What The Water Gave Me (performance-installation)

First Site Gallery, Melbourne (2018) & Colomboscope, Sri Lanka (2019)

What The Water Gave Me plays with seen and unseen scenarios, building, and inhabiting microhabitats between here and there, this and that, now and then. Unfolding in a wetland in Victoria, the movement and sound is inspired by Australian migratory shorebirds, their circulating energies, navigational know-how, strategies for nesting, and resting while on the move. This is a choreography of repetition, pattern and duration. That is an action remembered from the day before. These are ghosts in her body, all too familiar pathways mapped onto air, or the massive wall of sky, or the other bodies that might be watching, listening. This is not about this body or that habitat but about making and unmaking our sense of ‘home’ and ‘belonging’ from a migratory perspective. Here, making ‘home’ or making kin is a continuous building project; repurposed, tacked-on, knotted with the world, suddenly, surprisingly, swiftly gone.

What The Water Gave Me hovers mid-air, ascending and descending, offering more than one point of view, landing for a moment before it departs again, building a cumulative narrative which has no words.

Choreography & Performance: Amaara Raheem

Video: Mick Douglas

Photos: Eloise Coombe

Presented at First Site Gallery, October, 2018 & Colomboscope, 2019