This online event features key artists and introductions to five major commissioned projects in the Treatment III program, including Robert Andrew, Zanny Begg, Eugenia Lim, James Nguyen and Linda Tegg. Alongside artist & researcher Fiona Hillary, and Paul Balassone from Melbourne Water they contextualise the third iteration of this ambitious public art project, sharing insights into their works and perspectives on Treatment’s and our wastewater infrastructure’s ongoing significance in the contexts of both cultural heritage and public health.

In addition to these conversations, the discussion includes an overview of the program and information on how to best navigate your way as the projects unfold from late March at Scienceworks and Spotswood, down the pipeline through Brooklyn, to culminate in late April with a Night + Day Treatment event spectacular.

Situated in a block on the cusp of transformation, Tending a line in the year of the rabbit responds to the boundary condition produced by two rows of concrete sleepers. No longer serving their original purpose, the linear arrangement now hosts life — the space between these rows has been transformed to support a species-rich plant community. To establish the plants amidst an already vibrant ‘vacant lot’, caretakers engage in new patterns of boundary-making, reciprocity, and care.

This ‘vacant lot’ sits at the intersection of competing forces in the modern city-suburbs. Located in close proximity to the Old Pumping Station (located within Scienceworks Museum) and the rapidly gentrifying neighbourhoods of Melbourne’s inner-west, this ‘vacant lot’ and Tegg’s thoughtful intervention raise questions about land usage and prompt broader thinking about conservation and regeneration in urban areas.

Over the spring, a new generation of seeds will be collected to catalyse as-yet unimagined opportunities for plants in this place. Commissioned for Treatment III, Tending a line in the year of the rabbit will live beyond 28 April until construction at the site begins.

This project received funding from the Victorian Government through the West Gate Tunnel project’s West Gate Neighbourhood Fund. 

Linda Tegg’s work engages with the construction of images of nature, and the frameworks through which we find meaning in the world. She collaborates widely, working across cultural institutions and public space. She was a co-creative director of the Australian Pavilion at the Venice Architecture Biennale with Baracco+Wright Architects, and Artist in Residence at the School of Geography at The University of Melbourne (2018). In 2014 she grew ‘Grasslands’ at the State Library of Victoria with Horticulturalist John Delpratt. Linda is a Samstag Scholar (2014), and Georges Mora Fellow (2012). She has degrees from SAIC, The University of Melbourne, and RMIT University, and is a PhD candidate at The University of Melbourne.

Image: Linda Tegg, Untitled, seed mix, 2022.
Artist portrait: Tjaša Kalkan, courtesy Assemble Papers

Join artist Linda Tegg in-conversation with Treatment’s curators and the landscape architects contracted to transform the vacant lot which currently hosts her work Tending a line in the year of the rabbit.

Tending a line in the year of the rabbit responds to the boundary condition produced by two rows of concrete sleepers. No longer serving their original purpose, the linear arrangement now hosts life — the space between these rows has been transformed to support a species-rich plant community.

While the work can be viewed any time of day from 17 March – 28 April, this is one of the few sessions that will allow visitors to enter the site and walk around the work. All are welcome — registration is free, but essential to attend. Please meet us at the location at the corner of Hudson Rd and Booker St, Spotswood – across the road from Scienceworks Museum.   

This project received funding from the Victorian Government through the West Gate Tunnel project’s West Gate Neighbourhood Fund. 

Join Public Art Commission and partners for the opening event of Treatment III, a public art project that celebrates the histories, technologies and communities of Melbourne’s West.

This in-person event will begin with a Welcome to Country from Bunurong Traditional Owners, gathering at the site of Linda Tegg’s work Tending a line in the year of the rabbit (located across the road from Scienceworks Museum, at the corner of Hudson Rd and Booker St). We will then walk over to Scienceworks for the rest of the evening, and view two other key commissions by Robert Andrew and Zanny Begg, installed within the grounds of the Old Pumping Station.

Following on from the digital launch, this event will be a first glimpse of the works and a celebration of Treatment III.

All are welcome — registration is free, but essential to attend. Drink and light refreshments will be provided; further event details will be communicated by email.

This event received funding from the Victorian Government through the West Gate Tunnel project’s West Gate Neighbourhood Fund. 

