Justine L Walsh
Artwork
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Borrow a Brick for Contact Listening
Joy Zhou, Jess Tanto, Ceri Hann, Justine Walsh
10 Aug 2024 - 12 Oct 2024
FRINGE @ Abbotsford Convent, Wurundjeri Country (VIC)
~ WINNER: Melbourne Fringe Festival Awards, Best in Words and Ideas ~
A site-responsive public art project activates moments of encounters around Abbotsford Convent created by artist Joy Zhou, collaborators Ceri Hann, Jessica Tanto and Justine Walsh, and community.
Borrow A Brick for Contact Listening is built as Joy Zhou and collaborators explore public space with active listening that re-experiences the Convent through momentary encounters, made possible through collective input. The process engages with community collaboration, fostering collective dialogues as a disruptive force that trouble prescribed norms and binaries in public spaces.
We each facilitated a public walking tour, exploring the place through our own practice and in relation to the research and ideas of the project. My walking tour focused on listening-sounding, with our voices and bodies, to the material and histories of the Magdalen Laundries. We explored sympathetic resonance, and the permeation of sound through our bodies and through matter, to deepen our relationships and understanding with the place and each other - and possibly to listen to/tend to/care for the troubled histories of the Laundries (see here and here for more on this).