Hospice’s speculations. Note that the situated space may change over time.
Virtual
Alongside the situated space, Planet Hospice will publish, exhibit and archive on a digital platform in the virtual space. The platform will include a digital salon to host and house discursive ensembles (recorded and transcribed), and a reading room that features lectures, performances and video works. Planet Hospice will launch its virtual platform in year one.
Potential
Spanning 40 years, and including multiple more-than-human lifetimes, Planet Hospice anticipates finding expression in as yet unknown examples, housed alongside its current plans in parallel potentia. From these unknowns the project welcomes unforeseen tendrils of relational creation.
Ethics
Planet Hospice is guided by an ethical orientation that aligns with Braidotti’s affirmative ethics and Levinas’s notion of being for the other. Both value diversity, and caution against normative approaches based on transcendent rules or guidelines. In other words, both value an ethical orientation that is generated in the act of living. Like Braidotti, we seek to affirm multiple ways of being in our work, which we acknowledge is often challenging and exhausting. It requires us to remain continually engaged in an uncertain process and avoid any impulse to proclaim a moral imperative. This is not the same as moral relativism, which is merely another universal, but rather a commitment to openness. And also, to duration, “both in the temporal sense of continuity and the spatial one of endurance”.[4] We also recognise, like Levinas, that encounters with otherness helps to extend our sense of responsibility beyond the self.[5] This is in contrast to the neo-liberal perception of otherness as a threat to self-reliance. Though we appreciate the need to respect certain boundaries for the sake of safety, we are critical of neoliberalism for its failure to embrace otherness and to acknowledge that interdependence, not self-reliance, is essential for sustainability. Faced with death and dying, we see a responsibility to befriend and extend our care, rather than protect ourselves.
Intention – Year One
Our approach in year one is to gather and express our thinking in ways that reflect our diverse skills, knowledge, and perspectives. Our intention is not to arrive anywhere. Not to find any certainty or be prescriptive about the conditions of others. Our aim, aligned with our ethics, is to contribute our approach, and thereby generate new knowledge alongside existing thought in critical post-humanities, death studies, ecology, multispecies performance, architecture, health, economics and social science.
We find traces of death in our bodies, our familial relationships, our domestic experiments, in the catastrophe of now-visible climate change, in reckoning with colonial inheritance, in our love for the present, in our care. And in thinking about death, we orient ourselves by the following suppositions:
We are not the lament. What matters is that we have the capacity for movement through a just encounter with death, towards closeness, and more affirmative ways of living. Death is our necessary partner. [6]
We are not the hope. Our condition cannot be undone, and the notion of hospice invites neither protest nor resignation. It is synonymous with care, kinship, community, and a commitment to looking out for one another.
We are becoming a more-than-human community. This means we are extending our kinship beyond human/non-human duality.[7] Between hope and despair we seek to host a progressive form of friendship in our relation-research-creation.
We expect to fail. To the extent that our activities generate speculative theory about what is plausible in our situation, we embrace the need for theory that avoids generalising, that subverts mastery and rejects the condensation of complexity into categories or themes.[8] But we are not immune to being inclined towards the neat and tidy. If we are going to play, we are going to need to dispense with the conceit that failure is not an option. We assemble with the tools we know, to discover what we do not yet know.
Who
In year one the Planet Hospice project community intersects multiple disciplines, perspectives, areas of expertise and cultural backgrounds.
Tina Stefanou is a Greek-Australian artist with a background as a vocalist. She is currently based on Wurundjeri country in Victoria. Tina works undisciplined, with and across a diverse range of mediums, projects, practices, approaches, and labours: an embodied practice that she calls voice in the expanded field. Tina has performed and exhibited locally and internationally. She is currently a PhD candidate in Fine Arts at the Victorian College of the Arts, University of Melbourne.
