Producing the Self: an epistolary reflection of a PhD research journey
Dr Donna Lyon

To cite this contribution:
Lyon, Donna. ‘Producing the Self: an epistolary reflection of a PhD
research journey’. Currents Journal Issue Two (2021), https://currentsjournal.net/Dear Researcher

Download this article ︎︎︎PDF

Course of study:
Doctor of Philosophy, Faculty of Fine Arts and Music (Film), University of Melbourne

Keywords:
digital archive, auto/biography, reflexivity, producing, epistolary, epistemology, ontology.

Abstract:In this letter to research graduates, author Donna Lyon embarks on a reflexive account of her PhD research journey. She explores the methodological challenges of producing a practice-led digital archive research project, for pedagogical, research and engagement purposes. Alongside this, is a reflective discussion on the personal and professional discoveries that she made along the way. The author shifts from the pragmatism of being an effective industry producer to one who introduces broader reflections of her processes and their implications on the practice, enhancing the action-based nature of the exploration. This precipitated a broader reflective practice, combining the authors personal experiences of publicly claiming her experiences as a survivor of childhood sexual abuse and how it informed her working methods and relationship to the research and films in the archive. As the films in the archive were transformed from old media into new media, so too was the researcher’s personal and professional identity as she began to express and re-claim self.

^{Image ^^^ Every Day Every Night, Director Kathy Mueller 1983 (Swinburne University of Technology).}

Dear Graduate Researcher,

I did it! I am a Dr. The first in my family history! I write to tell you the news but more than that, to share some of my scholarly journey. But why write a letter you ask? Well, I must declare upfront that I do have an attraction to the epistolary form as a mode of self-expression. It was sparked by mother, a submissive type, who I watched as a child write cursive letters to her acquaintances on Sunday evenings. As I grew and we drifted, she would write to me over the years. It was her way of connecting, although I must say that her letters were never deep. They were hard to read and focused on the mundane, yet I sensed her desire to express herself. Her letters frustrated me, but there was something about the form that I was drawn to. Perhaps I longed to be able to communicate with her and for her to write the truth.

Did you know that the narrative form of letter writing became popularised by women during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries? Letters were seen as an acceptable form of communication back then, in which women could express themselves easily, offering little to no challenge to the chronicles of man.¹ Do not worry, my letter to you will be more than an attempt at self-expression. At times I will include academic interludes, and most certainly you will get some potted personal history. I hope to at least achieve some of the characteristics of letter writing that Hallett describes as heartfelt, truthful, idealistic, moody, anxiety-ridden, manipulative, temporal, yet ‘of the moment.’² By choosing this form my dear researcher, I am attempting to reflexively recount an auto/biographic experience of my PhD research journey. Yet, by making the choice to go with this genre, I am acutely aware of the ethical and epistemological implications of my decision:

The notion of auto/biography is linked to that of the ‘autobiographical I’. The auto/biographical I is an inquiring, analytic, sociological – here feminist sociological – agent who is concerned with constructing, rather than ‘discovering’ social reality and sociological knowledge. The use of ‘I’ explicitly recognizes that such knowledge is contextual, situational and specific, and that it will differ systematically according to the social location (as a gendered, raced, classed, sexualised, person) of the particular knowledge-producer.³

What I can only admit to as a slow, somewhat uneasy research process, ‘I’⁴not only produced a multi-platform digital archive project, ‘I’ produced a multi-faceted version of self. I write this letter to you then as an experiential and contextual analysis of how I constructed and became a knowledge-producer of my research enquiry (into that of my practice and existential self). My hope is that as practice-researchers, you might be inspired to consider what is your construction of self and how it has influenced your research. For the non-practice researchers reading this, may this letter serve to advance your knowledge about how one’s practice can influence and support new knowledge.

But of course, as I write this, the anxiety that Hallett warned as evident to this form has begun to reveal itself; ‘(Will I achieve the right tone?’⁵The obsession has begun. What happens when I send it? Will my words be dismissed as self-reflexive drivel? Will it be peer-reviewed? Will you reject me? Will I remain misunderstood? My attempt to connect with you may indeed fall flat. For how you receive my words is outside of my control, yet here I go…

When I entered the world of research, I had little depth and understanding of the actual term ‘research’. You see, I was more of a practitioner type back then and my modus operandi was to find out the information, decide on a course of action and move on. I was pragmatic, logical, and decisive (it was, and remains a rather efficient way to live my life).I struggled to make sense of why one would spend so much time investigating things without a clear result. Worse, was the idea that you could spend so much time researching something that may be disproved or eventuate to nothing. How mortifying!

Allow me to retrace my steps for you… I began working at the University of Melbourne, Victorian College of the Arts (VCA) Film and Television department in 2013 in a professional role. Here, I oversaw the administration and compliance of the student short films produced in the film department. I was known by staff as a ‘fixer’, a problem solver (dare I say, a woman of action?). I took on the responsibility for distribution deals related to the student films attracting the last vestiges of broadcast support. By the end of that year, Apple had stopped making its MacBook pro computers with DVD drives, and Blockbuster announced it was closing its DVD stores. Technology was killing the video store, and the need for VCA Film and Television to embrace online distribution and the digital access of its films, was fast becoming a pressing issue.

Students wanted to screen their films online and share their work easily amongst peers, beyond the traditional pathway of the film festival circuit. I became inspired by a staff member, who casually remarked one day that our department could solve these problems if it set up its very own YouTube channel. I decided to take on the project and swiftly enrolled into my masters, where some of you who are reading this letter will be situated. Within a year I converted to a doctoral degree, recalling the MFA supervisor stating that I was creating a lifetime job for myself at the institution. Little did I know that his words would begin to ring true, as seven years later the project continues to evolve.

Initially I chose to investigate the practicalities and challenges of designing and strategising a YouTube style internet channel for the VCA Film School—aptly titled VCATube. VCA held in its archive room, over 1,750 student films dating back to 1966, acknowledging its early lineage from Swinburne Technical College (now Swinburne University), marking it as Australia’s inaugural film school.⁶ I hope you don’t mind, but I feel I need to give you some further background knowledge to the institutional home of this project for this story to make more sense. In 1992, Swinburne amalgamated into VCA, before merging into the University of Melbourne and settling into the Faculty of Fine Arts and Music, where it currently resides. At the time of the consolidation, the audiovisual holdings were transferred to VCA, along with the ethos of the film school; practice-based filmmaking (learning by doing). Founder, Brian Robinson, had been inspired by the practice-based framework he observed whilst visiting the University of California in the 1960s.⁷ In the 1960s and 1970s, experimental modes of practice were common to arts making and became a popular form of filmmaking by students at the film school.⁸

In 2006, I had completed my postgraduate study in producing at VCA, and gained a deeper understanding of the blood, sweat and tears required to make student short films. Coupled with my industry experience, taking on a large-scale multi-platform project did not phase me, yet the academic research felt like an uncomfortable fit. You see, I was a producer and I produced content with an audience in mind. In case you do not know about the role of the film producer, Eve Honthaner, describes the job remit quite well:

A producer is basically the one who initiates, coordinates, supervises and controls all creative, financial, technological and administrative aspects of a motion picture and/or television show throughout all phases from inception to completion.⁹

To achieve a film, my goal has always been to bring together skilled players with their various expertise to realise the writer/director’s vision. So, when I heard of practice-led research, it made sense to me as a framework; the practice of filmmaking driving the research enquiry process. Yet I must confess, I did not understand why I needed to provide an argument for how I did things. Why should I lay claim to how I arrived at knowledge, particularly if it worked? Why over analyse and complicate things?

