Durational Situation / Umeälven / 3022
Geoff Robinson

Durational Situation / Umeälven / 3022  is the sequel to a two part site based audio walk that focuses on the deep time and anthropogenic relations of the Umeälven river. Situated in Umeå, the audio walk picks up from where it left off at Bildmuseet and takes the audience on a guided walk through listening to river systems across time.  

Part one of the audio walk, Durational Situation / Umeälven / Birrarung (as a part of Re-Think festivalen 2021), was a comparative walk between the rivers Umeälven in Sweden and Birrarung in Australia. The walk focussed on the geomorphological and colonial impacts of the two river systems on opposite sides of the world.  

Part two moves forward into the future, a speculative projection focussing on the ongoing transformations of the interglacial period, human impacted environmental change, and the potential for the Umeälven to reclaim its ecology and flow.

I acknowledge this audio walk takes place on Sami land and waters. I pay respects to all Sami people past, present and future.

Durational Situation / Umeälven / 3022

Transparent Image

Circle

David Brown & Rosalind Hall 

Prepared guitar and saxophone

Unsound Festival, Canberra, 2014

David Brown & Rosalind Hall - Unsound Festival

Distant football crowd cheering and nearby traffic captured and warped through Iron fence down by the Yarra river

 

Iron fence separating Batman Avenue from the banks of the Yarra river

Ukrainian Borders

Recording of football crowd from inside a stadium elevator 

stadium elevator

L. Lerkenfeldt - Surfaces (Excerpt)

This piece was made for the Herbarium Project, exhibited at Lab 14 gallery, Melbourne University.  The source sound is a saxophone with an acoustic spring reverb attached.  

The time based processes to preserve and treat once living specimens is reflected in the practice undertaken in this piece.  I have made recordings of my performing acoustic instrument and processed them to shift the pitch and speed of the sounds and give a sense of slow degradation and the inevitable decay as tones subside with noise.  The recordings bear no reference to the environment they were taken from and so exist in an in-between space that is remote and hanging in time, a sense I felt when visiting the Herbarium at Melbourne University, a shrine to the proof of life.

Slow Heat - Excerpt

Geoff Robinson is a Melbourne-based artist working on Wurundjeri country. Robinson creates event-based artworks that utilise the temporal qualities of sound and performance and the spatial conditions of physical sites to unravel the durational layers of place. Recent projects include: Tributary Project (2020-2021), with Ying-Lan Dann, Ben Woods & Saskia Schut, Bus Projects, Melbourne; Durational Situation / Vartiovuori (2019-2020), Titanik gallery, Turku; Itinerant Sound (2015-2019), multiple sites across Australia; Itinerant Object / Propositions for Change (2016), Sarah Scout Presents, Melbourne; Room Overlay / 5 weeks / Thursdays 6-7pm / Accumulation (2015), West Space, Melbourne; 15 locations / 15 minutes / 15 days (2014), Federation Square, Melbourne; Site Overlay / Acoustic Survey (2013), across three public sites in Melbourne. Robinson has held residencies and exhibited at Titanik gallery, Turku; Helsinki International Artist Programme; MoKS, Estonia; and Seoul Art Space. He was awarded the Melbourne Prize for Urban Sculpture 2014 and completed the PhD project Durational Situation at MADA, Monash University, Melbourne, 2018.
 
www.geoffrobinsonprojects.com

Durational Situation / Umeälven / 3022

Geoff Robinson

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