Strange strangers!

Channel your vision and follow the golden wings.

There is no background. There is no foreground.

The interdependence theorem does not reduce everything to a level of sameness. It raises everything to the level of wonder.

At the same time utterly unmysterious and unspeakingly miraculous.

It is 13 000 kilometres from Australia to Siberia.

Existence is always coexistence.

Intimacy is strangeness.

A song.

Rhiannon.

Take us to Tomorrow.

FLYWAY is a response to the enchanting nature of migratory birds and the mystifying, ancient, epic journeys they continue to make each year. Flying thousands of kilometers non-stop, their places to rest and feed are being increasingly devoured by human hunger for coastline. Without these places they perish.

Moving from place to place, the birds’ in-between-worlds existence makes them invisible to many, but there are the committed few who work to illuminate their plight, understand their ways, protect their sites and hospitably welcome them as they make their way between homes at two ends of the earth.

FLYWAY investigates the social and ecological mesh we are part of, framed by the humans and birds engaged in this phenomenal act of moving onwards together.

THE PATH

FLYWAY research was conducted through an annual migration back to the empty the nest for Christmas. Between a new home in Melbourne and a family home in Maryborough, Queensland, FLYWAY maps a path of field research - of birders and birds at wetland sites along the east coast. At many of these places I was guided by generous individuals sharing their bird experiences, knowledge and often their homes.

FLYWAY will be presented in the 2012 Next Wave Festival, as a live, cinematic migratory walk through Melbourne city. Using video, sound and performance to merge foreground and background, FLYWAY points to our increasingly mediated experience of ‘nature’.

Drawing on ecological philosophy, personal mythologies and social ecology, audiences will navigate through urban spaces with altered perception.

Cousins! In the midst of our shifting globe there are signs of hope.

There is tomorrow…