Over time, I discovered that the process of ‘doing’ was a legitimate form of research, so it was not surprising then that after making some headway in the ‘doing’ of the project, that I happened upon ‘action research’. You might be aware that there are many modes of action research (I will simplify from here as AR), and that it is a term coined by the social scientist Kurt Lewin in the 1950s. AR is used most often in the field of educational research, but can be very effective in participatory and arts based research (if you want to know more, I suggest hunting down Dick 1993; Zuber-Skerrit 1996; Whitehead and McNiff 2006; Greenwood and Levin 2011; Kemmis, McTaggart and Nixon 2014). Simply my friend, if it is okay to call you such, AR is a cyclical process that follows four steps; plan, act, observe, reflect.¹⁰ However, this redaction is defended by researchers such as McTaggart, who see AR as ‘…a series of commitments to observe and problematise through practice of a series of principles for conducting social enquiry.’¹¹ Zuber-Skerritt asserts the objective of AR is ‘to bring about practical improvement, innovation, change or development of social practice, and the practitioners’ better understanding of their practices.’¹²

As I had come to the research from a practitioner’s perspective, I felt responsive to the idea of bringing about organisational change to better processes and practice. When I arrived at VCA, I had discovered a systematic problem—a situation that demanded responsiveness. Simply, no one could easily access the past films made by film students, unless they had a library card and DVD player. DVD was dying and the threat of format obsolescence ever pressing. Discovering this problem soon led to more than setting up a YouTube channel for the film school. Rather, it became an exploration of the challenges and stages of developing and producing a wide scale digitisation, preservation, and access digital archive research project for teaching, learning, research and engagement.

Allow me to digress to offer up a definition of the archive. The word archive derives from the Greek word ‘arkheion’ meaning a house; a domicile.¹³ Steedman says that inside its domicile ‘The Archive is made from selected and consciously chosen documentation from the past and also from the mad fragmentations that no one intended to preserve and that just ended up there.’¹⁴Don’t you love this idea of mad fragmentations? It provokes in me the need to make some semblance of order. In the VCA Film and Television archive there were 16mm films, magnetic media (Digital Betacam, Betacam SP, HDCAM and Umatic magnetic tapes, a large collection of stills, catalogues and production paperwork associated with the making of the films). I am not sure how much you know about digitisation and the like, but to digitise a film means more than creating a digital version. It means producing multiple digital versions and formats that then need to be further archived in a digital repository with their associated metadata (data about data), to ensure their long-term value and accessibility.

The technical intricacies of an archive project are not dissimilar from the complexities of a film project. For filmmaking is made up of many parts and is inherently collaborative and interdisciplinary. Archives also need to connect with various disciplines, such as records management, library and computer science, through to new media and digital and cultural heritage preservation. As a producer on independent projects, I might wear several hats, and so too in the digital archive project, I found myself becoming a multiple operator. I played the role of pseudo archivist, record keeper and information management expert. Yet metadata muddled me, and the granular thinking required in these disciplines turned my stomach. I know, I know! I hear you thinking… the process of organisational change is slow and difficult! You are right. Research proves that it is conditional upon achieving several factors, which Zuber-Skerrit defines as:

… based on team collaboration, coordination, commitment and competence; and it needs to foster critical, double-loop learning in order to effect real change and emancipation, not only for the participants themselves, but also for the organization as a whole.¹⁵

I’ll be honest, I found it difficult to achieve any of these things within VCA Film and Television and the wider university. Lack of resourcing, time and conflicting schedules impeded on my ideal of setting up a collaborative and participatory based digital archive project.

Outside of the practical project, I felt overwhelmed and confused by the theory surrounding the practice. I was a big picture thinker (admittedly prone to internal flights of fancy). I struggled to give expression to complex thoughts and ideas. You might describe this my friend, as a form of imposter syndrome, but really, I was battling daily with negative self-talk and low self-esteem.

As I moved through the many action steps required to research and plan the project, new revelations dawned on me. AR, as a process of social enquiry and an attempt to gain a better understanding of one’s practice,¹⁶ meant that I was naturally inquiring into the way I was going about things. I discovered that I had been taking action to keep me from myself! Sure, I liked to plan, observe and share, but I struggled to reflect. The idea of being in my body and head long enough to notice what was going on, seemed foreign, incomprehensible and frankly, rather unpleasant (l will come back to this later, I promise…).

Firstly though, I want to give you a bit more context of this research to show you the breadth of the project and to assure you that the research was situated within a larger discourse of film preservation in Australia and internationally (the challenges I faced were not just about my inner world, they were also about audiovisual preservation). Lack of time, resourcing, equipment, and funding were the key problems cited in ensuring the large numbers of film and analogue material could be sufficiently digitised.¹⁷ There were issues of software and hardware progression, commerciality, cultural heritage, economic sustainability and risk management, among others. Add to this, the enormity of digital data and complex databases, plus the inability of local storage devices to accommodate these things,¹⁸ the digital archive project was formidable.

Don’t worry my friend, I achieved small wins along the way. As I moved pragmatically through the research journey, I discovered that I had been operating professionally as a screen producer with a tacit knowledge of my practice, what Donald Schon would describe as ‘knowing-in-practice.’¹⁹ My implicit understanding of my practice was in many ways a form of research, not yet made explicit. I reflected in action—through the act of asking questions, engaging with stakeholders, meetings, emails, notes. These simple acts informed each moment and became how I constructed knowledge and made meaning.

Let us pause momentarily here my dear researcher, as this is an important point. You see, I was beginning to realise that my ability to construct knowledge was indeed legitimate (you might already know this as a constructivist approach!).²⁰ The process of research forced me to stop and reflect on my practice—how I operated and discovered knowledge for its translation.

As I began to tie together my methodology, combining action and filmmaking research, I saw that my process fitted in with Denzin’s method of interpretive interactionism. ‘The biographical, interpretive method rests on the collection, analysis, and performance of stories, accounts, and narratives that speak to turning-point moments in people's lives.’²¹ My inward reflexive process started to become unapologetically subjective as you are about to read.

As I began to articulate my research journey and explain meaning, my epistemic discoveries opened into a broader ontological discovery. I began to see that from an early age, I had been (re)constructing a sense of self, motivated by a desperate need to (re)build a fragmented identity borne out of being a survivor of extreme sexual and mental abuse. In the early years of my research, the process of ‘doing’ was so natural and easy to me. I produced task lists, milestones, project plans and funding applications. I took the project beyond a theoretical investigation and practically produced it. I led the digitisation, preservation and curation of over 1,750 student films, ensuring their accessibility on a university supported digital platform.

