CANTOS #7 - ‘Weight of the Earth’.

CANTOS #7 - 'Weight of the Earth',
guest curated by Isabella Hone-Saunders, featuring:

Gabriella Imrichova
(with Jo Lloyd, Phillip Adams, Daniel Ward and Thomas Woodman)
Paul Dalla Rosa
Archie Barry
Sylvie Nehill

Saturday, September 27th 4-7pm, tickets $20 + bf with all proceeds directly distributed to the practitioners presenting.

For this edition of Cantos, Isabella has invited each of the practitioners to respond to a prompt from the transcribed tape journals of David Wojnarowicz, recorded from 1987-89.

This prompt has come from a particular line of investigation into hope, which is at the core of Isabella's PhD in Curatorial Practice at Monash University.

Excerpt from Isabella’s essay below:

‘As guest curator of Cantos, I wanted to take the opportunity to extend my current PhD research, which proposes hope as a generative and disciplined curatorial methodology. This conceptualisation of hope frames it as a type of recommitment that acknowledges yet reorients despair and has the potential to cultivate new forms of solidarity.

This hope that I am researching is particularly interested in a realistic and active commitment or approach, not an idealised or passive deference. And so this hope I’m getting at is well acquainted with despair, with the weight of the world, of many worlds, minor worlds and large worlds. It attempts to address the contours of our shared historical present.

For each practitioner, I selected several prompts and asked them to choose one that most resonated for whatever reason. These prompts came from David Wojnarowicz’s tape journals, which were recorded during the years 1987-89 and while they weren’t explicitly referenced, there is a nod to these prompts in each presentation.

And what I’ve now come to understand after watching rehearsals this past week, is that each of these artists imbues certain qualities of David’s work, be it grief, absurdity, experimentation, humour or activism.

I first read these transcribed tape journals in 2018, and ever since this phrase ‘the weight of the earth’ has whirled around and around in my brain. So, what is it about David’s voice and thoughts?

The hope that I see in this work lies in the constant renegotiating with the present, after the anticipatory loss of the future, as David was diagnosed with AIDS in 1988.

There is hope in the way he recommitted to living. Living alongside despair and directly or squarely looking at it. Straight down the barrel.’

Artist bios:

Gabriella Imrichova works with the medium of live performance across theatre, visual arts, and dance.  By stripping back and withholding the usual coordinates for encountering a live performance work, they explore how perception, attention, and meaning operate, and how these things can be manipulated on a structural level for the viewer. Gabriella is a graduate of the Victorian College of the Arts with a BFA in Theatre (2019). Their work sits within the city’s lineage of critically rigorous experimentation and has been recently presented at Dancehouse, Performance Space (Sydney), Temperance Hall, and Gertrude Contemporary for Contact High, with residencies at Bundanon and the ATLAS scholarship at ImPulsTanz (Vienna). They are currently the Front Studio Resident at Temperance Hall, where their research extends into the symbolic order— exploring it as an infrastructural code to be mapped, hacked, and reconfigured for performance. 

Paul Dalla Rosa is a writer based in Melbourne. Paul is the author ofAn Exciting and Vivid Inner Life. His work has appeared in The Paris Review, Granta, McSweeney’s, Meanjin, and New York Tyrant.

Archie Barry is an artist living and working on Wurundjeri country. Born in 1990 and raised on the coastal regions of the Eora Nation, their artwork is autobiographical, somatic and process-led. They are drawn to time-based mediums to induce moments of affective intensity, drawing from lived experiences of loss, near death, and a politics of trans liberation. Attuned to histories of knowledge making and connection that do not easily map onto the “seen” or the rational, Barry’s practice questions dominant representations of selfhood as singular, stable, legible, and sequential. Their works have been exhibited widely in Australia, including at The Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Heide Museum of Modern Art, Samstag Museum of Art, The National Gallery of Victoria, Museum of Contemporary Art, Contemporary Art Tasmania and Artspace, amongst other spaces.

Sylvie Nehill (b. 1991, Wadawurrung country) is a musician based in the Macedon Ranges, on the lands of the Dja Dja Wurrung, Taungurung and Wurundjeri Woi Wurrung Peoples. Primarily a percussionist, she is the founding member and former drummer of the experimental doom band Divide and Dissolve, and was active in the group from 2009-2022. Informed by her current work in the environmental conservation field, her musical practice explores related themes of time perception, transience and resonance, both natural and imposed, and seeks to honour indigenous legacies and futures.

Thank you to Roslyn and Camille for hosting us, for your generosity and for your documentation.