When I made my video “ISOLATION PROCEDURES”, we were in the early stages of COVID-19 close-down here in South Australia and I wondered what would happen if the laws necessary for restricting the spread of the virus became entrenched in a more authoritarian government regime. With things getting worse around the world on many levels, it seems opportune that my video has been selected for screening at the 2020 Fotogenia International Festival of Film Poetry and Divergent Narratives in Mexico City in November. Rather than subtitling the video in Spanish, I’ve integrated a Spanish version of the text into the video, as part of my long slow project on exploring how text and image can interact.
Poetry
dog daze screens in Sweden
dog daze continues its international success and is an official selection for At The Fringe – International Arts Festival at Tranås, Sweden, 9-18th October, 2020. As part of the festival, I was interviewed about the process of making the video by curator, Laura Bianco. You can see the interview below.
Colony Collapse screens in European festivals
“I am still watching ghosts, eyes rimed with salt, homesick… this was never our natural state, our true inheritance… we should not be here…”
My video Colony Collapse, originally published in Verity La, is an official selection for the ZEBRA Poetry Film Festival in Berlin, and has been short-listed for the 8th Ó Bhéal International Poetry-Film Competition in Cork, Ireland. Both screenings are in November, 2020. It was also screened at Lyra ’20: Bristol Poetry Festival – Poetry and Climate in March, 2020.
SALA 2020: The Unwelcome
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. It has since been picked up by Moving Poems (USA) and ZEBRA Poetry Film Festival (Germany) facebook page.
Filmed mostly in the southern Flinders Ranges, it explores the idea of alternative energy sources for food after environmental collapse.
“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, … 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.
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 is an official selection for Fotogenia, International Festival of Film Poetry and Divergent Narratives (Mexico, November, 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… Click here for more.