FROM THE OUTBACK TO THE BACKYARD AND BEYOND
“Throughout the years, Australia’s government-regulated film industry has engineered precarity and fused it with affective capital, turning national trauma into its primary growth sector. Beneath its polished rhetoric of recovery lies an exhausted public, resigned to the knowledge that belief itself is now professional duty. Ask anyone in or around the industry and you’ll hear it, though rarely on record – for fear of repercussion, and rightly so: Australian films, especially to Australian audiences, mostly suck.”
“Between the pious and the pissed lies a certain truth: drink is a kind of communion. It whets a whistle that otherwise might never call together an audience. It can lift your spirit, it can drag it down, but the spirit’s level is best in balance – unless, of course, you’re Winston Churchill, who claimed, “I have taken more out of alcohol than alcohol has taken from me.”
“Epure takes inspiration from the strigoi of Romanian folklore, a spectral creature neither living nor dead. Seeking a conscious departure from the contemporary cinematic traditions of his home country – cultivated by the likes of Cristi Puiu and Corneliu Porumboiu – he ‘questions realism and its artificiality through soft ruptures.’”
“This tendency to perform progress while sidestepping its material implications is everywhere. An art university without an art gallery is as senseless as software without hardware. Just like a digital art collection with no evolving archival strategy, both suggest an infrastructure that no longer serves its cultural purpose.“
“Leaning on popular mythology and culturally specific rituals, Contact High’s curation splinters selfhood into a triad of spiritual negotiations. […] Transference becomes more than the repetition of self-perception—it is the continual practice of swerving into the light of a forked trajectory.”
Kenneth Suico, Nostos, Sing It To Me (Balikbayan), performance documentation, Contact High 2023, Gertrude Glasshouse, Naarm (Melbourne). Photo: Machiko Abe. Documentation facilitated by Open Practice Studio. Courtesy of Gertrude and Performance Review.
Sophie Gargan, when did you stop laughing, 2023, performance documentation, Contact High 2023, Gertrude Glasshouse, Naarm (Melbourne). Photo: Machiko Abe. Documentation facilitated by Open Practice Studio. Courtesy of Gertrude and Performance Review.
Diego Ramírez, I am a ‘diaspora’ Latinx. Hola. It means everyone back home thinks I am basic, 2023, performance documentation, Contact High 2023, Gertrude Glasshouse, Naarm (Melbourne). Photo: Machiko Abe. Documentation facilitated by Open Practice Studio. Courtesy of Gertrude and Performance Review.
“[Jaakko] Pallasvuo joins a burgeoning group of these artists turned curators turned critics or blanketed ‘content creators’, spiteful of the institutions that dare to govern them while pathologically averse to the criticism they bestow, taking to networking platforms to soothe their insecurity through memesis and mimesis[...].
“The vagary of the intersection [between art and technology] has developed a lexicon (both verbal and visual) that is being used by institutions to catfish audiences and artists into believing that they are delivering new work and providing genuine support.“