Passage
Moving Image, 7:21, 2022
comissioned by fine print for pause ~ play
presented for SALA Festival
Passage is a moving image work that considers passages of time and water. Through this work, the artist reflected on her late father’s life spent across and connected to the ocean. Born on the small Mediterranean island of Malta, he migrated to South Australia by boat, living his adult life as a diver and fisherman.
Passage is a compilation of footage captured in Malta and Backstairs Passage (a narrow strait between Kangaroo Island and mainland South Australia) bought together with archival footage sourced from Magna Żmien – a grassroots archive project advocating for the digitisation and preservation of Maltese home audio-visual collections. The work explores intergenerational memory and cyclical time with the repetition of ocean tides presented as a constant underpinning force.
Watch: Passage
Read:
“you will spend such a long time thumbing for tender places. pull open maps google ancestry charts unravel on your therapist’s couch look at the mirror, stare for a long time at the small angles of your eyebrows thinking of where you came from.
that is what we are doing here. essaying how to place your fingers at the source of the pain how to untendril yourself from what trails behind, what clings to you, what you cling to.”
in water bodies, Melanie Pryor
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