“Prisons do not disappear problems, they disappear human beings.” – Angela Y. Davis

Prisoners is a looped single-channel video installation created at the Pumping Station, the location for the infamous 1986 Blackmoor prison riot, in the TV series Prisoner. Glenda Linscott, who played Rita Conners, the chief protagonist in the riot, revisits the site to re-create iconic scenes from the TV show alongside interviews and performances from women who have lived experience of incarceration. Prisoner was one of the most popular series in Australian television history running for over 690 episodes and developing a huge fan base in Australia and overseas. Scenes from the show are recreated from the artist’s memory allowing the script to fragment as it fuses with personal biases. Deliberately blurring the “invisible line” between documentary and fiction Prisoners explores the mythologizing of the prison industrial complex within Australian culture.

The Pumping Station was built in the 1890s to clean up Melbourne’s sewerage, its imposing industrial architecture made it the perfect location for Blackmoor, the fictitious “black hole” of the prison system.

Featuring interviews with Debbie Kilroy, Sisters Inside, Naomi Murphy, Woor-Dungin; and Sara and Nina, Homes not Prisons.

This project received funding from the Victorian Government through the West Gate Tunnel project’s West Gate Neighbourhood Fund, and was created with generous support from Create NSW Commissioning Program.

Film by Zanny Begg

Staring Glenda Linscott

Interviews with Debbie Kilroy, Sisters Inside, Naomi Murphy, Woor-Dungin; and Sara and Nina, Homes not Prisons.

Cast and Crew

Petra Leslie, Cinematographer
Cameron Dunlop, Second Camera
Natalie Cicciarelli, Producer
Jack Pardy, Assistant Producer
David Ross, Audio Engineer
Bob Scott and Serge Stanley, Mixing
Mark Blanch, Lighting
Joshua Fernandez, Best Boy
Jasmine Guffond, Composition
Fiona Dann, Casting
Emma Saunders, Choreographer
Bon Mott, Makeup Artist
Yanni Kronenberg, Colourist
Editor and Script, Zanny Begg

Featuring; Sarah Kaluke, Michael O’Malley, Bronwyn Penrith, Dax Carnay, Evan Hocking, Campbell R Smith, Gabriela Green, Lee Quek, and Nesina Viola.

Commissioned by Deakin University’s Public Art Commission. With thanks to Jonathan Shearer from Scienceworks.

Donations to the Free Her campaign, which supports women inside, can be made here.

Zanny Begg is a video installation artist who works across drawing, film, social and spatial practice to explore questions of feminism, migration, and ecological and intergenerational responsibility. Often creating intricate worlds through drawing costumes and backdrops, Zanny is interested in the loops and twists of time that reveal previously submerged or hidden histories. Based on unceded lands in the Dharawal Nation, Bulli, Zanny’s recent exhibitions include Sharjah, Taipei, Labin, Limerick, Odessa and Istanbul Biennales, in THE NATIONAL 2017, NEW AUSTRALIAN ART, UTOPIA PULSE at the Secession, Vienna, STATECRAFT (AND BEYOND), National Museum of Contemporary Art, Athens, MONA FOMA, Tasmania, SYDNEY FESTIVAL 2020, NOVA GALLERY, Zagreb and OK VIDEO FESTIVAl, Jakarta.

Her recent film works include; Juanita Nielsen NOW (2022), Magic Mountains (2020), Stories of Kannagi (2020); The Beehive (2018); The City of Ladies (with Elise McLeod); The Bullwhip Effect (2017); How to Blow up a Bubble that Won’t Burst; 1001 Nights in Fairfield (2015); and Doing Time (2014).

Image: Prisoners, 2023, Hugo Begg.
Portrait of Zanny Begg: Maria Boyadgis 

Yawuru artist Robert Andrew’s work for Treatment III seeks to make visible the knowledge systems held within the land beneath our feet. His installations combine natural elements with programmed machinery to articulate ancient understandings, lived experiences, and cultural knowledge imbedded within language. The complex choreography of his self-actuating artworks build visual, aural, and linguistic landscapes that articulate the complexities of these ancient knowledge systems and challenge the dominant Western-educated assumptions of language use.

Andrew’s artwork for Treatment III will slowly and steadily write in water across the courtyard façade of The Spotswood Pumping Station. In a constant state of steady motion, the mechanical armature precisely projects water to darken the red bricks of the colonial structure. Weather patterns—humidity, sun, and rain—create a chance encounter and vary the degree of legibility each day.

This project received funding from the Victorian Government through the West Gate Tunnel project’s West Gate Neighbourhood Fund. 

