Field of Triggers: Centipede 2025

single channel video, sensor, wax casts from live equine hoof, wood, steel, wax, wool

760.0 x 240.0 cm 

Artist: Tina Stefanou

Editor and colourist: Wil Normyle

Sound designer: Alistair McLean 

Wax casting: Ceren Sinanoglu

Equine collaborator: Breeze

Equine specialist: Sacajawea

Equine assistance: Tanika Mathews 

Project manager, bench designer and fabricator: Ellen Sayers

Screen build: Steven Bellosguardo

Fabricator apprentice and metal welder: Georgia Brooks

Video collage and sensor designer: Steve Berrick

Wool: Sayers farm

Commissioned by Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne, with support from Creative Australia, Arts House and Yamaha

Field of Triggers: Centipede 2025 is a film sculpture—a large billboard size screen, akin to a drive-in cinema, disrupted by a line of metal legs and wax hooves. It stands as a monumental body, holding the many lives that pass through its surface. As both monument and anti-monument, the screen carries its own sculptural significance. Inspired by agricultural machinery and harvesters with their immense scale, cinema takes on the same magnitude, reflecting both agribusiness and the film industry, each with its own massive environmental footprint. 

A sensor is positioned within the bench, which, when triggered and reshapes the taxonomy of visual and sonic material experienced across the gallery. Here, the gaze, or the ass, co-shapes the filmic environment, affecting how others encounter the exhibition. Raising questions about how care, tenderness, bodily responsibility and the ethics of touch become central to the interaction between audiences and institution.

Films featured:

Dance The War of Proximity 2024

Back-Breeding 2023

Hym(e)nals 2022

Miming for Mines: You Can’t Hear Faith 2022

Wake for Horses 2022

Cactus Kid 2021