Dance the War of Proximity: workshops

Development and workshops with Adelaide youth performers. Co-facilitated with Lily Potger and Alice Heyward at Estonian Hall in North Adelaide.

Creative producer Jennifer Greer Holmes.

Documentation by Sia Duff

Dance the War Proximity

Dance the War of Proximity, 2024, is a performance action and live filmic event featuring 10 young performers, as part of the 18th Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art: Inner Sanctum. Through embodying a metaphorical nervous system and enacting certain functions, these performers integrate singing, speaking, vocalisation, and movement, drawing inspiration from nature, art, science, and popular culture.

The action serves as a self-organising system, resembling a form of poetic automaton, that moves through different sites of exhibition in Adelaide city, shedding light on various facets of coming-of-age politics. Whether delving into themes of valuation, social class, the sun, puberty, resource distribution, elderhood, or symbiosis, Dance the War of Proximity aims to forge strange solidarities within sites of collection and surveillance (including botanic gardens, zoos, and summits), questioning their historical contexts, the politics of acquisition and the gaze, using the body-voice as an instrument to explore more-than-human and more-than-bourgeoisie modes of making-sensing, which are always commoning through collective labour formations and technologies of improvisation.

This work is an extension of Hym(e)nals, a four channel video and sound work that features the artist's long engagement with a herd of elderly horses and their teenage female horse riders, currently showing in the Adelaide Biennial at AGSA.

The live performances take place across Adelaide at Mount Lofty, Adelaide Botanic Garden, Adelaide Zoo and the Art Gallery of South Australia. Entry is free at all locations except Adelaide Zoo with a 2 for 1 ticket offer* after midday on 27 April using the code word 'BIENNIAL' at the main entrance.

*Valid for entry ticket of equal or lesser value.

Performance details

Wed 24 Apr, 12-1.30pm

Mount Lofty Lookout

Fri 26 Apr, 1-2.30pm

Adelaide Botanic Garden at the Amazon Water Lily Pavilion, Palm House and the Bicentennial Conservatory

Sat 27 Apr, 2-3.30pm

Adelaide Zoo

Sun 28 Apr, 3-4pm

Art Gallery of South Australia in Gallery 13

Credits

Lead artist

Tina Stefanou

Creative producer

Jennifer Greer Holmes

Co-choreography and performers

Lily Potger, Alice Heyward and Celina Hage

Youth ensemble and co-choreography

Victoria Mackay, Kaz Rogers, Cooper Faull, Scarlett Jankowiak, Jade Porter, Maree Fong, Sahara Soliman, Jazmine Deng and Indigo Fossey

Live film documentation

Andrew Kaineder and Wil Normyle

Live sound documentation

Nick Steele

Poster design

Rose Williams

This work was made and witnessed on Kaurna Country.

This project has been assisted by the Australian Government through Creative Australia, its principal arts investment and advisory body.

18th Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art: Inner Sanctum - Artist Profile

Rural Utopias 24 November 2023 – 18 February 2024 The Art Gallery of Western Australia →

I’ve met your barrel-chested creatures in the fields and witnessed a deer transform as we sang amidst ankle cutting stubble. Emus sprinted across plains, and a powerful poet reminded me that a campfire was all one needed. We spent nine days sewing and laughing as ‘90s pop songs play­ed through our 5,000 kilometres of seed stitching.

Your charm is in simple gestures — smiles, greet­ings, and stray farm dogs. Light softens your terrain, making even impo­sing machinery appear gentle. I couldn’t help but think of the film Gladia­tor and its famous opening grain scene, where pre-violence brings profound stillness.

The water monsters, the Axolotls at the pub, beckon like sirens, reminding me of the possi­bi­li­ties of regeneration even in a muddy tank. In your presence, the anxiety of ambition and agri-art’s careerism waned. I didn’t want to subject you to tokenism or similar contrivances, nor did I aim to romanticise or infantilise. Instead, your vocal to­tems, the wildflowers in the gaps, were my focus.

Grandmothers Started the Revolution

Photo essay and performative action in Enough is Enough.

Edited by Vikki McInnes

CoVA x Perimeter is a collaborative publishing initiative curated by the Centre of Visual Art at the University of Melbourne and independent publishing house Perimeter Editions. Foregrounding experimental and otherwise innovative discursive outputs from three key streams of enquiry – Postnational Art Histories, Feminism and Intersectionality, and Art + Science – the program spans research-in-progress, academic dialogues, artist responses, and essays, working to reframe scholarly research via a multiplicity of new perspectives and lenses. The Feminism and Intersectionality series explores discourse and practices that challenge dominant narratives and ideologies, proposing new frameworks through which to continue making and legitimising forms of knowledge and cultural production that are otherwise rendered invisible or deemed untenable. The series aims to address relations of difference, heterogeneity, and hierarchy, enriching our understanding of inequality and global power relations and interactions.