Yet, it wasn’t until years into the research, after the doing of the project, that I began to observe that I had not valued the practice of screen producing enough to consider it as a legitimate and justifiable mode of research. So, I drew on many forms of action research, all of which helped drive my line of inquiry, but the truth was, I kept falling back into my skills of producing, and the processes by which I would make and conceive screen work. I simply could not have done this project without my background and practice as a producer.

And this is what I hope you take away from my letter. It was in the writing of my dissertation and reflecting on the actions that I took, that I began to develop a greater awareness of my ontological and epistemological stance to understand how I arrived at this project and how I created new knowledge. I did this intuitively and creatively, as I began to insert pieces of myself (documents of my personal history) into the larger story of digitising and preserving an historic and culturally significant audiovisual film school archive.

My first foray into inserting myself into the project came in 2015, after I published a short piece about the digital archive project in the University of Melbourne’s Cultural Collections Magazine. With the aid of the Film School, we had formalised the VCA Film and Television archive as a University Cultural Collection in 2014, due to its cultural, research, historical and aesthetic significance. In case you are not aware, the Cultural Collections Unit contains over thirty diverse collections from academic disciplines such as botany, dentistry, medicine, law, zoology and more and are made up of specimens, maps, medical and dental implants, paintings and rare books… but no moving image archives. Our collection proved to be unique and worth alerting the wider university about.

I then received a phone call from the editor at the online news publication, The Conversation. The news had broken that VHS players were no longer going to be manufactured. They asked me to write a response. I jumped at the opportunity and began to think about my history with VHS and realised that I had had a significant relationship with the format in my late teens. I had produced and directed my first film on VHS tape! Can you guess what I wrote as a response? A letter of course! I wrote a love letter to VHS:

I stayed late after school editing you all together. You captured my vision; you finished my vision – you were my master… tape. You were solid, real and fun to carry and put in the machine. I understood you. I made other movies with you too before I graduated and moved on to more mature models, like Super VHS and Betacam. But I never forgot you. You were my first.²²

I went home and dusted off my old VHS tapes and had them digitised. I laughed as I watched my early work, remembering the passion and zeal in which I had rallied my friends from my local church and school over a weekend to make my first poorly written horror short film, Reigning Terror. I was 16 and knew nothing about filmmaking, yet there I was again, constructing knowledge and developing my practice as I learnt through the process of doing and making mistakes. Those moments of watching and observing past actions allowed me to reflect on the process of my making:

I sat watching my work from 16 to 19 years old – a true blast from the past. It had been years since I had seen you. The images spoke of an unconscious grappling with the trauma I was now working on in therapy. I was using you as an early recovery tool; a healing tool.²³

Soon after, I wrote a narrative reflection about the project for the Australian Society of Archivists newsletter. This time, I turned to third person prose to express elements of my research journey:

One afternoon, two archivists stopped by. She showed them the archive room and watched with curiosity as their eyes lit up and tongues began to salivate. With their noses in the air, they said, matter of fact: ‘this room smells like vinegar’. The woman had encountered her first problem. Later, she mused that the archivists were a strange breed, but they had her thinking. She began to reflect ever so slightly on audiovisual heritage and cultural memory. Nostalgia had crept in.²⁴

I am telling you all this because as I began to insert myself into the narration of the digital archive project, each time I started to share a little more of myself. At a public event held at ACMI in 2017, titled Film and Data EXPOSED, the project team presented the first iteration of the digital archive portal to a research and industry audience. Here, I unashamedly admitted that I hated growing up. It pained me, even as a child, to know that one day when I was older, I would finally accept myself. I loathed having to endure the endless years of gritting through my early life, only to be bestowed some sort of relief that people over 35 assured me would come. With this impatience driving me, you can see that I was hardly nostalgic. I was unashamedly modern and fickle. I migrated from one thing—one medium to the next—making, mastering, moving on. Yet, psychologists purport that nostalgia contributes to positive social and personal development.²⁵ So as the digital archive evolved, so too did my understanding of nostalgia. Of course, I had moved beyond remembering the first name of the first street I lived on and pairing it with my first pet’s name to work out my porn star identity (Tiger Uralla, in case you were wondering…). Instead, I began to see nostalgia more like what Gabriel describes as ‘a source of meaning in life’²⁶ and as developing a sense of continuity between one’s past and present self.²⁷ As I learned to recognise and give honour to my past self, it enabled me to connect to my present and future self—establishing the ontological awareness and epistemological framework in which to contain my research. I hope you are beginning to understand as I cannot help but wonder where you are at with this in your own research journey.

I can now see that I was in a process of coming out publicly as a survivor of childhood sexual abuse. I was writing my past into the present. Through the digitisation of the short films in the archive, I realised the memories from my childhood, fractured and full of terror, were also coming into light. My process of understanding self was not so dissimilar to the students whose films I was archiving. These early filmmakers were also revealing stories held within themselves and beginning to enter a world of political, cultural, religious or social discourse. Their work and identities, like mine, were unpolished, unformed, uncontextualised, unrefined. Yet within all our rawness, lay a sense of authenticity. The lack of polish refreshing in a world where everything is so well crafted to manipulate audiences in how they should think or feel. I think that students who make films are still finding, defining and creating their voice and unbeknownst to them, are often capturing the zeitgeist of the times.

Over time, my relationship and understanding of student film archives evolved. I realised our archive was much more than a showcase of the famous works of filmmakers who had gone on to contribute to the national and international filmmaking scene. Instead, it lay claim to a rich audiovisual social and cultural history of films by students who were exploring their identity and raising questions and concerns about their place in society. More than the filmmaker's curiosity, the films in our archive were a time capsule of its people, places and things rooted in the past. Locations had changed, suburbs had become gentrified. The cultural milieu of Melbourne transformed over decades, becoming more diverse and fascinating over time.

But alas, I am going on my friend, and I must begin to close this letter. Thank you for hanging in there. What has come of all this, you might be wondering? You will be pleased to know that the practical component of my research has culminated in the creation of a bespoke digital platform, which features over 2,000 student short films, dating back to 1966. Each film comes with rich filmographic metadata and is searchable through film-based keywords and nomenclature. The digital archive is a retrospective digital archive and a pipeline for all the current and future born-digital film works. This enables students, for the first time in the VCA Film and TV’s history to digitally store, archive, present and curate all the films they make whilst at film school. Films can be curated into collections for personal or public screening use. Students enter their own metadata, which means the collection is continually enlivened and activated through the submission of information to contextualise their work. This adds to the richness of the collection and builds on its cultural and historical significance. The short films are no longer static, they are truly digital moving images, which can be put into new contexts and transformed. The archive is more than a heritage site. It brings together past, present and future.

