| Recidency center | |
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| Recidency type | |
| Art form | |
| Time of residency | April 2024 |
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| Contact info | kokkinoskennedy@gmail.com |
| Definition of artistic practice? | I am a director, writer, dramaturge, and teaching artist with more than 30 years of artistic experience. Since 2006 I have focused on the creation of immersive, participatory, and site-specific works that focus on the audience’s experience of the world, and which explore existential themes such as the climate crisis, identity, place, mortality, and transcendent experiences. |
| Title of the investigation at the residency | Writing into the Unknown: a series of monologues for a complex site – the Royal Botanic Gardens in Melbourne. |
| Description of investigations and findings | I was able to work daily from 6am – 10 am daily on locating the poetic aspects of the four voices I identified for my project: pre-colonial aspects of the landscape; colonization; the complicated now; and climate fiction speculative futures. Interestingly, given that I was writing for very specific places within the gardens – it was surprisingly easy to bring these to life in my imagination and to write about them from the context of Bornholm Island. |
| What are you most curious about or invested in in your own practice? | In this residency I want to focus on writing four monologues for META the work I am creating for the Royal Botanic Gardens in Melbourne. This work focuses on four specific time zones. I am also writing, thinking, and researching for a 2nd work for the same gardens, Thresholds. This work is designed as a night work and deals specifically with the theme of darkness. I am most interested in how to communicate sensitively and poetically with audiences about topics which are disturbing, frightening. |
| What questions did you bring to investigate and what questions are you leaving with? | How to facilitate the audiences’ understanding of a complex and contested site. How to introduce narratives and ideas that run counter to dominant narratives whilst staying connected with the audience. How to present ‘hot’ or difficult or challenging topics in poetic ways. Is it possible to write about a specific place and its complex historical moments when you are distanced from a specific place? Is there something interesting or enhancing about this distance? |
| Transformative, creative moments at the residency | I was outside the house hanging up my washing when I became aware of what an interesting image was created by two trees that were framing the farm next door. I felt that this would be a good place to conduct a meditation focused on grounding, being in place, and without having to offer a romantic image of rural life. In relation to this. I wrote a text that offered a time-based context: Bornholm's creation 1.6 mio years ago, the arrival of the first people and a group of humans in May 2024. |
| Keywords for the work done at the residency | Antropocene, Climate crisis, Colonialism, Ecologies, Future thinking, Geology, Immersion, More than human, Time scales |
| Research locations | BIRCA grounds |
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| Webside links |
Katerina Kokkinos-Kennedy