This publication was conceived on March 15, 2021, when more than one hundred thousand people marched across Australia in a series of March 4 Justice protests calling for gender equality and justice for victims of sexual assault. While these protests were motivated by anger at the lack of response by the Australian federal government to current and historic rape allegations, they were part a larger global movement that was gathering momentum. Edited by Vikki McInnes and designed by Kim Mumm Hansen, Enough: Artists and writers on gendered violencecomprises creative responses to the issues highlighted in these protests. Responses are subjective, poetic, cathartic, and as fiercely political and deeply personal as the issues they address.

With contributions by: Anjella Roessler, Anna Ricciardi, Claire Bridge, Darcey Bella Arnold, Deborah Eddy, Freda Drakopoulos, Helen Grogan, Iona Mackenzie Cant, Isabelle Sully, Jordan Wood, Josephine Mead, Julie Vinci, June Miskell, Katie Paine, Katie Sfetkidis, Louise R Mayhew, Makeda Duong, Michelle Hamer, Natalie King, Natasha Rai, Nell, Nur Shkembi, Philipa Rothfield, Sandra Minchin-Delohery, Sophia Cai, Tina Stefanou, Wendy Catling, and Zoë Bastin.

224 pages, 22 x 14.5 cm, cold glue bind, softcover with flap, Perimeter Editions x CoVA at the University of Melbourne (Melbourne).

Agripoet(h)ics: What is an artist Suppose to do with all this?

“I am going to share two ongoing projects which consist of films and some fields notes from two different sites and focus on performative co-inventions with communities, animals, and environments living with automated farming practices and technologies and their co-emergence with the art market. The field notes and films act as a call and response to one another, and interrogate the role of the artist-researcher in these spaces.

The initial trilogy of films emerged from sixteen weeks of fieldwork conducted in Carnamah, situated on Amangu country, approximately four hours northeast of Perth. This exploration focused on grain production utilising performance, para-ethnographical practices, and vocal workshops within the Wheal Belt region. The concluding piece, an animation serving as a precursor to a forthcoming series of actions, was born from experiences at the Dookie Agricultural campus and Robotic Dairy Farm in regional Victoria, located on Yorta Yorta country.

 I won’t have time to talk through all of the details of the films and their multitudes. This is also the first time that the films from Carnamah have been shown to the public outside of the community. I have no map for these stories and my methodological approach is grounded in the sensorial and relational experience of vocalising with places, animals, machines, and people. Condensing the myriad paradoxes and complexities I encountered during my time into this twenty-min talk is beyond my capacity. Attempting to do so would mean succumbing to a form of writing and expression Michael Taussig terms "agribusiness writing." This type of writing obfuscates the processes of production, operating under the assumption that writing's primary function is to convey information, distinguishing it from writing that embraces attributes such as poverty, humour, failure, loss, luck, drought, animality, fibres, the ecstatic, and more. It erases the page's chaotic and vibrant collaborators, spirits, and tricksters. These cheeky paraontological collaborators and extra affects challenge established power structures inherent in using language not only as a tool for ownership, territorial claims, and careerist individualism. These transindividual forms of language encapsulates what I refer to as 'more-than middle-class+ aesthesis,' embodying a range of intricate vulnerabilities and relational poetics beyond the production of distinct art selves.”

*hum

Going against the grain with artist Tina Stefanou →

By Marianna Alepidis.

Tina Stefanou is one of 24 artists who have been announced as part of the 18th Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art: Inner Sanctum taking place in 2024.

About an hour away from the city of Melbourne, the award-winning artist lives in her own little “Greek village.” She is surrounded by the serenity of her yiayia’s farm, where she resides with the rest of her family, who have had their own hand in influencing Stefanou’s path.

“As a child, I was nourished. I had aunties and uncles that were making little films with me, my dad sang and played guitar at a Greek tavern, my mum is very expressive, even though she didn’t get the opportunity to realise that in the arts,” she told The Greek Herald.

“The way in which my family sings songs and the natural performative gestures that flow from being together, has really shaped me.

