Preston, Julieanna. moving stuff [performance]. In Auckland Art Festival Rosebank Art Walk, solo performative installation in a group event curated by Marcus Williams, March 2013.
Moving stuff was a site-specific installation as part of the Rosebank Art Walk, an event featured within the 2013 Auckland Art Festival.
The Rosebank Art Walk demonstrates the power of art to build and bind a community. Over the course of a weekend, 22 artists collaborated with the people and businesses of one of Auckland's oldest communities, Avondale's Rosebank Road, to share the stories interconnecting this distinctive place.
Moving stuff operated across and between the Whau River estuary edge and Rosebank Road with an aim to dispel artificial boundaries that segregate the natural world from the artificial world, the estuary from the industrial zone, and the ecological from the manufactured. As mud and water-- the stuff of the biological environment-- were shifted bucketful by bucketful up to the road’s edge, timber pallets- an object symbolizing the economies of an industrial manufacture environment- were transported down to the tidal zone. The repetitive, laborious and absurd task of shifting these materials back and forth across a zone rich in vegetal, geological, human, and climate exchange is meant to prompt alternative relationships between place and people and material stuff. Visitors were welcomed to join the performance in order to heighten a sense of community engagement and increase the rate of exchange. (Many hands make work light.) The hands-on participatory aspect of the performance invoked a collective empathy towards the complexity of the site, its history, its current occupants, its on-going processes and its futures.