NEWS
Conjuring home in big and small ways
As a daughter of parents who have emigrated twice, and are themselves descended from refugees, I’ve always had a complicated relationship with the idea of home.
So I was intrigued when I read the description of Mapping the Collective, a workshop that video artist Elham Eshraghian-Haakansson and Rebecca Riggs-Bennett – an artist working with sound – are presenting at CAN’s one day conference Making Time.
In their workshop, Elham and Rebecca invite participants to share stories and make artworks or creative expressions about their connection to home. The resulting works are then gathered into what they describe as “a living map… a poetic digital and audio collage made up of vision and sound”.
Perhaps what appeals to me most is the request to attendees: “Please bring a small object that connects to your sense of home.”
Elham Eshraghian-Haakansson and Rebecca Riggs-Bennett invite workshop participants to share stories about their connection to home.
The idea for the workshop came from both artists’ practices and relationships with the concept of home.
“I can relate to your complicated relationship with this concept of home,” Elham tells me. “I am unable to visit my family’s homeland due to religious persecution. Home, here for me, as a second-generation, is even more complicated, but that’s another artistic unravelling that I have yet to fully explore.”
“We both have strong connections to what we define as “home” and that not being immediately here,” adds Rebecca. “I grew up in the UK and I have a very strong relationship to experiencing feelings of longing, distance, the tentativity that comes with a sense of belonging when you're deeply connected to more than one place or one country or one site. I feel as connected to this boodjar, this place, as I am to where I grew up and my family in the UK.
“The workshop is connected to these feelings and what a sense of home means, and ways in which you can conjure home for yourself – in small ways and big – and ways in which individually and collectively you can find connection with one another.”
In addition to the workshop, Elham and Rebecca are currently making a work together called So Once You Were Here They Had You, which will be presented at Bathers Beach in Fremantle as part of the 2023 Fremantle Biennale, 9-12 November.
Described as an “experiential audio-visual poem”, So Once You Were Here They Had You retraces the steps of 50 young cotton-weaver women who journeyed by ship from Lancashire to Walyalup (Fremantle) in 1863.
The seeds of the show were sewn when Rebecca began investigating site-responsive sound work, and the ways in which sound can transport people back in time, in a site-specific work. Like the Mapping the Collective workshop, So Once You Were Here They Had You circles back to the idea of home, she says.
“It’s a particular piece of history gifted from my mum (artist Rachel Riggs, who is also presenting a creative workshop at Making Time) and her work. She's also been a dramaturg on this process, about these 50 young women from Lancashire who were brought here in 1863.
“Through working with Elham, I discovered that this work has been conjured through the fact it helps me feel connected to home, and how warming it is to feel like I have a part of Lancashire here on these shores of Walyalup, at Bathers Bay, which is exactly where these women landed.
“Not that it was an easy or warming time for them. There are themes of loss that we have talked to, in the work. But in terms of our work together, we found a lot of mutual values as artists and as human beings, a lot of care-centered work, gentle and slow-making in practice. It's a really beautiful collaboration and I feel very honoured to work with Elham.”
This is the first work the pair have created together, having met two years ago at an artist-in-residence program at the last Fremantle Biennale, and the artistic rapport between them is palpable.
“I have been wanting to work with Bec for a very long time," says Elham. "Her craft beautifully captures that poetry, the act of wayfinding and the invisible – which is a very difficult thing to achieve.”
At the time of this interview, in late October, the work is nearing completion.
"We’re currently in the final stretch, working with magic-maker Jarrad Russell (VFX artist), to bring some of that ethereal glow to the story,” says Elham.
“I am obsessed with magical realism at the moment. From everything Bec and her mother had shared with me, I immediately imagined this ghostly dream, invisible and glowing with echoes of the past – threads weaving - found and lost – waves crashing, under starlight."
A promotional image for 'So Once You Were Here They Had You' // credit Elham Eshraghian-Haakansson
Elham and Rebecca's Mapping the Collective workshop will be presented at Making Time, a one day conference celebrating creativity and the power it has to transform places, spaces and people. Featuring some of Australia's most innovative arts and community development sector leaders, artist and practitioners, the conference includes panel discussions, creative breakout sessions and networking opportunities.
Making Time takes place Friday 10 November at Midland Junction Arts Centre. The event is fully booked but you can join the waitlist here.
So Once You Were Here They Had You is also fully booked but you can join the waitlist here.
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