Robert Andrew is a descendant of the Yawuru people. His work speaks to the past yet articulates a contemporary relationship to his Country. Andrew’s work often combines programmable machinery with earth pigments, ochres, rocks and soil to mine historical and cultural events buried by the dominant paradigms of western culture. 

Born in 1965 in Perth, Australia, Andrew lives and works in Brisbane. His work has been presented in major exhibitions in Australia and internationally. Andrew’s work is held in the collections of National Gallery of Victoria, Queensland Art Gallery and Gallery of Modern Art (QAGOMA), St Andrew’s Hospital Collection, and Gadens Lawyers Brisbane. 

Robert Andrew is represented by Milani Gallery, Brisbane.

Image: Robert Andrew, Water waking country – Wulani yinamirlgan buru, 2022 – ongoing (detail). Commissioned by the Biennale of Sydney with generous support from the Australia Council for the Arts. Courtesy the artist & Milani Gallery, Brisbane. Installation view, 23rd Biennale of Sydney, rīvus, 2022, Museum of Contemporary Art Australia. Photography: Jodie Barker.

Join artist James Nguyen for an artist talk with curators Cameron Bishop and David Cross, prior to the commencement of his two-day durational project NO SLEEP TILL BROOKLYN. 

NO SLEEP TILL BROOKLYN is a two-day performance/walking tour led by James Nguyen in collaboration with a small number of committed and engaged performance activators. This performance and conversations will generate ideas around public health, community participation and culture as we reflect on the 125-year history of the pipeline running through this region, as well as other major infrastructure projects in Melbourne’s west.

All are welcome — registration is free, but essential to attend. Please meet us at the top deck carpark of Altona Gate shopping centre (please see map) before the event commences at 10.00am.

Time: 10.00am, Saturday 15 April
Meeting Point: Level 3 Car Park, Altona Gate Shopping Centre
Wear: Warm clothes, prepare for possible wet weather
*Please note, this performance event will be filmed and/or photographed.

This project received funding from the Victorian Government through the West Gate Tunnel project’s West Gate Neighbourhood Fund. 

James Nguyen works with documentary, installation and performance to examine the politics of art, self-representation and how decolonising strategies can contribute to diasporic dialogues. His work has been included in group exhibitions across Australia, including The National, Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, 2019. Recent solo exhibitions include Re:Tuning, (with Victoria Pham and collaborators, at the Sydney Opera House), 2022; Re.Sounding, (with Victoria Pham and collaborators), Samstag Museum, Adelaide, 2021; Homesickness, (with Nguyen Thi Kim Nhung) a commission by the Australian War Memorial, Canberra, 2018; and BuffaloDeer (with Nguyen Ngoc Cu), Westspace, Melbourne, 2016. Nguyen has been the recipient of several prizes and awards, including the Copyright Agency Partnerships Commission, in collaboration with the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, and the Anne & Gordon Samstag International Visual Arts Scholarship.

Image: James Nguyen with Salote Tawale, Bad Mudda, photo by Melissa Howe. 

NO SLEEP TILL BROOKLYN is a two-day performance/collection/walking tour to explore the locations, objects and sounds of the area from Altona Gate Shopping Centre through to the Federation Trail in Brooklyn. 

Working with a small number of committed and engaged performance activators, artist James Nguyen will lead a group on day one to activate spaces and share impromptu stories and ideas as they make their way towards the Federation Trail/heritage pipeline (Main Sewer Outfall). This performance and conversations will generate ideas around public health, community participation and culture as we reflect on the 125-year history of the pipeline running through this region, as well as other major infrastructure projects in Melbourne’s west.  

Returning on day two, they will produce a public performance across multiple sites that celebrates this vital area and reflects on discussions and connections from the two days.   

Audiences are invited to witness the performance at DN Duane Reserve Playground, Brooklyn at 3.30pm on Sunday 16 April.

This project received funding from the Victorian Government through the West Gate Tunnel project’s West Gate Neighbourhood Fund. 

 James Nguyen works with documentary, installation and performance to examine the politics of art, self-representation and how decolonising strategies can contribute to diasporic dialogues. His work has been included in group exhibitions across Australia, including The National, Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, 2019. Recent solo exhibitions include Re:Tuning, (with Victoria Pham and collaborators, at the Sydney Opera House), 2022; Re.Sounding, (with Victoria Pham and collaborators), Samstag Museum, Adelaide, 2021; Homesickness, (with Nguyen Thi Kim Nhung) a commission by the Australian War Memorial, Canberra, 2018; and BuffaloDeer (with Nguyen Ngoc Cu), Westspace, Melbourne, 2016. Nguyen has been the recipient of several prizes and awards, including the Copyright Agency Partnerships Commission, in collaboration with the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, and the Anne & Gordon Samstag International Visual Arts Scholarship.