“The migrant interpretation and experience of the Australian landscape mixed with village peasant concepts such as ‘the evil eye’ form these very strange and hybrid magical forms of expression. Orientations that float around the psyche have probably been more pivotal in my development as an artist than any kind of singular human or artistic practice.”

Automatopoeia: From The Sludge →

Fieldnotes from the 2022 Art and Ecology Residency at the Dookie Robotic Dairy Farm, Agricultural Campus and the Mansfield High School. 

Moving methane, BEEP!

Slobbering boundaries, ZING!

The chugg, the belch of the milky way, as it moves from my teat to your gut.

SPLASH! CRACK!

I am bovine, I am a larger field, a happening. Neither sexed nor mother.

THUD!

Neither subject, lens, tongue, or mirror.

In the words of Doja Cat, BITCH! I am a Cow.1

Grazing on cattle time: eighteen days on site is not enough time to truly form a body of work that can speak beyond the politics of capture (to be seen seeing). So, what amount of time would be necessary in a robotic dairy farm?

Vocalising, moving, writing, line dancing, listening; conversing with cows, robots, farm workers, scientists, shearers, sheep, pulses, The Quarry, students, retirees, horses and teenagers on the spectrum has generated something more-than and less-than-productive. The residency began when I hummed softly to the cows as they were being art(ificially) inseminated. In that moment, vocality assumed a quiet cinematic quality, capable of co-shaping a projected sonic environment—a multi-sensory glimpse of breath-light, sonorous-tactility, and (e)motion.

An unrestricted sociality presented itself and it was in that moment when something, which exceeds speech, whispered in my ear, sidling.2 A devotional diffractive practice; an approach to moving and being moved with the world, which takes a non-discursive route away from forward-facing representationalism. Sidling, involves crisscrossing through a plethora of (extra)ordinary encounters and entities, singing with the gaps. It refrains from an act of knowing, an approach that places the human at the apex of knowledge, which relegates the environment to an instrument of human-animal use.3 Sidling box-weaves away from a human/artist-centric paradigm—‘a sphere encompassing thought, action, belief, desire, and an imaginary economy—that is toxic.’4

This orientation prompted a challenging inquiry: amidst the mechanised monotony of a robotic dairy farm, where does fugitivity reside? Fugitivity, ‘is a desire for and a spirit of escape and transgression of the proper and the proposed.’5 In the case of the artist, it is a space that demands an attunement to voice, ‘not as individuation, but as something amidst an intense engagement with everything: with all the voices that you’ve ever heard, where you struggle somehow to make a difference, so to speak, within that voice. And that difference isn’t necessarily about you {as an artist}’6

 Here the invitation is to drop the outcome, to listen fugitively and commune with sludge.

SLAP!

Sludge: a group of cow bodies on heat communing in an orgy. Messy hot rubbing. A group-soothing moment, where hooves, fur, and reproductive surfaces take part in a ritual of Bos Taurean stimming. Perhaps this is where the fugitive lives? Amidst the mire, briefly moving away from the architectures of order. The droning, trance-like sounds of milk and its mechanic corporeality resonate through the farm; this place is Automatopoeic. The fieldnotes in Automatopoeia act as a behind the scenes hyperspace, a precursor to a body of actions yet to come, presented in a moving 3D animated landscape.

The animated work, plays with ‘animatic (dis)entanglement’, an approach to animal cinematics that interrogates the historical and contemporary ethnographic methods of capture inherent in film and art making. I invite the human-animal reader to experience these processual interiorities as they are felt to me at the time. With little editing, what I experienced at the robotic dairy farm and the ecology of interactions that unravelled was a call to find another locomotion, a sidling depiction of the performative. To animate the otherwise representative disconnect between the subjugated labour of animals, and a human’s capacity to ‘assert dominion through the act of assigning meaning.’7

As Jacob Lingren writes, ‘{i}n this prevailing context, animal life is frequently diminished to mere economic units, their worth gauged by their capacity to be produced and consumed.’8 Animal life is leveraged through agricultural mechanisms, which fuels the momentum behind early time-motion technologies, trapping them within humanist hierarchies that domesticate the movement and function of bodies.9 These factors highlight an embedded habitus that centres human mastery in conventional artistic identities and environments. I find myself moving further into a para-ethnographical practice often stationed in regional and rural places, at times funded by art, government, and academic institutions. The implicit danger of an imperial narrative lies in the belief that one must placate an external figure, whether a bureaucratic or artistic institution, that sits outside of and detached from corporeal intricacies:10

lactic commoning

microbial co-composing

hormonal drifts

fatty assemblages

neural throbbing

sperm work

faecal aroma(n)tics

nervous system mastications

Motion. Capture. Cash. Cow.

