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But all the story of the night told over, And all their minds transfigur’d so together, More witnesseth than fancy’s images, And grows to something of great constancy; But howsoever, strange and admirable.

William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

A Carriage (work) re-imagines the potential links between evocative cultural acts and the architectural environments in which they thrive, considering several aspects engendered by Carriageworks itself as both a physical space and a repository of embodied memory.

Thus we set out to explore the idea of “carriage:”

Movement, a conveyance through space.

A vehicle which carries us across a landscape and through time.

A moving part of a complex machine.

Personal bearing, the manner in which a body is held and moved.

A Carriage (work) is an exploration of the emotional and existential conditions of travel, and the tension between movement and stillness.

The work is a narrative of time between day and night. Carriageworks, the institution, contains the work as well as being its notional subject.

Within the body of space and memory, the work constructs (and enacts) a journey about journeys, about transportation, and about travelling, through both space and time.

…deeply stimulating…a slow movement in relation to performance and, importantly

A CARRIAGE (WORK)

An inexorable journey, past and future to the space that one moves slowly in…generate(s) an intense performance that

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TRAVEL

“One’s destination is never a place, but a new way of seeing things.”3 – Henry Miller

To be moved is to be transported – any journey (whether temporal or physical) is an exploration of the emotional and existential conditions of travel, and the tension between movement and stillness. We thus adopt the idea of “moving images” in many ways, and challenging the conventions of the projected image: moving the projector, the “screen,” the audience. This will invite engagement with the space and the physical act of movement, as well as create an awareness of time and its passage as we (and the audience) traverse the space of Carriageworks.

A fundamental notion central to the work is that of the solitary figure moving through the landscape.

Guy Warren - Works from the Nullarbor

Renowned Australian artist Guy Warren got his inspiration to paint the Nullarbor while on a train ride home from Perth to Sydney a couple of years ago.

“It was the best thing I have ever done. It was marvellous going across the landscape and seeing its beauty through the view of the train window…It’s about people, the landscape and the relationship between people around the landscape…the colours are different. The images are not vertical and they’re not compressed, overlapped and overlayed...”4

inherently holds narrative…the duration of time is a narrative in and of itself and by moving out of normal societal speed (i.e. very slowly)…creates drama mingling in the present moment A white thread subtle manifestation of the ties

“More recently I have enjoyed a term used in reference to Walter Benjamin, “Marxist hermeneutics.” This phrase helps me think about activities which combine the inwardly removed sphere of hermetics and interpretation with the material dialectics of a real environment. The activity takes the form of a theatrical gesture that cleaves the structural space.” - Gordon Matta-Clark1

Architecture and film weave a delicate dance between space and time, wedded to light, though in markedly differing ways. If architecture relies on light to reify the materiality of its essence, film uses light in an altogether more transparent manner, to reveal that which is, essentially, not even there.

However, more than buildings, the currency of architects has always been drawings, impossible projections which are neither reality nor experience, but rather a desire written on an absence.

An image on a screen.

We make plans – they are not drawn, but imagined, in a dynamic choreography between architecture (built and read), light (tactile and operative) and space.

Sergei Eisenstein, though reluctantly schooled as an architect, was nevertheless, a devotee of Piranesi: “At the basis of the composition of an architectural ensemble, at the basis of the harmony of the piling-up of its masses, in the establishment of the melody of future overflowings of its forms and subdivisions of its rhythmic articulations that provide harmony to the minting of its ensembles, lies that same unique ‘dance’ which is at the basis of the creation of work in music, painting, and film montage.”2

This is that dance.

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tension...the spectators’ gaze - their dwelling of time matching ours…all we were doing was walking slowly - and yet this held the spectators’ attention for extra-Our movements each step ties that bind us holding us on a common path

PLACE

Consideration of site is inescapable, and context implicit in any presentation.5 Engagement in locale as generator of process and concept is integral to the approach of The Conductors. Consideration of the work must be informed by the site, the site by the work, with the objective of a sum greater than the parts. The viewer, drawn into the work, becomes both audience and integral in its scale and proportion, the body becomes site. The viewing experience is enriched as site begats memory, time, space and viewpoint.

