^{A sonorous draft; a lexicon of windjamming}

^{BLINDSIDE Gallery

Room 14, Level 7, 37 Swanston Street, Melbourne

June 30 - July 17}

OVERVIEW:

Continuing an investigation into expanded modes of publication, A sonorous draft; a lexicon of windjamming is the first in a three part installation reading room series and eventual publication on labour and genealogy. Part one opens up to non-conventional forms of kinship and sound-perception as a queer strategy for displacing the visual (as akin to the biological) gaze. It employs hybrid narrative strategies to frame a break with the traditional family tree, situating expanded imaginings for togetherness through modes of botanical drift, co-constitution, biotic "rubbings" and through a cross-pollination of intimate contact zones for queer relationality and resistance. Starting from the premise of a lexical body of inheritance in the passing down of a family name in the absence of a bloodline, the sonic imaging of a six week journey at sea in which my grandfather taught himself the English language becomes a seeding event for a deep web of connections across times and geo-political coordinates.

Rather than framed as an essay—an attempt—this work is a draft: it is an ongoing state of becoming; a play on words to suggest that the air that endlessly moves around us also creates the conditions and climates for the trajectories of our entangled lives.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT:

This work has been created on and around the stolen lands, waterways and airways of the Wurundjeri people of the Kulin nation in greater Naarm, so-called Australia.

I would like to pay my deepest respects to Wurundjeri Elders past, present and becoming, and to all people for whom survivance and resistance continues to be their ancestor’s wildest dreams. Sovereignty was never ceded.

This work is for all my vertical and horizontal, human and other-than-human, relations.

For Antoni, Anna, Ettael and Kitaj Kotlarczyk.

CENTRAL TEXT: A sonorous draft; a lexicon of windjamming

AUDIO TEXTS: 01: Audio text: A sonorous draft; a lexicon of windjamming

02: Ambient soundscape that accompanied the exhibition reading room

PUBLIC PROGRAMMING:

A frottage for sound in the night: performance by Abbra Kotlarczyk and Benjamin Woods

Thursday 15 July 6-7pm

NOTE: due to Victorian lockdowns, this even was performed in the gallery without an audience.

^ Images by Christo Crocker, 2021.

^ Images by Abbra Kotlarczyk, 2021.