CLUNK!

Over the course of ten years, deeply engaged in working and living with animals—particularly horse-kind, the original life-action-view (zoopraxiscopic) actors—I have continued to wrestle with these questions. I loop back to the ways we frame, the spaces we bring to light, the tools we use, the time we tend, the where—the places we land and the how and why we feature the voices we employ are fundamentally important. It is in this realm that an act of refusal emerges, countering the instrumentalisation of cow-labour for artwork. Sidling explores the potential of written, visual, and aural refusal as forms of sensate more-than-human sovereignty. What Dylan Robison outlines in Hungry Listening as actions of structural refusal to 'convey knowledge and experience otherwise to the normative strictures.'11 A place to instigate reflection on the production and circulation of content.

We all inhabit and co-create worlds saturated with unease, progressively mechanised, and estranged in this twenty-first-century technoscape. The aristocratic menagerie highlighted animals and their intriguing potential to signify status, a display that underscores a manifestation of imperialism and elitism stemming from the colonial cabinets of curiosity. This legacy lingers within the confines of the white cube. I can hear Bayo Akómoláfé’s assertion, ‘{e}thics is what comes to matter and what comes to be excluded in the mattering of what comes to matter.’12

It is in these tricky matters that animalness comes into relation differently, shape-shifting ethico-aesthetic landscapes, demanding ‘ontological mutiny.’13 The dynamics of pushing and pulling, the friction and the kinetic movements within the sludge, a forbidden love, the fugitive, all contribute to a sense of belonging that is brought to life through a commonist-interspecies-working-class-diaspora. This process involves a re-evaluation of how labour, bodies, and time can give rise to post-anthropocentric economies. Akómoláfé continues, ‘We are arousals. We are subjects of unspeakable arousals.’14 Animalness asks us to give up something. It disrupts the narrative of the cows at the Dookie farm as visual, knowledge, or entertainment production sites to dis-art, an inverted tonality, a place of uneasy making-wit(h)ness, dancing the war of proximity.

CRUNCH!

Notes

1. Doja Cat, “Mooo!”, YouTube, August 11, 2018, music video, 4:42, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mXnJqYwebF8

2. Akómoláfé, Báyò, “on Ontological Mutiny,” July 3, 2023, in For the Wild interview, with Ayana Young, podcast, MP3 audio, 01:01:50, http://forthewild.world/listen/dr-bayo-akomolafe-on-ontological-mutiny-338

3. ibid

4. ibid

5. David S. Wallace, “Fred Moten’s Radical Critique of the Present” The New Yorker, published April 30, 2018, https://www.newyorker.com/culture/persons-of-interest/fred-motens-radical-critique-of-the-present

6. ibid

7. Jacob Lingren, “Toward a Non-human Lens,” Are.na Editorial (blog), 1/08/2023, www.are.na

8. ibid

9. Lingren, “Toward a Non-human Lens,”

10. Akómoláfé, “on Ontological Mutiny”

11. In Dylan Robison's book "Hungry Listening," the author explores various forms of Indigenous knowledge sovereignty through acts of refusal, spanning aesthetics, modalities, and audiences, aimed at obstructing the extraction and instrumentalisation of Indigenous knowledge. This perspective aligns with repositioning animality within decolonial thought. Dylan Robison, Hungry Listening: Resonant Theory for Indigenous Sound Studies, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota press, 2020), 24.

12. Akómoláfé, “on Ontological Mutiny”

13. ibid

14. ibid

Author/s: Tina Stefanou

Credits: Automatopoeia, single-channel 3D animation, moving fieldnotes, two channel sound and iPhone field recordings from Dookie Robotic Dairy Farm, 17:22 mins.

Concept and direction: Tina Stefanou. Video animation and design: Henry Lai-Pyne

Cups, 2023

Two and a half hour participatory performance for the Collective Polyphony Festival at Stockroom Gallery, Kyneton. Part of In-Kind Collectives group show.

Let me make you a cup of Greek coffee and read your creative future. Will you get that next grant? Will you finally do that painting? Are you going to take on more study? Will you finally get secure employment? Will you be invited into a big show? Together we will delve into peasant reading practices in the form of Greek coffee divination. Using metabolic processes of consumption and co-constitutional forces, I will sit with people one on one to navigate otherwise the abstractions of neoliberal art-making-it.