While living at sixteen addresses in five years, moving continents thrice in seven years and shuttling daily between the changing landscapes of Ballarat, Geelong and Wyndham over the last couple of years, the majestic calm and stillness of the You Yangs has given a restless migrant an extraordinary anchor; an immovable constant that has acted like a magnet to her fickle mind. Meanwhile unknowingly, the mountain’s transcendence has mysteriously replaced the ingrained memory of the Puri Temple in her mind.

Interested in the abstraction of extraordinary experiences in places they do not belong, in HOLM Anindita Banerjee invites audiences to encounter the shared experience of an adapted cleansing ritual. In this creative enquiry, based in the Western fringes of Naarm, Banerjee uses the same game that the You Yangs played with her memory in an attempt to create an authentic sense of belonging to these unceded Indigenous lands.

Anindita Banerjee (PhD), describes herself as a “twice-uprooted Indian.” She is an interdisciplinary artist, curator, researcher and arts worker living and working on the land of the Wadawurrung people of the Kulin Nation. Her research interest includes cultural otherness, authentic identity and the sense of home. The memories of ritualistic ceremonies and mark-makings and her reconstruction of them informs her practice. Using gestural portrayals of hybrid rituals, she wonders where her place is as an immigrant to the unceded Indigenous lands of present-day Australia. She has exhibited at the Victoria Parliament Melbourne, Customs House Sydney, the Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts, the Academy of Fine Arts in Kolkata, at the Palazzo Bembo Gallery in Venice in conjunction with the Venice Biennale 2019 and various other institutions and galleries. Her exhibition Ondormohol has been shown at the Art Gallery of Ballarat as part of the Ballarat International Foto Biennale and is currently touring other regional centres in Victoria. She currently works as a Public Arts Officer at the City of Ballarat.

Old Boundary Road is a multi-channel sound installation which sonically resonates a line of large steel pipes, spares from the Melbourne wastewater line from Narrm, Wurundjeri Country to Wadawurrung Country. Using high-powered transducers, sonic textures from the periphery of the Treatment Plant crackle and resonate through infrastructure at the site of the previous Cocoroc township.

Listeners are invited to walk through, stand in and listen closer to the sounds of place, modulating and overlapping resonant frequencies, tones and textures emerge as they shift across the pipes, resonating both inwards and outwards, reflecting on our listening positionalities with the surrounding land.

Edwina Stevens is a Narrm-based audiovisual artist from Aotearoa/Te Wahi Pounamu. Her ongoing place-based practice engages improvisational processes of wandering and closer listening through varying techniques of sonic recording, responsive synthesis and found acoustic possibilities. With a focus on the incidental and unanticipated – producing works drawing on our potential to learn from the complex overlaps and dialogues in the details consistently present around us. Her processes accumulate to produce audiovisual works, compositions and installations, further expanded through performances, exhibitions, community conversations and collective wanderings.

Recently Edwina has been focusing on resonant engagements with infrastructure, transducing environmental recordings and harmonic modulating drone-frequencies through metals and other resonant materials. As a non-indigenous artist working on unceded lands, her projects intend to address continuing problematic colonial perspectives of place, specifically questioning western imperial concepts of ownership and control of land in so-called Australia and Aotearoa.

Through her ongoing creative research, Edwina wishes to further develop a respectful, responsible and resonant approach to the representation of place through audiovisual creative processes to encourage conversation within the wider community in questioning ongoing colonial perspectives.

Single-channel artist film, 2K video, colour, sound, looped.

Note: For Treatment III, a preview of ‘Metabolism’ will screen during the Night + Day event before its longer-form presentation in late 2023.

A portrait of a living, working ecology and the multi-species it sustains, Metabolism is a film-essay that considers the body-as-land and land-as-body.

Filmed around the site of the Western Treatment Plant (WTP), Metabolism is an artist-film that considers metabolism as an ambivalent process, connecting external and internal forces: from chemical energy-creation within our bodies, to capitalism’s ‘metabolic rift’. For the Wadawurrung people, Wirribi-yaluk (Werribee river) is the backbone and spine of Country, a waterway that has sustained life since time immemorial. Wirribi-yaluk runs along the eastern edge of the WTP, a living and flowing entity connecting old ways with new. Since colonisation, the land, waters and air of this place have been drastically shaped to produce and metabolise food, waste, energy and water. Created in dialogue with the site-as-protagonist through seasonal change and a number of months, Metabolism considers the interconnections and interdependencies between human and more-than-human bodies; interior and exterior ecologies, and the consumption, colonisation and capitalisation of land.

