Transcript
[The City of Melbourne respectfully acknowledges the Traditional Owners of the land, the Wurundjeri Woi Wurrung and Bunurong Boon Wurrung peoples of the Eastern Kulin Nation and pays respect to their Elders past, present and emerging.
We are committed to our reconciliation journey, because at its heart, reconciliation is about strengthening relationships between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal peoples, for the benefit of all Victorians.
Apparition Mikala Dwyer, University Square, Melbourne]
What I'd hope people might experience is, as they wander through the park, that something might catch their eye, in a peripheral way, in a quiet way.
We're here in University Square on Wurundjeri and Woi Wurrung land. So, the process of creating this artwork came about through a very unique and wonderful experience of a two-week intensive workshop with Melbourne City Council where all sorts of people came together and to kind of find out what the site was about.
Working through this project I was really privileged to meet a number of indigenous knowledge holders and elders like N’arweet Carolyn Briggs and Jefa Greenaway and others that have sort of really were generous in sharing their knowledge of the site, which gave us a kind of a really different perspective of what this place is in time, and in deep time.
I think this project relates to my, all my practice in the sense that I've always been interested in belief systems and superstition and so in a sense the apparition is something that’s, you know it's connected to you know all through my practice. But I think what's different here is, I've had an opportunity to really extend it into a whole new materiality of you know animated projection.
So with the decision to make an animated possum I then had to find an animator and luckily I work at RMIT which actually has a media communications department, and there happens to be some of the best animators in the country working in there and discovered Gina Moore who has a special gift for animal animations as she comes from a kind of painting background. And she has a love of animals that she was the perfect person to work with because she sort of can really breathe life into these creations that are you know, they become sort of supernatural creatures that have a really particular quality.
And I think ghosts and apparitions have a way of kind of carrying stories and memory from one generation to the next and so working with all that kind of history, of you know an idea of the ghost or the apparition, but then creating a possum out of nothing. It seemed appropriate in the end that it was an animation rather than photographic footage of a real possum that it was something that was brought almost an apparition from the future back to the present somehow.
So, I think some of the experience of making a public work here has been different to other aspects of my practice. Public art I guess it should always be contentious I mean anything it should be there to kind of stir things up, create conversation, but I think what's nice about public art is that it's in a space where you can happen upon it where it's not framed by a gallery necessarily or you know a lot of knowledge like you know anyone can come up to it and it can be a bit of a reality shifter. They perform a function that nothing else can, there's nothing else like it. There's you know we have architecture and we have landscapes and we have parks and with public art, [it] just asserts a kind of a different reality into a city, that I think’s really important.
[Credits
Videography Takeshi Kondo
Music ‘Evening Night Fall – Fire, Cricket, wine glass etc’, Ai Yamamato
Special thanks to
Curatorial panel – Wesley Enoch AM & Dr Simone Slee, and all those involved in the workshop intensive.
Animator, Gina Moore
Sean Lynch
David Corben
The possums of University Square.
Commissioned by City of Melbourne in collaboration with RMIT.]