Twin Cinema: Four Devils and a Woman in Red, 1) Bridget Crone, Lily Hibberd 2-4) Yallourn Theatre demolished, memory screen; Commissioned by NETS Victoria for The Cinemas Project curated by Bridget Crone photo Din Heagney |
For curator Bridget Crone, Hibberd was an apt choice for The Cinemas Project, in which five artists worked in regional Victorian sites and former sites of cinemas. Crone paired Hibberd with the Regent Theatre in the isolated Latrobe Valley town of Yarram, one of few locations where the original cinema still stands. The project resulted in Twin Cinema: Four Devils and a Woman in Red, an exhibition of objects and memories at Latrobe Regional Gallery, 4 Devils, Hell and High Water, a play in six acts and an enigmatic silent film, both performed by local residents.
Hibberd was keen on Crone’s suggestion of Latrobe Regional Gallery. It’s a former cinema site and you can still see the proscenium if you know where to look, Hibberd says. “Both of us thought of it as an echo…I’m very interested in memories that have been apparently fragmented or dispersed over time; so attention to something lost brings a kind of productive memory to bear on the community.”
Hibberd has been concurrently working on an IASKA Spaced 2 project with the communities of Punmu, Kunawarritji and Parnngurr in the Western Desert and the Parramatta Female Factory Precinct Memory Project, with formerly incarcerated women (see RT121). “I’ve become more interested in being, not necessarily the author of all the work…[but] producing, I guess, provocations through the work. So that people will be able to be involved and engaged and actually be creators too.”
In the Latrobe Valley, Hibberd found that the process of ‘mining memories’ over 18 months or so brought up more than coal. “There were deeper waters there,” she says—mythologies that seemed to arise not just from shifting industrial histories, or the valley’s frequent, intense fires, but also, in Yarram itself, from regular flooding. “The history of water in the region is played out through the theatre. The building itself has pressed metal panels around the balcony of Neptune [the Roman god of water]. It’s like you walk in there and that’s the first thing you see—and I thought, water, right!”
4 Devils, Hell and High Water, a play in six acts, commissioned by NETS Victoria for The Cinemas Project curated by Bridget Crone courtesy the artist |
“You’ve got this doubling of the thing that is apparent, and the ghost or the lost thing. We’re talking about a lost industry, a lost history, lost towns—Yallourn [home of the Strand] was completely razed when they realised there was coal underneath. So that process when people started to talk about the Strand, which was no longer there, instead of the Regent [which is], well this is a very powerful mnemonic force.”
Twin Cinema: Four Devils and a Woman in Red, Lily Hibberd installation shots, commissioned by NETS Victoria for The Cinemas Project curated by Bridget Crone courtesy the artist |
“So the Latrobe Valley is actually a huge development of economic madness. Like ‘dig it up and move it.’ And thus people’s way of dealing with that was really interesting. I wanted to put the people I was meeting in touch with themselves, to actually say well it’s not just about art, it’s about recognising what this social activity—cultural production—is that we’re all involved in.”
Lily Hibberd, Twin Cinema: Four Devils and a Woman in Red, Latrobe Regional Gallery, Morwell, Victoria, 12 April-8 June; 4 Devils, Hell and High Water, a play in six acts, The Regent Theatre and Gippsland Regional Arts, writer Lily Hibberd, director Darren McCubbin, The Regent Theatre, Yarram, 24 April; commissioned by NETS Victoria for The Cinemas Project curated by Bridget Crone; http://www.lilyhibberd.com
The Cinemas Project also features Brook Andrew (Bendigo Art Gallery, 12 April-1 June 2014), Mikala Dwyer (Mildura Arts Centre, 8 June-24 August), Bianca Hester (Coles Carpark, Warrnambool, 4-5 July), Tom Nicholson (Sorrento, Indented Head, Geelong and at Geelong Gallery, 6-9 July); http://www.thecinemasproject.com.au/
See RT122 for an interview with Bridget Crone for more about the Cinema’s Project
RealTime issue #121 June-July 2014 pg. web
© Urszula Dawkins; for permission to reproduce apply to [email protected]