This recording is from the inaugural Hi-Viz Practice Exchange in 2018 held at The Substation.

Panel Discussion One: Collaboration

Featuring Adena Jacobs, Tamara Saulwick, Gian Slater, and Ria Soemardjo. Facilitated by Genevieve Lacey.

Transcript

Tamara: I'm just going to hand over now to Genevieve Lacey, who will be facilitating this first discussion.

Genevieve: Thank you, Tam. And how lovely to be here in this room with these amazing people. Perhaps, if I may, on behalf of us, it feels really important to say thank you to Chamber Made for dreaming this up and making it happen. It's such an incredible piece of leadership. It's visionary, it's generous, it's pragmatic, it's strategic. It's exactly what we need. And all of us as makers and doers know how many hundreds of lists have gone into this, how many grant applications, how many meetings, and already we've seen how much care and thought has been poured into this day. So thank you.

While we're on the thanks, I was thinking a lot in these last days about the women who have shaped our lives, the women who taught us, the women who brought us up, the women generations before who fought for the right for us to vote, who fought for a situation where we could be educated, where we could be independent. And it feels like this is the kind of day and room where it's lovely to acknowledge those role models, those mothers, those mentors, those women who we've never met, but whose artworks have changed the way that we understand ourselves. And again, just to say thank you. Without them, none of us could be here.

And particularly to say thanks and to acknowledge the women of the Kulin Nation who have been gathering on this land for so many thousands of generations in a timeframe that most of us can't really even imagine. But those women who've been making law, who've been making culture, who've been making community, who've actually invented this whole idea of collaboration that we are striving to follow. So all those women whose footsteps we walk in, those elders past, present, and the elders among us and leaders who are emerging. Thanks.

On that note, our panel today is about collaboration. All these beautiful things that people have been talking about already, the sort of slipping points between art forms and what happens when we get together, a room full of people trying to make a project. We're in beautiful and distinguished company here. These artists are remarkable people. I'm not going to do formal introductions or bios because we can access those other ways. I thought I'd just dive straight in and ask them quite a personal question and from there we'll take our conversation. So, but first of all, I should at least say this is Adena and Gian and Tam and Ria, all of whom have kindly said they'll join us on stage. So welcome to them and thank you.

So Gian very kindly said she'd take the first question. What I wanted to ask all these women is what are you passionate about at the moment?

Gian:I'm passionate about improvising as a way of...