The fabric of the Carriageworks is many layered: an engineered and architectural fabric, overlayed by a historic patina, traversing its role in the fabrication of carriages, in local and interstate transport, and its more recent role in creativity, performance and the arts.6 The site informing the work is extended beyond the immediate locale, conceptually incorporating the realm of the mind whilst undertaking an exhausting train journey in biographical flashback, whilst the spatial and aesthetic experience of journeying the Nullabor has been interwoven through a projection of Guy Warren’s drawing of the Nullabor. The completed work forms an apposition of a biographical and personal sited within a physical and historic context.

An intimate journey is begun intensely within a corridor reminiscent of a claustrophobic carriage. Audience crams in hopeful of glimpsing the view, engaging with fellow passengers, and partaking in the journey. A strange tableaux consisting of a pair of travellers, their luggage, both filmic and carted, a carriage of lights and projectors with their associated operators, along with the audience, inches through the newly contained space of Carriageworks. A concentrated experience of urbanity and populace dissipates as the carriage migrates to a less contained site. Space unfurls, a distilled image of the Nullabor projected across and beyond the drapery of the travellers, the audience diffuses through the space like molecules in a gas no longer contained. Ultimately, after a passage of some duration, the strange tableaux comes to rest, the journey complete, contained through the foyer’s extent.

FABRIC

A nomad’s possessions consists entirely of what can be carried, anything more is superfluous. Playing with this relationship between the travellers and their belongings, the performers do not require abstract signs or maps for their orientation. They carry their centre within their body, where a vertical line between earth and sky intersects the vertical plane of earth.

The word ‘arab’ defines the inhabitants of the desert; it is related to homelessness and wander in reference to the nomadic ways of the people from the desert. The costumes of the Travellers embody this idea of travel as a state of being, a means of inhabiting the world. In its layers and drapes the dress evokes both the nomads’ traditional clothes and the tunic of the Vestals, custodies of home, earth and family.7

Projected on the dress, itself a projection screen, are all the memories of travels, made of encounters and experiences with places and cultures. They are indistinguishable, blurred and evanescent, yet leave a permanent trace of their passage inscribing the body with the colour of blood.

The two travellers/performers renegotiate the relationship between each other as they walk their journey. They are bounded one to the other. Textures of laces and strings flowing from the waist allude somehow to the legacy of their relationship and attachments.

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ordinarily long periods of time. Then the spectator would wander off and pick up each shift of weight transmitted

somewhere later down the line. The collected six of us solely committed to this through the tenuous thread

IMAGE

Light, and thusly film, “describes” time and space… we, with glass, transform light, therefore time and space, into another dimension8. Time and space are transposed by photons, relocated to a two dimensional frame, concealing the means by which it has been created. This concealment similarly is not confined to the transformative process, but flows through to the (re)projection of the “work”. The formerly three-dimensional artefact, along with the associated infrastructure utilised in its creation, is translated in time and space as a static and passive engagement, albeit through a surface animated with photons.

Conceived to challenge filmic convention, A Carriage(work) exposes the means of creation; projectors, lights, “technicians”, film infrastructure, are exposed, conceived as part of the setting for the work. The work presents as a “film within the filmic” in the custom of Shakespeare’s “play within the play” in A Midsummer Nights Dream, it becomes a part of a greater whole, whilst exposing the fabric of the whole. The film has been expanded beyond the frame, reconstituting it in time and space, in order to “…not so much occupy as infect space, calling upon its memories of other gatherings that once happened, and perhaps premonitions of others that have not yet happened.”

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An intimate performance, the film is located within a setting born of the camera dolly, its carriage. The building’s fabric and bodies are illuminated by the carriage of photons from projector and lights. The film embedded within the temporality of performance and movement, is expanded once again out into space and time. A compressed time-lapse journey, is framed and carried, moved through the spaces of Carriageworks, past overlayed with the present, and conveyed into the future.

TELLING TIME

Standing still in a moving place.