Daniel Silver is a Jewish-Australian writer, counsellor and emerging scholar currently based on Arrente land in Alice Springs. He is a long-time collaborator with Tina, and with his brother Jordan, who is also involved in the project. Daniel’s research interests include post-structural responses to dealing with unalterable conditions in the expanded field of education, which extends to philosophy and psychotherapy.
Jordan Silver is a Jewish-Australian architectural graduate, illustrator and researcher based on Gadigal country in Sydney. His interests include narrative drawing as a means of research creation. Jordan is a regular contributor to the ABC on a range of urban issues and is particularly passionate about small public architecture. He is the founder of Towards Small Things.
Constantine Stefanou is a Greek-Australian emerging scientist, musician and sound artist living on Kaurna country, Adelaide. His scientific research focuses on freshwater and estuarine systems, which flows into his work as a musician and sound artist, exploring the possibilities of data sonification as a tool for science communication, pedagogy, and accessibility to the sciences. Constantine is currently completing his degree in ecology and spatial science at University of Adelaide. He is the co-founder and curator of live art and music organisation MUD.
Siena Jacobs is a Celtic-Scottish-Australian registered nurse working in a large public hospital on Gadigal country in Sydney. She was inspired to join the nursing discipline after finding a passion for working with older persons. Siena has worked in a palliative care ward, nursing homes, critical care areas and medical/surgical wards. She is interested in improving the dignity of death and dying; and culture surrounding this within the medical setting.
Dr Kamil Wolyniec is a Polish, Melbourne/Naarm based medical scientist and clinical psychology PhD student. Kamil has travelled around the globe learning about holistic approaches to mental and physical wellbeing for more than a decade. He did his first PhD in molecular oncology in the UK, followed by 5 years of postdoctoral work at Peter MacCallum Cancer Centre and Deakin University. He is currently finishing his second doctorate in clinical psychology at Peter MacCallum Cancer Centre/Swinburne University, working on the project elucidating psychological distress of patients diagnosed with Carcinoma of Unknown Primary.
Mattie Sempert is an American born, Australian based practicing acupuncturist and creative writer, who received her creative practice-led PhD at RMIT (Creative Writing/Speculative Essay, 2018). Her doctoral research explores the intersection of three practices: creative writing, acupuncture, and process-oriented philosophy. Her book, Sweet Spots: Writing the connective tissue of relation, was published by Punctum Books in 2021.
Manjusha K Sathiananthan was born in India and is an Adelaide based researcher in the field of public health with an interest in palliative and end of life care. Her most recent publication is a qualitative study related to the preference of place of death of patients at the end of life examined from the point of view of healthcare professionals.
These words were assembled and edited by Daniel Silver with Tina Stefanou in conversation with Planet Hospice Year One project team.
[1] Rosi Braidotti, Posthuman Knowledge, (Polity Press, 2019).
[2] Deborah Bird Rose, “Multispecies Knots of Ethical Time,” Environmental Philosophy 9 no. 1 (2012): 127.
[3] Tina Stefanou adds relation to the term research-creation, foregrounding relation as the primary ontological unit. Voicing-in-motion a complex set of relations inherent and inherited in the intensive and extensive curiosities of research-creation. These thoughts are influenced by Natalie Loveless, How to Make Art at the End of The World: A Manifesto for Research-Creation, (Duke University Press, 2019) and Erin Manning and Brian Massumi, Thought in the Act: Passages in the ecology of experience, (University of Minnesota Press, 2014).
[4] Braidotti, Posthuman Knowledge, 169.
[5] Paul Marcus, Being for the Other: Emmanuel Levinas, Ethical Living and Psychoanalysis, (Marquette University Press, 2008).
[6] Bird Rose, “Multispecies Knots of Ethical Time,” 127 – 140.
[7] Donna Haraway, When Species Meet, (University of Minnesota Press, 2013).
[8] Maggie MacLure, “The Offence of Theory,” Journal of Education Policy 25 no. 2 (2009): 277 – 286.
*Planet Hospice is part of the 2022 Project Anywhere Global Exhibition Program supported by Parsons School of Design and Centre for Visual Arts.
