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TCB
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Victoria, Australia
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TCB acknowledges the people of the Kulin Nations as the traditional custodians of the land, recognising their connection to land, waters and community. We pay our respects to their Elders; past, present and future.
©2024 TCB Art Inc.
Thank you to our generous sponsors:
VIV BAKER
SILT
2025
❦
Ena Grozdanić, Sabotage in seven acts
Gallery One, 25 Jan—23 Feb 2025
IMAGINE A RIVER
Everyone belongs to one. Wide, coursing, dangerous. Or, maybe small, maybe gentle, maybe shallow. Maybe not a river, but a puddle. Maybe not a puddle, but an ocean. Bugs walking the surface like christ, fish below, their silver smooth bodies moving against the stubborn current. Did you:
Bathe in the river? Let it hold you?
Walk right out to the middle and look up?
Sit amongst the reeds waiting for nothing?
Sleep on the bank until the sun sank low enough to tap your shoulder gently and so you rose?
Picture the water. Clear or murky. What your warm hand looks like when dipped below the surface. How deep? The floor of it, the colour. Dark? Light? The river accidentally in your mouth: maybe salty, or fresh, metallic or grainy. Maybe the taste of rot underneath. All the citizens of the river forming some great invisible circle, evidence of a lineage, of survival, of extinction. You will die also. Not in the river, which is your loss.
What grows by the river? Root systems and tangles of branches extending above, a delicate ceiling for the wet room where everything is humming with life. What are you in it. Are you also growing? Quietly, under the green ceiling?
People are born by water, die by water. Probably it happens every day. The water is the salve, the space we safely travel through in order to become alive, or to finish being alive. The water does not proselytize, does not instruct. It has no rules for living. It lets you scream into it, fitfully birth yourself over and over, let all but the flesh become liquid, become everything else. To float is to suddenly feel that all your debts have been repaid. To float and forget about money. Dull thud of metal meeting the riverbed. To know the water. For the river to be family: what is the cost? It asks for nothing.
The young ones grow and maybe they travel far away and construct their lives from the clay. Tight corners and soft edges and a half-forgotten trail of all the picked up and put down again threads. Time blows through like a turning wind, or a slap across the face. And the young ones, maybe they feel that pull. To return. To form a circle and come all the way back to the water, the homely place.
WANTING TO
To defend, to die on the hill. You belong to the river. When the machinery comes and condemns it to be dam(n)ed, you feel an ending inside yourself also. How to protect the waterways? Which is another way of saying: how to protect our own flesh?
Pictures of river systems taken from planes show their spidery limbs connecting and ending. These pictures of something very large from high above can also look like something very small up close: the root system of a seedling, the veins under the skin of a human wrist. Nature is always referencing itself.
This is new machinery. New violence, new threats to destruct in newly efficient ways. There is money to be made here. The cost of a backwards glance too high, too sentimental. The march onward, unceremonial. Not the rattle of coins, not even the silent rustle of paper. Something quieter. A transaction without touching (EXTRACTION). A disembodied exchange (EXTRACTION). The value of the river has been exactingly calculated (EXTRACTION). Everything once abstract and immaterial now made mortal. The new machinery is clever and it is cold and it knows what it knows and nothing more. It knows how to take and so it takes and it takes because that is all the new machinery has ever known. It costs everything. Then it makes back triple and money flows where the water once did.
The new machinery only knows what it knows. It does not know of wisdom or wonder how to get it. It is uncurious. The new machinery looks imposing, but its weaknesses are many. Be not afraid. Remember your body.
The oldest problem of all: the thing you love is under threat, and you feel powerless to protect it. Be not afraid.
Remember your body.
Desire alone is not enough. It catches easily, flares and burns out again if not properly fed. Desire, the promise of something more alive than itself, flinty and gleaming. How to feel it, and feed it? Feed it we must. Burn and burn and burn. Bury your feet in the river. Your body is an old machine. It knows of wisdom. There is no truth but still it tries. Keep trying. There is danger. Keep wanting. We must.
BREAKING
Action is water. Cool flow through the grass standing. Rushing onward, stirring the silt below – barely. Just enough. Movement, disruption: essential, like fire. Regrowth. Necessary, easy to condemn(dam[n]). Fire and flood: emblems of disaster. While defending the river, we become it. Naturally. Many before us have done the same. We are fed by it, the memory, the knowing. Many before us. And our children, after.
While becoming water, we wonder if this is normal or right. Feet in the mud, angling upward like the long legged long beaked birds, we call out to the air, implore it to guide us. This is new machinery, but our defence is as old as the riverbed. Breaking with ancient tools.
tools like
Hands, feet. Hubris.
A hammer. A pen.
The dark.
How to identify the moment where desire is not enough? Where desire, under pressure, transmutes and becomes something that suddenly possesses a heartbeat? Action, the thing that moves like our lives depend on it because in some way or other they do. We can find it in the word itself:
The A! sound, the wanting, a yawning aching vowel; the beginning of the feeling. AAAA with our mouths open, a call to the world that we have surrendered. Desire taking the body over. And then, the K/Cuh – transforming. Singular, one click, ringing out into the quiet air. The standstill, the moment over before it has begun, the crack of the whip, something is changing. The dam breaks and the shhhhhhnnnnn is rushing in, the sheer force of it, the water coming to meet us, dancing, lapping against the earth lusty and wet but different to an animal. A C T I O N. Imprecise, stilted. Never a blade. Something longer, broader, blunter. Stronger and heavier and stretching ever outward, further than you thought possible. Through the long grass at night. Keep going. While the people are sleeping.
VIV BAKER is a writer and editor living and working on the unceded sovereign lands of the Wurundjeri people of the Kulin nation.
Edited by Kaijern Koo.
Documentation by Nina Rose Prendergast.
This piece was commissioned in response to Ena Grozdanić’s exhibition Sabotage in seven acts as part of TCB’s 2024 Emerging Writers’ Program.
The TCB Emerging Writers’ Program is generously supported by the City of Merri-Bek.
Edited by Kaijern Koo.
Documentation by Nina Rose Prendergast.
This piece was commissioned in response to Ena Grozdanić’s exhibition Sabotage in seven acts as part of TCB’s 2024 Emerging Writers’ Program.
The TCB Emerging Writers’ Program is generously supported by the City of Merri-Bek.
