Margie Medlin (AUS/ GB) has an illustrious biography in lighting design and experimental filmmaking and media artist. She has lit and designed new dance performances, produced film, video, new media art works, mentored and curated. Her work specialises relationship between dance and the moving image. Margie has collaborated with many choreographers and directors including Ros Warby, Sandra Parker, Rebecca Hilton, Lucy Guerin, Carol Brown, Russell Dumas, Russell Maliphant, John Jaspers, Ong Keng Sen, Hellen Sky, Vicki Van Hout and Gideon Obarzanek and mentored many young dance-makers in Australia and internationally.
As Director of Critical Path, Australia’s leading centre for choreographic research, Sydney, 2007 to 2015. Margie’s program was dedicated to instigation of innovative platforms for choreographers and interdisciplinary artists.
Margie Medlin (AUS/ GB) has an illustrious biography in lighting design and experimental filmmaking and media artist. She has lit and designed new dance performances, produced film, video, new media art works, mentored and curated. Her work specialises relationship between dance and the moving image. Margie has collaborated with many choreographers and directors including Ros Warby, Sandra Parker, Rebecca Hilton, Lucy Guerin, Carol Brown, Russell Dumas, Russell Maliphant, John Jaspers, Ong Keng Sen, Hellen Sky, Vicki Van Hout and Gideon Obarzanek and mentored many young dance-makers in Australia and internationally.
As Director of Critical Path, Australia’s leading centre for choreographic research, Sydney, 2007 to 2015. Margie’s program was dedicated to instigation of innovative platforms for choreographers and interdisciplinary artists.
Margie Medlin
Facilitator: The Space in the Middle
LET'S HACK THE ANTHROPOCENE, SHALL WE? - AN INVITATION
Choreo Hack-Lab was an initiative of Critical Path that brought together five artists with a choreographic practice to participate in a week-long laboratory in January 2019. The laboratory was curated by Strange Attractor and co-presented with Sydney Festival in partnership with the Museum of Applied Arts and Sciences (MAAS). Each artist invited a critical thinker from a range of other disciplines to respond to the idea of the 'Anthropocene'. This term - a measure of geological time - proposes that we have entered a new epoch, where we are shifting from the relatively stable planetary climate of the past ten thousand years (known as the Holocene) to an epoch in which human activity is being measured as a geological force impacting and disrupting the earth's ecosystems.
For many of the artists, this was their first time encountering the term. For others, the concept had already entered their thinking and practice - but for everyone, it was an opportunity to explore this discursive and conceptual terrain from a number of different arrival points. Our many varied approaches and readings of the scene uncovered an interesting and contested field. Hacking into its blunt opacity, we splintered off into many fragment, as we discovered that all our bodies are entangled and complicit in its charge, albeit in uneven ways.
Similarly, the Anthropocene was a blunt instrument we used to hack into our many more-than-human 'selves'. Who is this Anthropocene? Is it all of humanity? Or should it be more aptly renamed the 'Manthropocene' as the literature of majority cis white male scholarship seemingly demonstrates? How can we speak to this human - that word again - and the human-engineered catastrophe of worlds ending, whilst continuing to discount the experience of First Nations and indigenous peoples? It ws their worlds that were first violently altered from contact with Eurpean settlers and capital: just as it was the black and brown bodies that were traded across oceans to new lands, whose own lands were colonised and rendered instruments for capital. As we consider the histography of this phenomenon, we also bear in mind those whose lived experiences continue to evidence this violent impact. We do not need to look far from this place on which we gather: Gadigal country of the Eora Nation, whose land we acknowledge and whose leaders - past, present and emerging - we pay our respects to. So we begin: Which bodies and whose bodies does the Anthropocene speak to and for?
Rebecca Conroy - Faciliator
ARTISTS AND COLLABORATORS: Ivey Wawn and Riki Scanlan, Henrietta Baird and Bruce Pascoe, Auntie Francis Bodkin, Vicki Van Hout and Clarence Slockee, Dean Walsh and Dr Glenn Albrecht, Jodie McNeilly-Renaudie and Claire Cooper, Sarah Pini and Jestin George.
GUEST SPEAKERS: Dr Astrida Neimanis - Feminist writer and teacher at the Department of Gender and Cultural Studies at University of Sydney and Kenneth McLeod - Convenor and curator of the Anthropocene Transitions Program (ATP) at UTS Business School, Sydney.
PUBLICATION: “Critical Dialogues: Hacking the Anthropocene” Issue 11, Critical Path. May 2019.
Edited by Bek Conroy with contributions from Astrida Neimanis, Henrietta Baird, Ivey Wawn, Jodie McNeilly-Renaudie and Sarah Pini.
PUBLIC EVENTS: #1 'Hacking the Anthropocene' Powerhouse Museum 3pm 30th January 2019
#2 'Making Space I: Bodies, Space and the Anthropocene' 107 Redfern St, Redfern 6 March 2019
The public talk and lab sharing were presented as part of Sydney Festival 2019. This project was made possible with funding from City of Sydney, Australia Council for the Arts, Create NSW and support from Woollahra Council.
 Henrietta Baird'Aboriginal people, my people have experienced the effects of the Anthropocene for a long time: drastic changes like loss of land, loss of language, loss of children (stolen generation). We have been Hacking the Anthropocene for a long time.' |  Ivey Wawn and Ricki ScanlanIvey Wawn and collaborator Ricki Scanlan begin by reading Henri Lefebvre's Rythmanalysis (1992) and focuses the lab around the chapter that speaks of dressage and on the four different rhythmic types illustrated; eurhythmia, polyrhythmia, arrhythmia and isorhythmia. |  Jodie Renaudie-McNeilly'The circular economy was the departure point for this lab. I was interested in exploring the movements of its circular logics as a disruptor to the linear economy ('take make waste'/'cradle the grave') in the processes and actions of upcycling, reuse, repairing and repurposing.' |
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 Sarah Pini and Jestin GeorgeCan embodied knowledge offer an effective ground for challenging and transforming dominant perspectives on progress and technological advancement? By intersecting ideas and principles from synthetic biology and choreography, we interrogate the human era of impact on the earth to contribute to creating a space for sharing such viewpoints and explore new ways to engage with the anthropogenic epoch. |  Dean WalshDean and Dr Albrecht will look at communicating marine environmental - "symbioment" - concerns through embodied approaches inspired by psychoterratic theories |  Astrida Neimanis - Guest SpeakerAstrida is a feminist writer and teacher who currently works at the Department of Gender and Cultural Studies at the University of Sydney on Gadigal Land. Her work focuses on water, weather and other environmental bodies in the Anthropocene. |
 Kenneth McLeod - Guest SpeakerKenneth McLeod is convenor/curator of the Anthropocene Transitions Program (ATP) at the UTS Businesss School in Sydney. The ATP aims to stimulate transformative thinking and regenerative action to bring our professional and social practices into line with the challenges of an age of radical uncertainty and existential crisis. |  Bek Conroy - FacilitatorBek has been sought after as a creative and critical thinker in interdisciplinary and intercultural contexts, and has been active in developing an artist led practice and philosophy in Australia, USA and South East Asia. She has worked as both an artist and a producer/writer/facilitator with key arts organisations across Australia: Vitalstatistix, Diversity Arts Australia, Performance Space, Campbelltown Arts Centre, ArtSpace, as well as collaborating with many leading artists internationally. |