Silo No. 5 – Intervening in the Anthropo(s)cene | Object Event

Silo No. 5 is a collective of artist-researchers who have committed to continuing to work together, having been introduced to each other through the PSi Performance+Design Working Group. In our first project on Maria Island our project was to reveal the natural resonance and embodied history of the island by connecting the prehistoric past of the fossil cliffs, the erasure of indigenous history, and acknowledgement of the penal and industrial pasts loaded into the cement silos by the island’s jetty. This was accomplished by using the resonance of the silos to progressively amplify human vocalization, an then subtracting the human element to leave just the sounds of the silo itself.

In response this new geological era of our making the Performance+Design working group held a 5-day international symposium/workshop hosted by the University of Tasmania’s Creative Exchange Institute: Intervening in the Anthropo(s)cene: Probes_Actions_Encounters

As a global warm-up to PSi#22 Performance Climates Conference, 6-9 July 2016, at the University of Melbourne, this Tasmanian ‘pre-amble’ acknowledged the anthropocenic reality we live in, utilizing this reality to consider its relationship to how landscape is constructed as scenery, in turn manufacturing spatial and cultural identities in relation to how environments are experienced. With a link to scenography as ‘spatial scripting’ we have gathered researching artists, architects, designers, theorists and performers from Australia and further afield to share and develop their thinking through collaborative embodied action in order to propose new ways of inhabiting landscapes that inhabit us via shifting political, social and physical climates.

Silo No.5 is made up of:

  • Malcolm Angelucci
  • Christopher Caines
  • Campbell Drake
  • Ian Garrett
  • Liisa Ikonen
  • Shuana Janssen
  • Sara Lindsay
  • Jo Paterson Kinniburgh