Chamber Made’s Hi-Viz Practice Exchange 2019 comprised two days of artist talks, practice interrogation, networking and art dates, and workshops.

In this recording composer and artist Cat Hope gives an overview of her multidisciplinary practice while focusing on the five-year process of creating her opera Speechless, a collaborative work responding to Australia's treatment of refugees.

Transcript

Thanks, Tam. Thanks for inviting me here today. First of all, I want to apologise for the horrible university slides. I didn't have time to take them off because the last time I talked about this project was to a group of university research people. But I'm here as an artist and I have an ongoing struggle between academia and art.

When I started in academia, I really thought there was a lot of hope for artists in the university. Now I don't feel quite so strongly, but see me later about that. I'm from all over the place, but I moved to Melbourne two and a half years ago to start a job running the music department up at Monash University. That's the office work that Casey was talking about. I'm trying desperately to keep my practice alive.

This work I'm going to talk about—the reason I decided to talk about this work today is because I think it's a combination of so many different aspects of my own practice, which I still don't understand, I have to say. I always ask people what they see my practice as because it helps me. I was very lucky to go and do a residency in Italy in a castle, and I realised that I can't operate, I can't create, I can't do things on my own. I'm a real collaborator. I need, even if I'm not talking or making art with people, I just need to be with them to talk through things so that they make sense for me.

This work came about not because of any artistic pursuit really, but out of a frustration. I've always been a very political person. I was very active as an anarchist in my teens, early twenties. I was horrified by what was happening in Australia around refugees and this idea of a democratic government of representation—feeling this complete disconnect between what the government was doing in my name and what I believed.

I was watching what was happening to Gillian Triggs when she presented the Children in Detention report in Parliament and was shouted down. Her discoveries and research that she'd done in detention centres, or her team had done at the Human Rights Commission, showed just how bad things really were for children in those places. I was getting very frustrated and talking to everyone about it, going to demonstrations and so on. Then someone suggested that I make a work about this issue.

I was looking at lawyers and the contributions they were making to this problem, and I was looking at doctors and how they could help, and I was like, I'm an experimental musician—what can I even do? But that's basically how I came around to making this work. I've called it an opera because I started my career as a flute player in an Italian opera company in Sicily. I loved opera, but I never wanted to make operas like the ones I'd played as a...