There are so many things I could have talked to you about my dear researcher. In this letter to you, I have attempted to convey some of the dynamic and evolving space of the archive. As we are in networked age characterised by flux and connection, I must admit that I am worried about the future of the collection. To ensure the collection grows and thrives, VCA must continue to migrate, back up and digitally housekeep. If this doesn’t happen, then the files and interface will become redundant, just like what was happening to the magnetic tapes and film reels. My concerns as to how you will interpret this letter have at least evolved to something larger than myself. For now, the digital archive project remains a complete research project, but one that is very much ongoing. It is a site of transformation, whereby a large, short film collection was transformed from old technology into new. It is a platform where knowledge is housed and translated by, with and for film students and the research community. My research offers insight into how these transformations took place. Now that the collection is digitally available, my hope is that its users can evolve its usage in ways that I cannot predict.

As for me? Well, in (re)creating and producing the digital archive, ‘I’²⁸ (re)created and produced myself—moving from an identity rooted in shame and the toxic effects of childhood sexual abuse, to one of post-traumatic growth. This letter to you is another part of the archive’s holdings. In many ways, the digital archive is a collection of ‘mad fragments’²⁹ of my life. It has traced aspects of my childhood, my early filmmaking career and educational pursuits. Through the process of action, reflection and subjective interpretation, it has opened my understanding of, and situated various, epistemological methods and beliefs. This has had implications for developing a deeper understanding of my ontological self. Through my journey, I have become aware of how I came to (re)assemble a sense of self, constructing fragments of my identity, through my practice and in co-creating myself in relationship with others. This has led to the legitimisation and authentication of my scholarly identity. I can assure you it has also positively impacted my professional, artistic and personal pursuits, which I hope will be the same for you. Articulating and explicating my knowledge journey has been transformative, profound, and emancipatory, just like all good action research projects should be. Kemmis says the tell-tale signs of whether something or someone has been emancipated yet, is answering the question ‘are things better than they were?’, not, ‘Are we emancipated yet?’.³⁰

I tell you my friend, yes! VCA Film and Television has changed because of this project. Institutional and student film practice has changed. I have changed. My practice has changed, my understanding of my practice has changed. Derrida and Prenowitz ask; ‘As much as and more than a thing of the past, before such a thing, the archive should call into question the coming of the future.’³¹ So, I am curious then, who you will be as you continue in your research journey. Who were you? Who are you now? Where will you go? Who will you become?

Yours Sincerely,
Dr. Donna Lyon

ps. Don’t forget to do your RIOT training asap.

pps. Learn how to reference properly from the start.

ppps. Do try and locate your ontological position and epistemological beliefs as a first action step.

pppps. And remember to check out the digital archive. https://finearts-music.unimelb.edu.au/digital-archive

Notes:

1. Katherine Carroll, ‘Representing Ethnographic Data Through the Epistolary Form,’ Qualitative Inquiry, 21, no. 8 (2015), https://doi.org/10.1177/1077800414566691,https://dx.doi.org/10.1177/1077800414566691, 686.

2. Nicky Hallett in SAGE Biographical Research. 4 vols. ed. John Goodwin (London; SAGE Publications, 2012, https://doi.org/10.4135/9781446268537,https://methods.sagepub.com/book/sage-biographical-research, 3.

3. Liz Stanley in SAGE Biographical Research. 4 vols. ed. John Goodwin (London; SAGE Publications, 2012, https://doi.org/10.4135/9781446268537,https://methods.sagepub.com/book/sage-biographical-research, 10.

4. In this early phase of the research, ‘I’ refers to me as a white, able-bodied, middle class cis-gender bisexual feminist. ‘I’ as film producer and practitioner. ‘I’ as adult child estranged from her parents.

5. Hallett, ‘SAGE Biographical Research,’ 2.

6. To give you some further context here, VCA Film and Television has launched the careers of numerous acclaimed filmmakers, including Robert Luketic (Legally Blonde), David Michod (Animal Kingdom), Michael Henry (Blame),Justin Kurzel (Snowtown, MacBeth), Jonathan Auf der Heide (Van Diemen's Land),Richard Gray (Summer Coda), Gillian Armstrong (Love, Lust and Lies) and Oscar Winner, Adam Elliot (Harvey Krumpet, Mary and Max) and more recently, Ariel Kleiman (Partisan), Kitty Green (Ukraine is Not a Brothel, Casting Jon Benet), Alethea Jones (Fun, Mom, Dinner), Polly Staniford (Berlin Syndrome, Lion).

7. Barbara Paterson, Renegades: Australia's First Film School from Swinburne to VCA (Victoria, Australia: The Helicon Press, 1996), 47.

8. Paterson, Renegades: Australia's First Film School from Swinburne to VCA, 49.

9. Eve Light Honthaner, The Complete Film Production Handbook, 4th ed. (USA: Elsevier Inc., 2010), 2.

10. Bob Dick, ‘You want to do an action research thesis? — How to conduct and report action research. (Including a beginner’s guide to the literature),’ action research theses (Resource), 1993, http://www.aral.com.au/resources/arthesis.html#a_art_whatisar.

11. Robyn McTaggart, in New Directions in Action Research, ed. Ortrun Zuber-Skerritt (London; Washington, D.C.: Falmer Press, 1996), 248.

12. Ortrun Zuber-Skerritt, New Directions in Action Research, 1st ed. (London; Washington, D.C.: Falmer Press, 1996), 83.

13. Jacques Derrida and Eric Prenowitz, Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression, (Baltimore, Maryland:The Johns Hopkins University Press 25, no. 2 1995), http://www.jstor.org/stable/465144, 9.

14. Carolyn Steedman, Dust(Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2001), 68.

15. Zuber-Skerritt, New Directions in Action Research, 95.

16. Stephen Kemmis, Robin McTaggart, and Rhonda Nixon, The Action Research Planner, (Singapore; Heidelberg; New York; Dordrecht; London.: Springer Publishing, 2014), https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-4560-67-2.

17. Jon Wengstrom, ‘Access to film heritage in the digital era – Challenges and opportunities,’ HÖGSKOLAN I BORÅS, NORDISK KULTURPOLITISK TIDSKRIFT 16, no. 1 (2013), www.idunn.no.

18. Ray Edmondson, Audiovisual Archiving, 3 ed. (Paris: The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation, 2016). https://unesdoc.unesco.org/ark:/48223/pf0000243973_tha.

19. Donald A. Schon, The Reflective Practitioner: How Professionals Think in Action (England: Ashgate Publishing Limited, 1991, 1983).

20. Liane V. Davis, ‘Feminism and Constructivism,’ Journal of Teaching in Social Work 8, no. 1-2 (2008), https://doi.org/https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1300/J067v08n01_08.

21. Denzin, Norman K. "Securing Biographical Experience." In Interpretive Interactionism, 2nd ed., ,57-69. , Applied Social Research Methods. Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE Publications, Inc., 2001. http://dx.doi.org/10.4135/9781412984591.

22. Donna Lyon, ‘Magnetic memoir: a love letter to VHS from the archives,’ The Conversation, 2016, https://theconversation.com/magnetic-memoir-a-love-letter-to-vhs-from-the-archives-63759.

