Dust of these domains: Performance readings

‘Dust of these domains’ is an ongoing reading-walking performance series led by artist Bianca Hester that evolves in relation to the specific locations in which it is performed.

Initially developed from the book Sandstone written by Hester in 2020 for the Lost Rocks series, this textual performance is positioned as a set of lively ‘footnotes’ that mobilise the exhibition – speaking directly to its materiality and to the environmental contexts and geologic temporalities of the places underpinning it.

This new iteration tracks a circuit around the environment surrounding UNSW Galleries on the lands of the Bidjigal and Gadigal peoples, and involves listening, walking, and tactile engagement. The walk pauses at certain locations, where text-fragments written in response to the site are performed by Bianca Hester, Bronwyn Bailey-Charteris, and Astrid Lorange. These texts consider the geologic residues of past environments that persist in the present, traces of extinction and regeneration, and relationships between colonial inheritance and extractivism.

A set of bronze performance objects are carried by walking-participants throughout the duration of the event. These bronze objects are hand-moulded from wax, cast from fragments of fossilised plant life from the Permian and Triassic periods held in the Australian Museum Palaeobotanical collection, combined with coalified wood and traces of human pollution. Through an embodied context, participants are invited to consider the entanglement of social and environmental forces within the current climate crisis.

Bianca Hester is an artist, writer, and educator based on Dharawal Country who is engaged in relational place-based practice with a focus on materiality. Her research explores entanglements between colonial inheritance, environmental crisis, human-nonhuman bodies, extinction, and regeneration registered within specific locations, and across timescales. Through a combination of fieldwork, archival research, embodied site-writing, studio production, collaboration, and performed actions, Hester produces multilayered projects that unpack the material and social conditions of specific sites.

Bronwyn Bailey-Charteris is a curator, writer, and researcher with expertise in the politics and poetics of eco-aesthetics, specialising in water and hydrofeminism. Based on Darug and Gundungurra Country, she is a Research Fellow at UNSW Art & Design. Bronwyn maintains an independent curatorial practice and her first monograph The Hydrocene: Eco-Aesthetics in the Age of Water was released with Routledge Environmental Humanities Series in 2024.

Astrid Lorange is a writer, editor, and teacher, and is currently a Senior Lecturer at UNSW Art & Design. Her research focuses on cultural studies of contemporary poetry, art, and media. Lorange is the author of How Reading is Written: A Brief Index to Gertrude Stein (Wesleyan University Press) and Homework, a book of essays co-authored with Andrew Brooks (Discipline). Her most recent poetry collection is Labour and Other Poems (Cordite Books). She is a member of the critical art collective Snack Syndicate, an editor at Rosa Press, and a founding member of the Infrastructural Inequalities research network.

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Presented in conjunction with ‘Bianca Hester: Lithic Bodies’ at UNSW Galleries (27 September – 24 November 2024) and Clifton School of Arts (12–27 October 2024).