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.
Nature Is Healing
Emma McManus and Maria White/ Too Rude (NSW & VIC)
Nature is Healing is a performance work about the relationships between human and non-human animals sharing urban environments, based on the story of the gweela/Australian bush turkey.
Too Rude is a collaboration born from artists Emma McManus and Maria White’s participation in the infamous Earlwood Farm Christmas Climate Change Variety Hour and named after the Daily Telegraph’s response to this event. They make hilarious, researched and political performances about themes such as living in cities, cultural policy, and ecologies.
In their latest work-in-development, the hero is the gweela and its fight against gentrification in urban areas, particularly North Sydney. The work also unpacks the eponymous meme that has emerged during the COVID-19 pandemic, based on a misguided idea of the environment returning to a more ‘natural’ state as humans self-isolate.
Creative Team: Co-creators and performers – Emma McManus and Maria White; Protest Patch designer – Romanie Harper; Sound composer and designer – Angus McGrath
Image: Maria White
Published on
4 September
Live+Local
Adhocracy In Conversation panel: Humans and the non-human: representation, collaboration and disobedience
Friday September 4 at 8pm
Artist keynote
Friday September 11 at 6:30pm
Residency Outcome
We worked together across zoom, phone calls and google docs between Melbourne and Sydney to produce this track. Once we worked out what we wanted to publish we harnessed the expertise of Angus McGrath aka California Girls (who made our dance track/sick banger) and Romanie Harper (who made our logo/ protest patch).
This work is a continuation on themes we explored in our last work (Never Trust A Creative City) around gentrification, urban spaces and resistance. We expanded this out to think about the creation of urban ecosystems and who gets priority within them (rich people mostly). We are also interested in animals that thrive in and adapt to urban spaces. The gweela or bush turkey naturally came to the front as an icon. To us the gweela is the perfect example of a species that has totally adapted it’s natural behaviours to thrive in the city space. We also see them as icons of resistance reclaiming their space amongst the wealthy suburbs of North Sydney. We wanted our work to lean in to making the bush turkey an icon of resistance with wearable badges and a dance track, so that the audience could celebrate the gweela with us.
We liked how the theme of our dads naturally came through in this experiment, as the gweela dads are the mound-builders and therefore the suburban garden-destroyers, agents of chaos and de-gentrifiers.
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