The Longest Hum, 2021, vocal participatory action, 21 years, launched 16.10.2021, updated 20.05.22.
The Longest Hum is an interactive voice work by Tina Stefanou (with Patrick Hase and Alisa Blakeney). It is sown together with voices, codes, locations, stringy bits and a desire to create the longest humming action in the Universe.
Put your hums into it
The Longest Hum is…
a digital river system
a sketch-becoming
a living time capsule
a community broadcast
a collective action
a humming cycle
a planetary commoning
a long chain of events
This action will run for 21 years and requires your hums to keep it alive and growing. The action morphs over time and becomes more and more animated. It starts with a single hum, a sketch of locations, an open invitation that slowly forms a connective tissue. The hum is a gentle, musically democratic, and direct way to interact with both human and the more-than-human. Hums are utterances found in the voice of humans, machines, and non-human species, as well as sonic artefacts found within the botanical world, and planetary rotation. It is an utterance that challenges the logical isolation of the English language – it is pre-speech, subterranean, pre-linguistic, pre-enunciative and within it exists pure potential.
Calling all hummers
The hum can be from your voice, or the voice of your fridge, dog, or thunderstorm. Why 21 years you might ask? Honouring The Spirit and of 21’ and an affirmative “f@$k off” to divisive narratives, together we are creating a real-time humming capsule full of curiosity and thick relational webs, as we head further into all sorts of changes. How will our humming shift over the next 21 years? How will technology develop? How will we retell stories of hum’s past?
Instructions:
1. Record your hums onto a device.
2. Upload your hum audio file and enter your postcode and country.
3. Watch your hum enter the collective action.
4. You can isolate your hum and see how it connects to other hums.
5. Over time the hums will get longer and longer, more complex and evolved.
The Longest Hum, 2021, instructional video, featuring original footage from The Baltic Way 1989, and hummers: Emily Bennett, Irene Poutakidis, George Poutakidis, Sophia, Kristina and Pauli Dimeralous, Mattie-Martha Sempert, James Hazel, Siena Rose Jacobs, Sophia and George Stefanou.
Commissioned by Cementa
Three-channel sonic sculpture across McClelland Sculpture Park featuring Lisa Roet’s White Ape and Peter Schipperheyn’s ZARATHUSTRA.
Documentation from the Liquid Architecture presentation at Site and Sound: Sound art as ecological practice exhibition 20/03/2021. Featuring: my grandmother Irene Poutakidis singing ‘You’re the Voice’ by John Farnham, 250 meters of cotton thread, two tin cans of dolmathes, two U speakers, a Bose speaker, a boat, artist-as-ape vocalisations, recordings from Sunday service at Frankston Greek Orthodox Church The Holy Epiphany, and the IGA Diamond Creek Supermarket.
Wake for Horses, 2021, single-channel HD video, two-channel sound, 11:25 mins
Wake for Horses, explores multi-species grief across different planetary proximities and temporalities. Using filmic projection as a tool for time travel, ritual and eventing.
Cinematography: Mitchell O'Hearn
Editing and colour : Rob Cameron
Sound: Joseph Franklin
Featuring: The Jocklebeary Herd and the late Billy
Voices: Irene Poutakidis and John O'Connor
Equine Specialist: Sacajawea
Technical assistance: Cem Yildiz
Thanks to The Centre for Projection Art
Presented by Art + Australia MULTINATURALISM Issue 57.1 2021 at The National Gallery of Victoria
https://sites.research.unimelb.edu.au/cova/projects/symposia/symposia-and-seminars-2021/multinaturalism-symposium2/tina-stefanou
*Wake for Horses has initiated an ongoing social project - the construction of an open air free cinema for the local community and there other-than-human companions. A place for new and old moving-image works to be shared with many loved ones.
Antiphonea, 2019, single channel video, colour, two channel audio, 9:01mins.