This story is true. Except for the part about the moving building; that’s an invention. But at the time, just after it didn’t actually happen, we had a brief moment of apprehension that it actually might have.10

The tradition of beginning a narrative in media res and using non-linear flashbacks began in ancient times as an oral tradition (eg. the Iliad) and continued through medieval works such as Arabian Nights and Sinbad the Sailor.11 In film, dispensing with a single point of view and a linear story line necessarily introduces the idea of the unreliable narrator, one whose memory is suspect. The film Citizen Kane uses the character of the reporter Thompson to act as a surrogate for the audience, questioning the (purported) facts and attempting (unsuccessfully) to piece together his life. “At the end we realize that the fragments are not governed by a secret unity: the [focus] is a simulacrum, a chaos of appearances.” 12

Life (a story always delivered in fragments) intrudes into the seemingly inviolate and continuous material story of history. In editing the time lapse film of the Carriageworks façade, we inserted a seemingly random collection of biographical vignettes that may have come from a life, or from several lives. There is no apparent order, no chronology; the vignettes are a nonlinear narrative - mimicking the structure and recall of human memory itself. These are the stories; Carriageworks stands in as the repository for memory.

It’s a cold, misty morning in Eveleigh, and we’re moving a camera and tripod, exactly 890mm at a time, re-framing fragmented portraits of Carriageworks 300 meter long northern façade. From sunrise to sunset, the camera takes its steps, recording not just the physical dimensions and material composition of the brick wall, but also the phenomenological changes to that surface, dirty and scarred from 100 years of use and reuse, over the course of the diurnal cycle. What we wanted to capture was the building in deep time, projecting its existence (physical, temporal and historical) via a compressed re-presentation of its reality. 13

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A Carriage (Work) was created by The Conductors:

Michael Lewarne’s skills and interests lie in the site specific construct, through a rich and diverse collection of projects and experiences embracing public art, buildings, design for dance and theatre, jewellery, and design for lights and darkness. With Angelo Korsanos, Michael established Redshift Architecture & Art in 2006 where he undertakes a multiplicity of projects, with a broad array of collaborators, and is currently on a quest to make manifest the illusory.

Lian Loke is a performer, designer and researcher, with the body as the central focus of her interdisciplinary practice. She is co-founder and co-producer of the Pork Collective, a group of artists working in performance installation. She is a Senior Lecturer at the Design Lab, Faculty of Architecture, Design and Planning, University of Sydney.

Linda Luke has a Bachelor of Communications degree from the University of Technology, Sydney, and has been working in dance, performance and teaching since 1997. She has been a dancer for Sydney based Body-Weather dance company DeQuincey Co since 2004 and has presented and performed her own solo pieces for festivals and curated events in Sydney, Melbourne and Los Angeles.

Thomas A Rivard is a designer, educator, filmmaker and artist; he heads Lean Productions, a multi-disciplinary practice making buildings, instruments and fables, and dedicated to bringing together all manner of collaborators in the common (and uncommon) pursuit of the impossible and the improbable. He teaches regularly in Sydney’s Universities, and runs the Urban Islands program. His work re-imagines the links between cultural acts and the urban environments in which they thrive.

Francesca Veronesi’s background is in architecture, her art-led research practice has developed in the field of experience design in the museum context. Her works explore the potential of interactive media to interpret and engage with cultural heritage. In collaboration with museum curators and interaction designers she develops technologically enhanced, responsive environments that create experiences around objects, places and memories.

Paul J. Warren’s knowledge and ability to cross between the different demands of feature films and documentaries has given him a rare and versatile approach to the many ways of finding the appropriate visual dialogue for the story at hand. Paul is also a dancer; namely the Argentinean tango. “... tango is an improvised dance relying on intuition and generosity within the embrace, and demands of its dancers, openness to the intuitive moment to create a ‘dialogue’ within the embrace.”

simple action for two hours, with the dolly and video imagery (referencing yet another time span) also punctuating the space of CarriageWorks.creates a dream-like sense of time the slowing down of our passage through space