Plexus International: Triangle Of Art 2004

Conceptualization of dramaturgy for Triangle Of Art under construction. Culture Lab members to participate through electronic link-up in Dakaroff Biennale, Senegal, May 2004.

Emu painting by Geoff Buchan: from emu habitat to erosive sand mining in Maroota Forest

Vision

Plexus International has conceptualized and realised numerous cross cultural experimental community based art-science events in various locations around the world.

One of its leitmotifs or songlines, especially in relation to the dramaturgy of its art co-operas, is a journey of universal mythology using the serpent as its metaphore. As such Eve and the Snake from the Garden of Eden, Quatzaquotle (the Winged Serpent), Il Serpente di Pietra (the Serpent of Stone), Irmgard and the World Tree, Ningki Nangka (Le Python Royal) and the Rainbow Serpent have served as multi-dimensional vehicles for travelling the world.

The Door of No Return at the House of the Slaves in Goree (Senegal) became for Plexus an important portal for repatriation of art and memory, especially of the diaspora of slavery, back into the communities from where the works and their cultural history were harvested.

The Plexus collective historical process, in 1989, in Rome, was symbolically placed in a Black Box. The mytho compression of its memory was buried and stored in various time capsules to be unearthed at future events. Sandro Dernini, coordinator of Plexus International, in December 2003 visited at Yellow Rock, in the Blue Mountains, Culture Lab, (Center for Cultural Research and Theater Anthropology), one of the custodians of Plexus International, and re-activated its storyline.

Realisation

For the Triangle of Art 2004, as part of the Dakartoff of the 2004 Biennal of Contemporary African Art, in Dakar (Senegal), Plexus Black Box will be opened in Australia and revitalise its memory in a theatrical multimedia event connected and linked to the mapping of erosion at the Door of No Return at Goree.

Plexus International in association with Culture Lab in Australia is developing Corpus Australis, sacred crossings of this last continent through The Door of the Heart. Its conceptual premise to be found in the inter-relations between human intelligences and their universal cultural histories as gateways for arrivals and departures of the long journey towards global social justice and wellbeing for all.

Muru Durabin (Pathway to the River) contains the resurrection of an ancient ceremonial festival ground at the Nort-West corner of the Sydney basin connected to the Unesco Greater Blue Mountains World Heritage area. By revitalising the ecology of memory, as is laid down in its environmental layered impact at this proposed Heritage site, it will be possible to 'read' and interpret its erosion from a multi-perspectival perception. It is a place of rare beauty and probably the largest area of ancient rock art near any city in the world. A place of aboriginal inter-tribal ceremony and celebration.

We suggest for the second edition of the Triangle of Art an electronic linking of the staged 'reading' about this lie of the land, from rock art to digit art.

To protect these important sites such as Goree and the House of the Slaves and Muru Durabin and resist its erosion by the telling of the story and the engagement of science in favour of international protection we can begin, on the occasion of the Triangle of Art 2004, a global cultural historical mapping for future generations and create a culture pattern of cross border weaving.

For the Triangle 2004, we propose a ritual interactive theatrical art event, connecting Australia and Senegal cultures, as first resources for a global sustainable development against the erosion of the memory of the humankind. Art is the sustainance which can feed this culture making at the formal years of the third millennium.

Send as a messenger, art scientist Sandro Dernini, with ritual trees ashes carried from the Blue Mointains to Goree, will stage and enact the symbolic compressed memory by performing a purification ceremony at the Door of No Return, and presenting the Message from the Portal of the Heart form the land of the beginning.

In 2002, at the previous edition of the Triangle of Art, Culture Lab participated with a digital photographic contribution 'Iconologia' in which performative characters were placed in the Australian landscapes to reveal their hidden history.

First human art sites such as cave paintings and cultural inscriptions in rock art brings back to mind the role of the artist in the community as a keeper of a living archive against cultural black out and the palimpsest of history. These specific locations in the land(scape) and their pictorial symbols contain the knowledge of first Laws and instructions for daily life and community living related to the Earth as a living organisme.

The Southern Star and the interpretation of its skeletal structure from top to bottom and left to right respectively: cosmogeny-self-container and kinship-self-cultural history, will assist the cultural navigation of the organisation of storytelling.

The local has been touched by the global. Healing and psychic acknowledgement of the trauma's inflicted and caused as results of collision of cultures will be the sound of the groundtone of Culture Lab/Plexus International events in Australia, towards a unified global justice for all.

Culture Lab is in pre-production of two event actions: the first in the Maroota Forest Area (New South Wales) and the second at Snake Valley (Victoria). Both will be extensively documented and the edited story-notations will be carried, performed and presented by Sandro Dernini.

People involved

Willem Brugman

Juno Gemes

Geoff Buchan

Catherine Hassall

John Archer

Steve Laylor

John Brisbin

Contact Info for this Project