rise
Mick Douglas & Denise Batchelor
2020
tidal performance installation, The Performance Arcade, Te Whanganui-a-Tara Wellington waterfront in Aotearoa New Zealand, 26 Feb – 1 March 2020
rise invites the public to perform a 30minute shift of bearing silent witness to the incoming tide, extending from a video installation in a shipping container at the harbour edge. Pacific Ocean navigation charts – a representational way of capturing and sharing knowledge that emerged with the interests of colonisation and extractive trade and industry – are transformed into paper masks that relocate the human with rather than separate from earth systems and more than human species, provoking questions of our human selves amongst more than human life and forces.
rise explores open collective processes of building sensibilities for communing with planetary forces, for decolonising ways of relating, and for inciting exploration of the role that embodied aesthetic experience, ceremony and ritual can play in redirecting cultural attention and human perception beyond current anthropocentrism and toward ecologically enmeshed inhabitation practices.
installation videos and photos above: Denise Batchelor
