‘Every day I unbury—I dig up. I find relics of myself in the sand that women made thousands of years ago’ exclaims Louis in ‘The Waves’ (1931) by Virginia Woolf.
This narrative is newly repositioned throughout the video work as a voice, a dislocation from the subject as human and an expression of the condition and living nature of basaltic rock formed as part of volcanic movement thousands of years ago.
This work is part of ongoing research by Georgia Nowak & Eugene Perepletchikov into historical geological narratives stored in material and landscape. Fundamental to Victoria’s land and identity the genealogy of basalt reveals a slow evolution – material becomes process within a mesh of geological and social systems.
The rhythms and ruptures of rock are animated by networks of energy flows, constantly living. Like memory, material is coded through the movement of time, modulated and reconfigured, a restless sedimentation and flux that pulses through land and bodies, all entangled, never still.
Nowak and Perepletchikov maintain an ongoing creative-led research practice investigating the material histories and their contested narratives.
Narrative text: Excerpts from The Waves by Virginia Woolf, 1931
Archival footage: ACMI collections / Private collections
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See the exhibition room sheet here.
STRAY VOLTAGE presents a discursive program of critically engaged moving image works focusing on experimental narrative-driven practices, led by Katie Paine and Aaron Rees.