North Land is a video installation documenting life within a shopping centre. The film uses five distinct locations across the suburbs of Melbourne: Mooroolbark Terrance, Northcote Plaza, Metro West, Bell Street Mall and Boronia Mall. Using semi-scripted performances and non-actors to stage chance encounters, the film uses character-driven sketches to explore the accidental poetry of built environments and how these spaces function in spite of disrepair.
Scenes play life video portraits, and are carefully framed to evoke stillness, inviting the audience to reflect on the changing nature of public spaces. North Land is a project rooted in lived experience, humour and social observation. Shopping malls across Australia are being transformed, demolished, or sterilised into anonymity. By documenting them now, North Land aims to preserve not only their visual strangeness, but their social value – and reimagines how they might still offer space for community, chance and resistance.
Credits to accompanying artists Moses Carr, David Wells, Stephanie Stankiewicz, Marcena Stankiewicz, Maddie Johnston, Joel Garrett, Xooey O’Keefe, Tempo Dance Company, Covers in the Corner.