The vessels themselves have been made by the wonderful @corinna_berndt and over two hours I invite the public to drink, sit and read caffeinated imagery with me. In a hope to make legible the illegiblity of art futures. The action is set amongst comrades In-Kind Collective as part of @collective_polyphony_festival at @stockroomkyneton on the 2nd of Sept 6pm.

Photos by Astrid Mulder

Curator Sarah Rudledge

Rural Utopias Residency: Tina Stefanou in Carnamah #6 →

AUDIO TRANSCRIPT

Mixed field notes from Amangu country, read from Crete, February 17 to March 30, 2023. 

Back in Carnamah. Tired body. Grief gut. Neat streets after a searing hot day. Sweat builds, even under air-con bed. No performance here, just secretions. 
 
Walking when the golden hours sings:
ping…dab…ba…summer seed, green shimmer purple…  
a granular quiet, so much industry standing still.  

The grain of this land intoxicating and laced with old hungry gods.  
Out here in the face of mono crops, city CV inflation, agribusiness writing, and, reading begin to collapse[1]

*Silent silos 

The relentless heat of a Western Australian summer insistently disrupts the writing of these field notes, provoking a question that smoulders at the back of my throat. My time here necessitates a peculiar merger, weaving my work with the cultural artefacts of the Art Gallery of Western Australia an imperative for the future exhibition.  
 
But what can the treasure trove bring to the table? And how can the socialities of this place, transform the Art Gallery of Western Australia's State collection?  

Inspired by Denise Ferreira da Silva's poet(h)ics, I propose a move away from typical constraints. Her approach urges us to liberate these encounters from the shackles of representation, and the legal and economic structures that rigidly maintain them. It contests the established practice of the Artist as a voice giver to: objects, locations, people, systems and beings, within a collection generating foreseeable or incidental, pastural or social connections.[2]

*A heavy ball drops on artificial lawn at Carnamah long balls club.

The agri aspect of agripoet(h)ics operates on dual levels. Firstly, it recognises the agricultural dimensions that shape our lives, codes, practices, and historicity, as well as the structural formations associated with value, statehood, globalisation and production. Secondly, it seeks to aggregate adjacently and agitate surreally those tendencies that govern selfhood across various realms of existence.

Commodities, like grain under this light, are not merely secondary products of social structures or methods of production, destined to be consumed or replaced by capital, instead, agripoet(h)ics reveals the inherent significance of relations in process, in motion, and “if tuned carefully, can become robust enough to grow and proliferate, proliferate through and beyond the institution.”[3]

Just as Roland Barthes famous, The Grain of the Voice[4], moves beyond discursive language — grain, identity, and wool represent aspects that exceed market relations, opening the space for the “reevaluation of value.”[5]

Rural Utopias Residency: Tina Stefanou in Carnamah #5

March 1st, 2023:

"I'm not suicidal, I'm homicidal," declares a man wearing a cochlear implant as he plonks himself opposite me. We are both savouring our medium-rare steaks on a Wednesday night at Carnamah Pub. Even the axolotls in the corner seem slightly unsettled by his remark. I relax into my body, trying not to invoke thoughts of the Australian Gothic. Shane, who openly identifies as a 'shit kicker', spends long days on farms digging holes for soil testing. Initially, he had difficulty understanding me, but as the meal progressed, he no longer needed me to repeat myself. His blue eyes and weathered skin are marked with countless stories. An ex-army veteran, now dealing with PTSD, he prefers working alone, enabling him to vent his violent moods without causing harm to others. In many ways, he reminds me of my cousin Nick, a closet philosopher dressed in Hi-Viz.

Peasant Surrealism in Poor Acoustics: Classed Vocalities →

Undisciplined Socialities and other offcuts

Bulletin Issue 71 (December 2022)

Bulletin Issue 71 is now available for download!

This issue was brought together by guest editor Tina Stefanou and features Kristina Susnjara, Juundaal Strang-Yettica, Selena de Carvalho, Kat Gaynor, Meera Rai and Lisa Salvo.

Contributors were invited to express what they want, without the constraint of any specific discourse or theme. The contents are undisciplined snapshots of people’s inner worlds and processes. As Tina notes, "Not a bouquet dominated by blossoms of rhetoric or a single demographic, but an offering of moments, from childhood musings to religious satire." 

Issue 71 also plays with the structure of a publication—the editorial and colophon are tucked away in the middle, page numbers are removed and the front cover graces the front and the back. Dip in anywhere you like!

Link here: www.womensartregister.org/s/Bulletin_Issue-71_December-22_FA_Digital.pdf