23. Lyon, ‘Magnetic memoir: a love letter to VHS from the archives.’

24. Donna Lyon, ‘A short story about magnetic memories; caverns of celluloid; and making meaning,’ Australian Society of Archivists (Online Newsletter), 2018, https://www.archivists.org.au/documents/item/1304.

25. Constantine Sedikides and Tim Wildschut, ‘Finding Meaning in Nostalgia,’ Review of General Psychology 22, 48–61. (2018) doi:10.1037/gpr0000109.

26. Gabriel (1993, 137) in Constantine Sedikides and Tim Wildschut, ‘Finding Meaning in Nostalgia,’ Review of General Psychology 22, 48–61. (2018) doi:10.1037/gpr0000109, 50.

27. Sedikides and Wildschut, ‘Finding Meaning in Nostalgia.’

28. In this final phase of the research, ‘I’ now refers to me as a white, middle class cis-gender bisexual feminist. ‘I’ as adult child estranged from her parents. ‘I’ as survivor of childhood sexual abuse, ‘I’ as film producer, ‘cultural agent’ and pracademic, situated on the lands of the Wurundjeri people of the Kulin nation.

29. Carolyn Steedman, Dust (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2001).

30. Kemmis, McTaggart, and Nixon, ‘The Action Research Planner,’ 245.

31. Derrida and Prenowitz, ‘Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression,’ 26.

About the author:

Donna Lyon is a screen educator, PhD practice-led researcher and producer, who has recently produced the independent feature film Disclosure. Her research has been focused on the digitisation, preservation, and dissemination of the historic and culturally significant VCA student film archive. Alongside ‘doing’ the project, she inserted herself into the digitization of the ‘works’, to create a holistic, personal, engaged, and reflexive strategy to expand existing notions of archives and to examine the practice of producing the archive. You can request access to the digital archive HERE.

The link, the limits between: performance and capture in the moving image

Jen Valender in conversation with Gabriella Hirst

To cite this contribution:
Valender, Jen. Interview with Gabriella Hirst. ‘The link, the limits between: performance and capture in the moving image’ . Currents Journal Issue Two (2021), https://currentsjournal.net/The-link-the-limits-between-performance-and-capture-in-the-moving-image

Download this interview ︎︎︎PDF

Jen Valender’s course of study:
Master of Fine Arts, Faculty of Fine Arts and Music, Univeristy of Melbourne

April 9, 2021, a little after 10am. The sun, intense. The blinds, drawn. Noir-esque strips of light fall across the screen as Zoom connects our call.

Gabriella Hirst — (moving about) I’m still kind of resetting myself up here. I’m staying in Sydney for… I don’t know. For an indeterminate amount of time. I’m subletting a room from a friend at the moment, so I’m kind of awkwardly, moving around their place trying to kind of settle in different corners. In between places.

Jen Valender — (from Melbourne) Of in between places… you live between London and Berlin. What brought you back to Australia? Why now?

I moved over to Berlin eight years ago, then moved to London to study, then back to Berlin where my partner lives because of Coronavirus, as it was a safer place to be. Well, it was in March [2020]… then I came back here for a couple of exhibitions: the ACMI Ian Potter, Moving Image Commission and The National. They were planned and then delayed and delayed and delayed. That was one reason, but of course as the year went on, not being able to get back and see family was affecting my whole life over there. So many people obviously feel this at the moment, but it changes everything, to not be able to get home. I was in Berlin for most of 2020.

You were creating the work for ACMI at that time?

I actually got the commission early 2019 and it was going to launch at the beginning of 2020. It got pushed back. I had made the majority of the film, I had the edit, I hadn’t done the sound or the grade by that time, which I was going to finish in the UK. It all became kind of impossible… Until it became possible!

Congratulations. How are you feeling now that it’s open to the public?

It feels good. I still feel I’m letting go of it. It’s been such a protracted process. I started this work, really, in 2018. I had the idea for it and came back to Australia, made a draft, had interviews and everything. But the quality was relatively poor, and it didn’t hold the [concept of the] work. Then, when I had the commission, I was able to do it in a way that suited the content. It really made the work what it is; what it couldn’t have been if it had been my usual way of making [with a zoom recorder and a little camera]. So, it was a really long process. After it opened at ACMI it didn’t feel real because the city went into lockdown the day after it opened. Other programs were cancelled around that. I was incredibly lucky and privileged to be able to open the same work again a month later as part of The National 2021 at AGNSW. I changed a few details also between that time to suit it to that particular space. It felt more complete then.

When I visited Darling Darling at ACMI, it was as if there were two stages and two bodies of performance happening. On one side, you’ve got the Barka Darling River landscape, and the AGNSW painting conservators performing on the other. Can you talk about the experience of those two sites?

I’ve been working on this project for so long… I haven’t had the space yet to be able to talk theoretically about my own performative relationship to that work. I feel when it’s a work, in which it’s only me and my camera, I can do that really fluidly. I’m still trying to form what that is for Darling Darling, because it was such a shift in my way of working. It involves so many people, it was a very resourced work. There are so many moving parts to a work when it gets scaled up, it’s quite difficult to locate myself within the performance. I see the work more as a gaze being implanted, to form how that place is perceived or represented, which I would understand as my own performance. So, I would bring that back to me, rather than how the land is performing. Because the land is understood completely differently depending on who’s looking at it and who’s experiencing it. One of the things that I’m still unpacking and trying to untangle is what it means for a non-Indigenous Australian person to go out on country and to capture [film].[1] The work is about a particular type of capture [in paintings] from the late 1800s, and how that form of capture lingers on. The lens continues that form of capture. I am the capturer and question where I positioned myself within that process. I don’t think there’s a clean answer to that.

It makes me think of when we’re working with others—be that land, people, animals or something else—it’s often wrapped up with ethics.

Absolutely.

^{Image ^^^ Gabriella Hirst, Darling Darling (2021), two
channel moving image installation 24:55, Commissioned by the Ian Potter
Cultural Trust for the Ian Potter/ACMI Moving Image Commission 2020. Stills courtesy of Gabriella Hirst.}

As a non-Indigenous Australian person performing or capturing in different ways on the landscape, what were the ethical considerations you had to wade through before you began this project?

I did a lot of research. I did several site visits, I started working very closely with the amazing artist and activist, Elder Uncle Badger Bates—who advised me on specific areas that I should not film, for cultural reasons, and others that I should focus upon in order to have people witness the destruction taking place there. Uncle Bates explained to me what I was capturing in ways that provide a bit of shaking up to the sense of entitlement that I think is a big part of a Western artmaking ideology—to be able to go anywhere and capture anything. In terms of navigating the ethics of that, I did try to complicate what the boundaries of that tradition of capture are. By the same token, I position myself very much as a visitor and in a role of trying to sit in that uncomfortable space. To think about what that uncomfortable space is. I don’t know if that’s the first and foremost thing that people will get from the work, because there are different layers. Perhaps the primary thing is the care/lack of care absurdity that’s played out. I’m also preoccupied with where I sit within that and what does it mean for me to re-perform acts of capture. In terms of the ethics, I don’t know if one can re-perform something and for it be ethical. I have been doing this in my practice in different ways and I wonder whether it’s the right thing to be doing. I feel by complicating these archival categories of capture, or of power, by re-performing them in ways that maybe show some of the violence embedded within them, particularly in something that might be considered to be very benign—I think that’s worthwhile. That’s something that I can approach and feel comfortable approaching; it’s my place to try and unpack that. Whether that be through romantic landscape painting or, in other projects, looking at things that I find beautiful and serene. I try to dig underneath and ask: why? Rose gardening has been another project that I’m working on. I really dig into things in very concrete ways. In this other project, How to Make a Bomb, there’s an 8000-word essay that I’ve written to accompany the work. On the other hand, I have works that are a lot vaguer, they’re not situated within a particular body of research. They’re more situated within this interest in capture and control.

