Image: Images: School of Water for the 23rd Biennale of Sydney (2022) at The Cutaway, Barangaroo. School of Water was presented in partnership with Hayball. Photograph: Four Minutes to Midnight.
The Waterhouse was anchored at The Cutaway at Barangaroo. It was the place where our programs, learning encounters and community gatherings exist, challenging where knowledge lived and how it was shared. The Waterhouse was built with the 23rd Biennale of Sydney, titled rīvus, that imagined rivers, wetlands and other salt and freshwater ecosystems as dynamic living systems. It extended upon the foundational principle of rīvus, “building upon what’s already there” and gifted agency to those who connected to it by empowering audiences to recognise that their journey held great value.
Supporting Programs & Leaky Experiences
Images: anti-symposium for the 23rd Biennale of Sydney (2022) at The Cutaway, Barangaroo. Photograph: Four Minutes to Midnight.
anti-symposium: arts pedagogy as social practice, Biennale of Sydney (2022)
anti-symposium: arts pedagogy as social practice explores educator practice as a form of relational and social work. Held across three days, anti-symposium invites educators from all sectors including primary and secondary school, community, tertiary, arts and cultural environments to contribute to a ‘pond’ of ideas sharing practices, experiment and challenge one another. anti-symposium is grounded in building strong, community foundations and relations with peers and leading pedagogical thinkers across the world. By modelling diverse educative approaches, the anti-symposium will gift educators with new tools to explore within collaborative learning environments, through newly created exercises and resources that extend beyond the three-day experience.
Each day of the anti-symposium will be led by artists and pedagogical practitioners including Pablo Helguera (Day 1), Stephanie Springgay (Day 2) and collective project, Creekulum (Day 3). The structure of anti-symposium is inspired by artist Asad Raza’s Schema for a School, 2015 and includes tea, meditation, active exercises, reading groups, reflective strategies and collaborative resource construction.
Emerging from educator and social practices, anti-symposium intends to build and inspire a collective of facilitators, learners and thinkers, together acknowledging the importance of pedagogical practice.
anti-symposium will include a loving lunch daily created by social enterprise and asylum seeker kitchen Parliament on King. Food will be used as a tool for grounding the learnings built throughout the three-day experience.
Images: School of Water for the 23rd Biennale of Sydney (2022) at The Cutaway, Barangaroo. School of Water was presented in partnership with Hayball. Photograph: Four Minutes to Midnight.
School of Water, Biennale of Sydney (2022)
Bringing 12 different practitioners together from the rīvus exhibition program, The Waterhouse public program and the pre-Biennale program Water Lessons, School of Water is a critical project that flows across a two-year period embedding feedback and key learnings from the public and their curiosity about water.
Developed in partnership with Hayball architectural studio, the two-day project will pop-up and takeover The Waterhouse encouraging intergenerational audiences to collectively consider the following questions through sharing and making.
How can we collectively heal the urban Watering Hole?
The Watering Hole in the School of Water is a place of nourishment, connection and co-dependence. It speaks to the need for healthy, abundant water systems and environments, but also a spiritual relationship with water and nature more broadly. Across the two-day period the public will collaborate with artists, architects, scientists and dynamic thinkers in the construction of a real-life watering hole that will live at The Waterhouse. To enable the project to live on beyond the two-day period, a collective Manifesto will be written mapping how we can continue the healing process of the human in the environment and with water.
Images: Water Lessons for the 23rd Biennale of Sydney (2022) at South Eveleigh Community Rooftop, Watchtower, La Perouse and Indigigrow. Water Lessons is presented by the Biennale of Sydney with assistance from Mirvac, Parliament on King and Randwick City Council. Photograph: Four Minutes to Midnight and Document Photography.
Water Lessons, Biennale of Sydney (2021 - 2022)
Water Lessons celebrates learning through doing. Taking place on the third Sunday of each month throughout April 2021 – May 2022, Water Lessons is an opportunity to connect with community in the lead up to and throughout the 23rd Biennale of Sydney (2022). Diverse water specialists from various fields of interest, knowledge and research are invited to host each monthly lesson and to facilitate interaction with participants. Each lesson provides a new lens to understand the complexities of water as material, muse and resource. Water Lessons embraces the reality that we all hold water expertise through our social, cultural, political and historical relations with it. Collaboration, dialogue and exchange are foregrounded through Water Lessons as essential tools for learning and sharing. Water Lessons aims to unpack the qualities, powers, threats and future imaginaries of water, together.
Images in order of appearance: Courtesy of WalkingLab a SSHRC-funded international research-creation project co-directed by Stephanie Springgay (McMaster University) and Sarah E. Truman (University of Melbourne). Detail from the Slow Spatial Reader, courtesy of the Slow Research Lab. Still Seals;kin Lament Hannah Tuulikki and Space In Between Designs courtesy of Biennale of Sydney.