SALA 2020: The Unwelcome

from floodtide

The 2020 South Australian Living Artists Festival (SALA) is mostly on-line this year. I have put together The Unwelcome, a showcase of my video art commenting on the environment, corruption, border controls, colonialism, authoritarianism… unwanted circumstances that, by design or active neglect, now or in a dystopian future, can make us, and those around us, feel isolated, afraid, oppressed, forgotten, erased, silenced… unwelcome.

Click here to see The Unwelcome entry in the SALA 2020 program.

Click here to go directly to The Unwelcome.

The Ferrovores in Atticus Review

My video poem The Ferrovores had been published in leading USA literature magazine Atticus Review.

Filmed mostly in the southern Flinders Ranges, it explores the idea of alternative energy sources for food after environmental collapse.

Ferrovores

“this time, this place… beyond open circulation closed reciprocity… closed hydration spheres wrought cast smithed… this is what we are what we eat … “

Iron is the most common metal on earth. Indeed, it forms much of the molten core of the planet which in turn generates the earth’s magnetic poles. The red soils of the world are due to iron. At a biochemical level, iron is essential for human life, amongst other things, making our blood red. In the societal domain, iron … Click here for more.

Coming Through at Poetry Film Live

Poetry Film Live, run by Helen Dewberry and Chaucer Cameron, is one of the leading sites for supporting and promoting video poetry in its various forms. They recently have expanded their brief to include performance poetry. So I am very pleased that they have selected my audio-poem Coming Through, a sort of a road trip saga through rural Australia ending up in Sydney. It’s one of my favourite pieces to perform live, especially with the backing track, which I composed and played myself.

Coming Through

spokevid-19

I don’t usually do poetry direct to camera, but here is a little vid I did for Spoke N Slurred, an iconic Adelaide spoken word event that has gone on-line during the COVID-19 shut-downs of the bars where we usually perform. It was recorded in my studio / work room in one take and all the post-processing was done in one day.

ISOLATION PROCEDURES

“WE ARE CLOSED UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE… MAINTAIN YOUR SOCIAL ISOLATION…”

After the pandemic has passed, the lockdowns persist: this is the new normal…

Recorded during the 2020 coronavirus COVID-19 pandemic mostly on location at Sleep’s Hill, Blackwood and Belair, South Australia, under partial lockdown conditions. The audio samples are made from birds, frogs and voices in the immediate neighbourhood. The text samples advice from various government, business and community organisations.

The video has been featured in Moving Poems (USA, April, 2020); selected for New Mediafest 1st Corona Festival and The Wake Up! Memorial (Cologne, Germany, April, 2020); selected for Life in the Time of COVID-19: Fragment 4 (July 2020); and selected for Oblò TV (Cinéma Oblò, Lausanne, Switzerland, May 2020).

future perfect screens around the world

Amongst all the isolation and angst of COVID-19, some good things are happening… I’m totally amazed that my video future perfect has been selected for five (5!) international video festivals already this year: REELPoetry (Texas); Newlyn Short Film Festival (UK); Carmarthen Bay Film Festival (Wales); FILE Electronic Language International Festival (Sao Paolo, Brazil) and Cadence Video Poetry Festival (Seattle). It was first screened at the 8th International Video Poetry Festival in Athens last year.

Although these all were planned to be live theatre screenings, most of them will end up being on-line, so stay tuned for info as it comes to hand.

Here’s my blurb for the vid – maybe a harbinger of where we are and … Click here for more.

VESSEL 2020 at Hart’s Mill

VESSEL 2020 is a large joint exhibition at Hart’s Mill, Port Adelaide, curated by Tony Kearney and showing through February and March as part of the 2020 Adelaide Fringe Festival.

sloop in a silo (ship in a bottle) was constructed by Tony Kearney and Paul Atkins with a massive charcoal drawing by Amanda Sefton Hogg in a giant disused steel silo at Hart’s Mill. I made the soundscape to go with it. All the audio samples were recorded in the silo and include Amanda creating her charcoal drawing.

Listen to the complete soundscape on Bandcamp…

Here is Amanda creating her amazing work in the silo.

Colony Collapse published in Verity La

I’m delighted that my video poem Colony Collapse has been published in Verity La. When I made this, I had no idea just how relevant to current circumstances it would become…

Massive thanks to Michele Seminara, David Stavanger, Anne-Marie Te Whiu and the rest of the amazing team at Verity La.

The video also was screened at Lyra ’20: Bristol Poetry Festival – Poetry and Climate (UK, March, 2020).

Colony Collapse (Ian Gibbins)
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