Moving image

Two video works created in response to each of the Queenstowns convey how place is revealed in our inner life. Inhale/Exhale (2023, 11:30 mins), by Sarah Rhodes, draws parallels between the healing landscapes of Queenstown in Lutruwita/Tasmania and the experience of being in place. PERMEATE: mapping skin and tides of saturated resistance (2023, 7:38 mins), by Unbound Collective, inhabits the mangrove wetlands of Yarta Puulti, over which the Queenstown of Kaurna Yarta/Adelaide was built. The film examines the recent poisoning of mangroves by salt mining industry and the need for ongoing protection of Country. Projected on a wall 16m wide, these works envelop visitors, inviting an experience of embodied listening.

Artist Statements

PERMEATE: mapping skin and tides of saturated resistance
Unbound Collective, 2023, 7:38 minutes, single-channel digital video, colour, sound, editor Jessica Wallace

This is a slow agitation permeating tributaries from wetland to rock-hole to spring and mighty flows that silt and stir at mouths of sand, salt and clay this is our body awash and afloat water-bearing and bearing-witness to poison and ignorance and greed we are river and sediment guiding currents to vast oceans of kinship deep this is our body as mangrove as skin and lung.

Inhale/Exhale
Sarah Rhodes, 2023, 11:30 minutes, single-channel digital video, colour, sound. editor Jessica Wallace

To inhale is to ingest the world around us, to become intimate with and forge a connection to place. To exhale is both an act of giving, and leaving behind, a trace of ourselves. In this mutual dialogue between person and place, breath in unison, we are a haunted landscape in recovery.