Recently, I started reading Ariella Aïsha Azoulay and she talks a lot about a kind of entitlement, within the idea of what art is—to go places and to take—and how that follows through in the camera. The impulse of creative-taking is something that I always grew up with—the artistic ‘license’—that you can make whatever you make and capture whatever you want. That’s something which feels at the core of a romanticised idea about making. That’s a really interesting place to straddle. Maybe the actual act of creative expression in its own right, is really ethically flawed if it’s fundamentally based on an entitlement to take—it’s a concrete colonial impulse. There’s a lot to unpack there. On the other hand, how do you then contradict that and continue making?

It’s an interesting, messy and fecund area where you could really get lost and tangled up.

Maybe that’s okay—to get lost.

I feel that problematising is what’s happening behind the screen in art most of the time.

Mmmmmm.

In terms of when you were speaking about performing—when in the past it would be yourself performing in the work. In those instances, do you feel it’s performance that’s being—to use your term—‘captured’ by film? Or is it visual material that is being created for the film? It’s the ultimate question: is it film or performance that is being documented?

I think it’s a blurring of those two. It’s both. I think the slippage between those two is what’s really fascinating. I’ve had this conversation with a couple of painters. A friend, Ellie McGarry, was explaining her process to me, and how she feels as if she’s always in rehearsal. She’s painting, constantly in rehearsal, then, eventually, she does a performance. She doesn’t know where it is, where the link, the limits between the performance and capture are, it’s very hazy. But when it comes to a work like Interlude, that was very much a study to do something else. It kind of crystallised a lot of things, where it was just me with my little camera—it’s still my favourite camera, even though it really doesn’t get much bitrate. But I still go back to it, because it’s immediate. The work [Interlude] is a very short, almost 70s-ish performance, where I go underneath a sheet and become slowly hidden; shrouded, as if becoming this chair/object, and then holding that for as long as possible. The work slips between being an object and a person, between a performance and a still [image]. That’s something that I really was exploring, and I’m still exploring, to some extent, through Darling Darling. But I haven’t been able to unpack that yet. I’ve often come up with works, imagining them as a performance and then documenting them and then finding that there’s actually a very strong relationship with the camera there. It’s not that I look at it and then I decide, ‘Oh, this works better as a video’. I was already making it for video. It’s an interesting question, because I accidentally started working with film.

Some of your works aren’t specifically moving image in their outcome, yet still have some kind of performative element. How to Make a Bomb, for instance, sees the roses performing in situ, growing in the gallery. Did the performative element come from making films? Or was performance something that’s always been there, in the background, in some way?

Until I went back to university to do an MFA, I didn’t consider what I was doing as performance for some reason. The filming came later, definitely the filming was a means to perform. When I did my undergrad, I remember making kinetic sculptures and wanting them to exist within a space and then making a film. I studied painting and photography and was making images through a camera lens: composing. That slowly became more than a means of recording.

I’ve been making performance for years without calling it performance, and not knowing exactly what I was searching for in that—I think it’s something to do with a liveness. Particularly when I started making work that had long protracted research behind it. Trying to hold on to a liveliness and the excitement in making, and also perhaps romanticising the artistic process by thinking that it needed to always be very alive, and not realising exactly what that means. I think I stopped painting because I started to find it deeply boring. The thing that I was missing in that was the performative element, which I know that people who really work on it, find it within it [painting]—they get there. But I was finding it really boring. I started moving to other mediums that felt more live, and perhaps in hindsight, that’s what I was looking for—that kind of space, where you’re performing, when you’re making and less present. You’re not thinking as much when you are making. I find that quite hard to do. I am constantly trying to analyse what I’m making. But I want both. I want to be able to have performance making, not consideration, yet I also want to be considerate in what I’m doing—I want a balance between the two. Because I think total abandonment within a creative process proves unethical. The more I research into these fields of total abandon within a Western cultural expression, these romantic paintings, the more I realised that they’re wrapped up in the perpetuation of violence. I remember going out to Hill End as a painting student, which is a painting colony that still somehow exists in New South Wales. It was a beautiful place, but I remember there being this thing about painters there going off into the bush and it was very romantic. You know, the whole place is beautiful, everyone’s cooking really lovely food and there are lovely artist residencies there—but the focus of the place is very much on post 1788, settler colonialist and gold rush histories, without the focus on the Indigenous Australian relationship to country in that place. There’s something dangerous in a pure ‘falling’ into making without being considerate and without doing research. So, I don’t know. I feel that. I want that. But I also want to be able to think deeply and make at the same time. I’ve been looking for that through moments of performance in a way. I don’t know if that’s one thing. But that’s one answer.

^{Images ^^^ Gabriella Hirst, Interlude (2017), Single channel video, 6:50. Stills courtesy of Gabriella Hirst and

How To Make A Bomb (2018-2021), Supported by The Old Waterworks and
Arts Council England. Photograph: Andrei Vasilenko at CAC
Vilnius.}

Do you feel you’re performing as yourself in the works? Or is there some kind of method or character, or is it something else?

No, it’s me… it depends on which work. In Force Majeure, which was this painting in a storm work that I made in 2015, the research behind that was looking into a bunch of different historical figures, including Iso Rae, a white female painter from Australia, who had gone to Europe in the late 1800s and moved to an artist colony in France. Everyone else had gone home when World War One broke out, except her and her sister in this seaside village where they were painting, which became an army barracks. They stayed on and kept painting sunsets and I found that really interesting, the bizarreness of that. I was researching and thinking about her. Also at that point, I had been given a scholarship to go over and live in Europe, so I was thinking about what it means to send someone, somewhere—to send someone from Australia to Europe to make art.

I was also looking at, Ivan Aivazovsky, a Russian court painter who was famous for painting storms—huge canvases of storms at sea. He would do that from the comfort of the court in St. Petersburg. Again, it’s this idea of how close you can be to something destructive and still make. I was thinking about those people when I was performing in that particular work. I also had a friend of mine come with me to this particular place to film and I had a cinematographer who came with me. We kept waiting. We had very little budget and we’re in a seaside town in northern Germany, on the Island Rugen, where Caspar David Friedrich would go to paint. We were there for over a week, and then another week trying to find a storm. Eventually, they had to go back to their lives. So, they left. To film, I had a camera that I had strapped to a tree. No one else was there. That’s when it happened. That’s the take. First of all, that was when the weather happened to come. But I think there’s also something about not having people’s gaze on you and the intimacy of the camera’s gaze and being able to forget about the camera’s gaze when you’re in a situation—where it’s you and the camera, you can get to a point perhaps where you can forget that the camera is there, and you can be performing. That’s what happened in that work. That’s why I stuck with that take.