Antiphonea meets Horse Power, 2019, two-channel video, four-channel audio, 2.5mx6m, 9:01mins loop, installation view from the Victorian College of the Arts Graduation Show 2019.
Installation view from Hatched 2020, PICA, photography by Bo Wong.
Cinematography: Andrew Kaineder
Performers: Joseph Franklin, Jacques Emery, Will Hanson
Edit: Jamieson Moore
Tina Stefanou, Horse Power 2019, single-channel HD video, black and white, two-channel sound.
Tina Stefanou, Horse Power 2019, single-channel HD video, black and white, two-channel sound, installation view from Performing Textiles at the Ian Potter Museum.
“Stefanou’s retired equines are free in rolling fields, and bedecked with much more glamorous attire: woven networks of bells and keys. They have become carnivalesque creatures, bearing the noisy garb of fools and jesters. Stefanou, whose prima materia is voice, rejuvenates her tired co-composers with sound. She walks among them singing, while they trot and shake their jingling cargo. While Stefanou is interested in multispecies interactions and expanded notions of both composition and care, her costumed horses also reignite imagery of chain mail – that most combative of fabrics, a meshwork of metal. But what kind of battle might Stefanou be inciting these horses to fight with her, or on her behalf? It is, perhaps, the battle against age’s invisibility, the slipping into silence and obscurity of the elderly of all species. Stefanou’s horses, well past their prime, are garbed in what the ecofeminist philosopher Deborah Bird Rose called ‘the bling of life’, or ‘shimmer’. It is a way of saying yes to life, even in old age and especially in the so-called Anthropocene, when, as Rose says, ‘everything you love is being trashed’.” Tessa Laird
Horses : Buster Rhythm, Breeze and Duke.
Cinematography: Andrew Kaineder.
Sound: Joseph Franklin.
Pattern Maker : Rioko Tega.
Equine Specialist: Sacajawea.
Equine Assistant: Sharon Rix.
Yia Mas, 2018, 6:33, single channel video, silent
Welcome to the family.
A mini empire of conflicting values and shared microbes, all taking a seat at the table. Each family member shares there struggle to reconcile there person-hood in the face of cultural expectations that center around identity, sexuality, immigration and survival in the modern world. The artist has used real footage and parts of the conversation to blur the line between what is said and what is meant, sharing her filter of the Greek/Australian family unit.
Practice should get me there, 2017, Tarraleah, Tasmania, 50 mins. Photo stills.
Set in an abandoned hydro electric town, the musicians were placed in different rooms in a workers cottage. The musicians were instructed not to musically respond to each other but to focus solely on the space they were in and their process. Only the audience could hear the accidental unity and interactions of the sounds made.
Featuring performers:
Drum - Chloe Kim
Double Bass - Helen Svoboda
Percussion - Joseph Batrouney
Percussion - Alex Rindfleish
Percussion - Bianca Gannon
Trumpet - Miles David Sione
Guitar - Juluis Schwing
Cello - Natasha Tinkle
Metah - 2017 Paris, film stills - 4.13 mins
How does a human being reintegrate into society after an emotional impact, emergency
or personal crisis?
Filmed by James Watkins
A Life in Titles (Card Deck) 16/30 - 2017, 7x15cm, Paris - Ink on card.
A collection of covers for books masquerading as tools of divination.
Illegal Hits, 2017 performance with Rioko Tega, Black Cat Gallery, Melbourne
Combining illegal moves in wrestling and mixed martial arts with illegal songs from Greece and Japan.
11 years, 2016, Salt Museum, Istanbul, Turkey, 11 hours, live stream stills.
A performance exploring the nature of intimacy and distance, how sound and music act as currencies and how the medium of exchange between two improvisers replicates a long-term
relationship.
The space occupied by the performers represents possibility and the table at which they sit symbolises the everyday objects that witness and facilitate communion.
Each hour of the performance portrays a year. Their 11 hour endurance narrates the commitment needed to sustain any union. Over time, through an accumulation of exchanges the environment gradually responds and transforms their connection.
