Counter Narratives: The Performance Arcade, New Zealand

‘The Performance Arcade is an acclaimed live art event that attracts 40,000 people every year to Wellington Waterfront since 2011. Audiences come for an exciting and diverse program of art, live music, and performance, installed within a special architectural arrangement of shipping containers that are stacked and arranged together to create an innovative new space for performance and arts presentation. This miniature festival offers new encounters between artists and public, creating a vibrant hub that activates the city and exposes communities to new ideas and cultural perspectives.’ Gibson / Martelli, Carol Brown and Russell Scoones collaborate to bring their moving image project to the Performance Arcade.

WAHAWAEWAO– Movement and landscape in flux, five figures cut between times and places. Collaging and overlaying environments, the interior of a motion capture studio and the raw physical landscapes of Central Otago, they inhabit an uneven terrain, negotiated through increasingly perplexed movements and sensory explorations.

The consolations of landscape dissolve as fractures and junctures open between the memory and affect of different atmospheres, altering their transit. In this new cartography that is here and everywhere, they take on the rhythm of an altered place.

Landscape and nature press hard upon their bodies and its touch continues to be felt as they navigate the sealed, air conditioned, environment of the lab. Tracked in all dimensions, they are trackers, agents of travel to unknown and ungraspable places.