When I see that work, it doesn’t feel like something that you were waiting for. It feels spontaneous.

It’s that moment. Almost when you can forget that it’s a performance.

And you’re living it…

Definitely.

^{Image ^^^ Gabriella Hirst, Force Majeure (2016), Single channel video 14:50, Commissioned by the Australian Centre
of Contemporary Art, Photograph: Andrew Curtis.}

When you perform in your own work, does that ever come across as a sort of self-consciousness or an indulgence?

It really depends on the work and who you are within the work. I’ve started to develop a belated allergy to works which treat oneself as Human A within a work. That’s something that I feel I’m quite sceptical of now. Even if the work is personal, it ends up lacking in the critique of what it means to use yourself as Person A—as the neutral—as if your body is neutral, which it isn’t. That’s something that I’m working on, in terms of being self-conscious and would be concerned of.

The most recent thing I’ve made, which isn’t even a work, it’s a performative thing that keeps the practice going—which I hadn’t done since the pandemic started, because I didn’t have the energy…. There are these plants that are from my grandparents place that I became fascinated with because they only bloom overnight and then they die. They are night-blooming cereus. I’d heard, when I was a child, that you’d have to wait up to see them. When I was living in the UK, my grandparent’s house was being sold. For some reason, I really fixated on these plants and started writing about them. I went back when I returned to Australia and for the first time, I use 16mm and I filmed the house, and I filmed that plant. I felt using 16 mil was a way that I could really blur filming and performance because there’s a scarcity embedded within it. For me, at least that first time using such light sensitive, expensive materials, there was a precarity that I rarely consider as a maker. I think 16 mil is a way that I could work in terms of performative filmmaking.

That plant itself bloomed when I was back here. I went out with my digital camera and my phone and my phone’s light and was filming it—I felt I had to film it, because it’s this plant that I’ve been waiting to see for so long, and I needed to bear witness to it, and filming it would solidify that. I, whilst I was filming, became aware of the violence of filming it. That it was, perhaps, the violence of trying to record something instead of witnessing… it kind of became this strange performative activity where I was filming it whilst destroying it, or something like that. It’s this footage that I have, and I, I’m really excited by it. I don’t know what it is, but I need to go back to it. I don’t feel any self-consciousness in doing that, because it’s such a personal story. It might not actually connect to anyone, because it’s very personal and abstract. Hopefully, it would. Hopefully, there’s something within the kind of material itself, that will translate to something underneath about the violence of witnessing, that other people might be able to connect to. But I don’t feel any self-consciousness. If I was using my whole body (only my hands are filmed), it would feel different.

Can you talk a bit more about this term ‘Person A’; what does that mean to you in your practice?

Recognising that everyone’s body is politically loaded and if you are recording a body, and showing it, you’re not neutral. To treat yourself as a body as neutral is a problem. There’s a long history of white people, in particular, treating themselves as the subject, whilst anyone who doesn’t conform to that is the ‘other’. That’s what I mean by Person A. That doesn’t mean I wouldn’t use my own body, and I definitely will use my body again, but it’s trying to have an awareness of that. The location of my body—which could also have been my body behind the camera, as well. It’s particularly poignant when it comes to representing your own body, I think. What do you think?

It’s incredibly hard to be the subject and analyser at the same time, but I think it’s also incredibly necessary. I’m curious about how to grapple with that problem myself.

I think it’s something that we grapple with and we try it out. There’s no set answer. Also, I feel I’ll probably make works and not always show them. I have a whole library full of performance films. They are little private performances and maybe they will become an archive of shorts at some point. But they’re more the performances that keep the practice going.

There’s an interesting relationship between filming and conservation. Filming, in a way, conserves a moment in time or a performance.

Absolutely. It’s a witnessing and, therefore, a recording of a witnessing. I use the word witnessing not to mean to live and experience, but to be a witness to something and to testify for its existence. Also, to consider that the camera is a witness and asking what makes the cut? What is burned in?

It could be argued that your practice is driven by concepts or forces that are clashing or rubbing up against each other in some way. Can you talk about that formula and what might be driving it? This method of pairing?

That’s something that has become more apparent in recent years from an interest in finding structural links between things. I do big mind maps, big drawings, where I know there’s some connection. For instance, the atom bomb rose project was about finding that material and knowing that there’s something in that I can’t quite figure out. There’s something violent within that plant that I don’t feel displaying that material as it is explains that. It’s about teasing out the hidden violences between/within things, or the hidden contradictions, when something seemingly benign is not necessarily what it seems. I think that’s something I’m kind of intrigued by at the moment. I have other ideas for projects that operate on a similar principle. Eventually, I’ll probably move in a different direction. Though I do think there’s something about placing two different, perhaps unexpected, materials together that has the opportunity to produce new knowledge in a nuanced way. Like basic montage theory—by placing two images together your mind makes its own narrative of what joins them. It creates a grey space where you can make your own conclusions between them.

Going back to Darling Darling, when an artwork has an environmental theme or an environmental critique or claim it often enters an interesting space of contradiction, in that the work comes with a level of waste or consumption associated with its production. Did that critique or problem come up for you and your work? And if so, how did you reason with it?

It’s very difficult to reason with. I flew to make this work. I flew twice – that’s contradictory and it’s anti-ethical. But I don’t feel that discounts, necessarily what the work is saying, because the work is not purely an environmental cry for conservation or care. It’s more of a scrutiny. It’s a way of scrutinising structures of care, structures of value, structures of hierarchy. It’s interesting, I was speaking with Charles Lawler, who is a technician at AGNSW about the work. He said he sat down and watched the work properly for the first time. The main thing that came out of it for him was how absurd the whole thing is. I really like his take on it, because we all end up being little cogs in this big machine of making and doing our little thing and carrying on with our little project. Much like the conservation side [of that work], we’re all doing our little tasks, doing our jobs—the absurdity of that, considering the destruction of the habitat that we need to survive in, the absurdity of us continuing on with our jobs, and how it can seem as if there’s very little way out. That’s not a cop out. I think it’s very difficult not to. I tried to be upfront with that in the work, in my own coded way. There’s a little SD card in the work which has been gold leafed. That was a way of wrapping myself up within the process and this art history—that I’m not separate from the art history that I’m critiquing. I’m not separate at all from the machine of art making that continues to be complicit in habitat destruction and world destruction and ideologies of damage. In this work, I’m trying to look at the structural issues underneath. Going forward, I will not be flying across the world to make work. But I guess for this work, to follow it through and to make it required some of that contradictory making. It’s a difficult question, though, because I feel conflicted about it.

It’s very human to have that sort of conflicted friction in the work.

