Vitalstatistix acknowledges that we, and our home Waterside, are on Kaurna Country, its sovereignty never ceded. We acknowledge Kaurna people as the continuing custodians of the Adelaide Plains who have a spiritual relationship with this land. We respect their cultural authority. We pay our respect to Kaurna Elders, past, present and emerging, and through them to all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples.
Cliffhanger
Angela Goh and Holly Childs (NSW & SA)
Cliffhanger is a multidisciplinary work across performance, installation and text, investigating the cliffhanger and the state of suspension as an omnipresent facet of contemporary anxiety.
Holly Childs is an Adelaide-based multidisciplinary artist and writer, recently based in Moscow and Amsterdam. Her research involves filtering stories of planetary computation through frames of ecology, earth, memory, poetry and light. Angela Goh is a Sydney-based dancer and choreographer working in theatres, galleries and telepathic spaces. Her work considers the body in relationship to commodity, materiality, technology and feeling.
The artists have previously collaborated, including on Angela’s acclaimed performance work Uncanny Valley Girl which undertook a development with Adhocracy in 2016; this new process brings them back together to co-author a timely new work.
Image: Zan Wimberley
Published on
18 September
Live+Local
Showing and artist talk
Friday September 11 at 7pm
Residency Outcome
We (Holly and Angela) undertook a four day remote residency, working from our homes in Adelaide and Sydney. We used Messenger audio to talk, Google Docs to write, collate and share, and Vimeo to host our video presentation. Across the four days we used the mornings to connect together—to talk, think alongside each other, share references and thoughts, and what we had done in the previous afternoon—we used the afternoons to follow up research and undertake individual experiments that we could then feed back into the collaborative research.
Angela read The Second Coming by Franco Bifo and Infinite Distraction by Dominic Pettman, and Uzumaki a manga about spirals by Junji Ito. Holly read Irresistible by Adam Alter, and Digital Minimalism by Cal Newport, and watched most of The Perils of Pauline (1914). We talked about the high drama of Neighbours and Bachelor in Paradise, discussed paranoid evidence boards, and how the story of Borges’ The Garden of Forking Paths only really starts to unfold the second time you read it.
Our project, CLIFFHANGER, is a multidisciplinary work-in-development that looks to the formal qualities of the cliffhanger—a narrative device to keep our attention suspended, and a physical state of literal suspension—in order to investigate the metaphorical relevance the cliffhanger has today—as a metaphor for the state anxiety produced by platforms that have commodified and seized our attention, and the ramifications of this in personal, social, and political terms. During this remote residency for Adhocracy we unravelled research strands, grew our field of references, and slipped and floated through the expanse of places we could take this project. We gathered that expansiveness and pinpointed our focus by coming back to the question “What even is a CLIFFHANGER?”. Our research is contained in this video presentation. Enjoy!
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