For Hi-Viz Practice Exchange 2019, sound artist Madeleine Flynn discusses three collaborative audio-led works—Five Short Blasts, Pivot, and Imagined Touch—exploring participatory practice, listening, and accessibility across contested public sites.

Transcript

Hi everyone, I'm going to start, and I'm going to read because I'm a nervous speaker and it helps me. Because actually it was really, I was really grateful to be invited to speak here today and I've got some things that I really want to make sure that I communicate. So, in order for me to do that I'm going to have to read. I am also going to show video. So there's going to be sound and movement—but no sound from the videos—just to give that sense of what I'm talking about as we go along.

So, I'm Madeleine Flynn and our gathering today is being held on the lands of the Kulin Nation and I wish to acknowledge them as the traditional owners. I would also like to pay my respects to their elders past and present and Aboriginal elders of other communities who may be here today and acknowledge their connections to land, life and lore.

So, my audio-led practice is collaborative with Tim Humphrey. Today I've been invited to talk about our concerns, methods and practice in cross-disciplinary concerns. I'll do this by talking about three of our works that respond in varied ways to these considerations of participative, socially engaged practice and the everyday. The three works address three human gathering sites, the river, the seat of power, and the theatre. The three works at these sites I'll consider today are Five Short Blasts on the river, Pivot at the seat of power and Imagined Touch which was a work beautifully directed and conceived, created by Jody Mundy, created with DeafBlind artists Michelle Stevens and Heather Lawson.

So, the Five Short Blasts on the river.

The Concern.

Australia as it's presently constituted is a settler colonial state founded on the now discredited legal fiction of terra nullius. The sovereignty of the prior and continuing owners was never ceded and an adequate response that can account for dispossession, reparate for colonial wars and indeed learn from 50,000 plus years of sustainable civilisation in order to survive the climate emergency is yet to be brokered between the First Nations peoples and the more recent arrivals who arrived by boat.

Five Short Blasts first arose through an invitation and commission in 2012. We were asked to make a participatory work that addresses the city of Melbourne's relationship to its waterways, specifically the Melbourne Dockland area and the lower river Birrarung Marr or its settler name Yarra. Because of the above and the recent history of riverscape alteration, industry and recreation and the most recent incarceration of refugees who attempt to arrive in Australia by boat, this is a highly charged and contested site.

The phrase 'five short blasts' in maritime language means, 'I'm unsure of your intentions and fear we may collide'. Anyone who works on the water will laugh and tell you it means, 'What the fuck are you doing?' We've now made Five Short Blastsin five different places, first in Melbourne, then in Prague,...