The visual language and conceptual articulations of this tactic resonate strongly with the Biennale’s overall themes. Site Geist I offers a transdisciplinary reading of the Unsettling Queenstown project’s foci of narrative and temporality and potentially yields correspondingly rich architectural manifestations.

The films revisit journeys of those who came before us through capture of contemporary bodies dancing in historic topography. We move where they once moved in a weaving of two scales of time: the architectural – slow and durable, and the bodily – fluid and mercurial. This linking yields experientially transformative encounters with place and history as, within the frame of the film, ‘then’ and ‘now’ are compressed.

The ‘spirit’ of site resides simultaneously within the dancers’ bodily responses to site and residually, within the architecture itself. We are making single-shot, one-point perspective films capturing nervous systems, 200 years on, dancing within ruins of the machinery of colonization. Can we displace our ‘imperial eye’? Animate and inanimate materiality combine as the remains of extractive settler worlds are tactically intertwined with deeply listening bodies.

paulwakelamarchitect.com/topography-dance

greatsoutherndance.com.au