I think it was also a surprise to me how resource heavy it is to make a work like that. The travel costs, the batteries for the camera, bringing a cinematographer out into far regional New South Wales, etc... all of these things that ended up being very resource heavy. I’m used to operating quite lightly, but still, you know, between different countries. It was a surprise to realise what it can take to make that sort of work. I was sceptical of that, whilst I was making I had doubts whether I was going about it in the right way. But I think we always have doubts when we’re making something in a way for the first time, and I’m really glad I followed through with it. I had a lot of amazing people to guide me, a wonderful team of collaborators and supporters, and friends who I asked for advice. Because I don’t think the work could actually express its message, if it was me and my camera. It would be a very different work. Maybe that’s okay, maybe I will make a very different work next time. It’s interesting—big, shiny moving image works come with a certain way of working. You can obviously break the mould and make them in your own way, but I feel that sometimes you’ve got to know the mould before you try and break it.

I’ll end on a lighter question. Are there any references in your career or artists that you keep coming back to when you’re making works? And from those influences (dead or alive), who would you invite to your next opening?

I feel they’ve changed a lot in recent years... Who would be yours?

I like the idea of Žižek turning up, perhaps getting drunk and spitting through his lisp at people, creating a bit of a scene in the gallery.

There’s an Italian director, who I really love at the moment, Alice Rohrwacher, who made the film Lazzaro Felice [Happy as Lazzaro]. I’ve been obsessed with that film for a while. It’s a surreal, magical realist, beautiful film. Her work is incredible.

My answer used to be someone like, Ragnar Kjartansson, because I really love his work. But I also don’t feel like I would really want that feedback... I think also, some really amazing artist friends—an artist called Andrea Canapa, who I met when I first went overseas. She lives in Berlin and is from Peru. We call one another and talk. Or Laura Hindmarsh… I think there’s about five artists, friends who I’ve had, who I call up regularly, and we talk through our issues, ideas, we work through what we’re working on, and ask: is this too provocative or not provocative enough? We care about one another’s practices and we’re not competitive. We care about one another. I actually feel, I know, this is a cheesy thing to say, but they’re the only people that I would want there.

It’s a rare, beautiful thing to have a community like that, where you are not competing.

Three of them are from German scenes, then there are people that I studied with. My Master’s course was called ‘Media Studies’, but a lot of it was performance. A lot of people hadn’t performed before and we were really vulnerable. Many of us did really uncertain performances as part of it. But when you do uncertain performances, you’re vulnerable in front of people. I remember doing a performance once in a shower. I wasn’t sure about it and I was really nervous. I did it twice in a shower at a public opening. The first time around, I thought, ‘oh, that really sucked’. Then the second time around, I looked up and three of my really close friends had come and it was this miserable night in the far end of deep South London. It made it. I think it’s those people that make it.

I have a friend who introduced me to making performance and she’s a performance artist with a capital P. A. She introduces herself as a performance artist. She’s from Estonia and studied Estonian performance art. She’s researched heavily into what performance art in that part of the world has meant politically and is the first person that I did a performance with, that would be considered as a performance. I asked, ‘can we do it when there’s not anyone around?’ I felt too vulnerable. So, we filmed it and that was a thrilling experience. I think that was a really pivotal moment—when someone said, ‘you can do this’. Then when I went to study in London, someone was putting on a performance art night within our cohort at a pub nearby. I did a performance of singing and I’d always been really scared to sing in public. But it felt like the right community, I could do that and be vulnerable, but also be okay. Another artist friend was there and she ended up doing a performance where she wore her pyjamas and rolled across the floor. Ever since then she has said, ‘oh, it was terrible’, but it wasn’t. It was a really great thing to put yourself in, we did things that made us really scared. The singing was terrible. I ended up going there and re-performing it later as a film, which has been the thing that’s been shown since then. But the actual performance at the spot was so vulnerable that I didn’t know what to think about it. I almost needed to make a film about it so that I could think about it. It’s those moments where you feel you have the support to actually make yourself vulnerable in that way and make the performance that you’re doing privately all the time in your practice and make it public to really push you.

If you are pushing all the time, if you’re nervous and you’re taking a risk, you might be doing something right. Something worth doing.

Exactly.

To ‘capture’, in the context of this work, is to contain a location or an experience pictorially, to extract phenomena visually within a painted frame or the confined visual space of a camera’s lens.

About the interviewee:
Gabriella Hirst (she/her) was born and grew up on Cammeraygal land and is currently living between Berlin and London. She works primarily with moving image, performance, and with the garden as a site of critique and care. Gabriella’s practice and research explores connections between various manifestations of capture and control - spanning plant taxonomies, landscape painting, art conservation and nuclear history. Gabriella recently launched Darling Darling, the 2020 ACMI/Ian Potter Moving Image Commission, which is currently showing at ACMI and AGNSW. Her upcoming projects include An English Garden at Estuary 2021, Essex, and ‘Tip of the Iceberg’ at Focal Point Gallery, UK. Gabriella is currently an associate lecturer in Media Studies with the Royal College of Art, School of Architecture in London.

About the interviewer:
Jen Valender is an Australasian artist and writer from Aotearoa based in Narrm Melbourne whose practice-led research explores the relationship between moving image, sound and psyche. She uses cinematic devices, performance lectures and reflexive writing methods to sculpt undercurrents of relational ethics and poetic problematics that are surfacing in her practice. Jen is a recipient of the Next Wave Precinct Art Prize and the Ian Potter Museum Miegunyah Research Project Award. She holds a BA (Sociology) from Victoria University of Wellington, NZ and a BFA (Hons) from Monash University and the Victorian College of the Arts. Jen is currently an MFA (visual arts) research candidate at the VCA, University of Melbourne.

CURRENTS

Issue Two

Contents

Producing the Self: an epistolary reflection of a PhD research journey
Dr Donna Lyon

Galaw-nilay: Articulating Interiority in Meditative Movement
Rina Angela Corpus

The link, the limits between: performance and capture in the moving image

Jen Valender in conversation with Gabriella Hirst

April 9, 2021, a little after 10am. The sun, intense. The blinds, drawn. Noir-esque strips of light fall across the screen as Zoom connects our call.

A review of ‘Olga Cironis: This Space Between Us’
Kelly Fliedner

CURRENTS

Issue Two

Contents

Producing the Self: an epistolary reflection of a PhD research journey Dr Donna Lyon

Galaw-nilay: Articulating Interiority in Meditative Movement Rina Angela Corpus

The link, the limits between: performance and capture in the moving image Jen Valender in conversation with Gabriella Hirst

April 9, 2021, a little after 10am. The sun, intense. The blinds, drawn. Noir-esque strips of light fall across the screen as Zoom connects our call.

A review of ‘Olga Cironis: This Space Between Us’ Kelly Fliedner

Producing the Self: an epistolary reflection of a PhD research journey
Dr Donna Lyon

Galaw-nilay: Articulating Interiority in Meditative Movement
Rina Angela Corpus

The link, the limits between: performance and capture in the moving image

Jen Valender in conversation with Gabriella Hirst

A review of ‘Olga Cironis: This Space Between Us’
Kelly Fliedner