“There’s no waste in waste.”

– Peter Kissonergis, Melbourne Water

METABOLISM TEAM

Director, Lead Artist, Editor: Eugenia Lim
Cinematographer: Tim Hillier
Original Composition and Sound Design: Fia Fiell (Carolyn Schofield)
Drone Operators: Trent Perrett and Glenn Hester
Production Coordinator: Bianca Chang
Wadawurrung Cultural Advisors: Stephanie Skinner and Corinna Eccles
Performer: Lee Wan
Performer: Harshanie Habarakadage
Western Treatment Plant Operations: Peter Kissonergis
Melbourne Water Heritage Advisor: Paul Balassone

Metabolism was filmed on and in the lands, waters and skies of the Wadawurrung. We pay our deep respect to the sovereign traditional custodians of this place for their deep, ongoing practice of care for country, kin and culture.

Commissioned by Public Art Commission, Deakin University and the City of Wyndham.

Eugenia would like to thank: Peter Kissonergis, Paul Balassone, Catherine Rees, Lee Wan and Harshanie Habarakadage at Melbourne Water; Wadawurrung Aboriginal Corporation; David Cross, Cameron Bishop, Simon Reis and the Public Art Commission team; Gabrielle Brady and Amos Gebhardt for creative support; and all her Metabolism collaborators, human and more-than-human. Eugenia is represented by STATION, Australia.

Eugenia Lim is an Australian artist of Chinese-Singaporean heritage who works across body, lens, social and spatial practice to explore how migration, capital and encounter cut, divide and bond our interdependent world. Based on unceded lands in the Kulin Nation, Lim has shown at the Tate Modern (London), LOOP (Barcelona), Recontemporary (Turin), Kassel Dokfest, Museum of Contemporary Art (Syd), ACCA, Next Wave, FACT (Liverpool), and EXiS (Seoul). She co-founded CHANNELS Festival, co-wrote and hosted Video Becomes Us on ABC iView and is a former co-director at APHIDS. Lim has been artist-in-residence with the Experimental Television Centre (NY), Bundanon Trust, 4A Beijing Studio, and Gertrude Contemporary. Lim is a 2022 Sidney Myer Creative Fellow and winner of Charlottenborg Spring’s 2022 Deep Forest Art Land Award. 

Images: Metabolism production stills

Working at the intersection of art, science and technology Reverberating Futures is a 360° sound and film experience that pays homage to bioluminescent dinoflagellates created as a meditation on human and non-human entanglements in climate change.  The southern hemisphere is currently experiencing unprecedented occurrences of algal drift, appearing as red tides during the day, noctiluca scintillans glow blue in the evenings crashing waves. This work invites audiences to think with the ‘shimmer of the biosphere’ to understand our implication in climate change.

Please note: Fiona Hillary’s work (included in the Minibus tour tickets) is a VR experience that audience will experience through a VR headset. If you‘d prefer not to wear the headset, you will need your own smartphone and pair of headphones. A QR code will be provided for you to access the work.  

Fiona Hillary is a Melbourne based artist working in the public realm. Her passion lies in site specific practices and the human/non-human relationships that reveal themselves across time. Exploring scale through publicly shared moments of awe and wonder; working with site, neon, sound, human and non-human companion species, her work focuses on temporary, fleeting encounters in and of the everyday. Most recently Fiona’s research understands climate change through her reading of bioluminescent dinoflagellates as the ‘shimmer of the biosphere.

Fiona has made and curated permanent, temporary, collaborative, performative works for a range of commissioning organizations. Fiona is the Program Manager of the Master of Arts – Art in Public Space at RMIT University and a research lead in the School of Art research group Contemporary Art and Social Transformation.

Hero Image: Fiona Hillary, Reverberating Futures (VR screenshot).
Additional image: Giles Campbell
Artist portrait: Jody Haines

This participatory sound work takes place from sunset on Friday 21 April to sunset on Saturday 22 April, under water and between stone, surrounded by the songs of the creatures who have made the plant their haven.

Amphibians dominated the earth through the Carboniferous period. Their strength was the ‘double life’ they could inhabit, on land and in water. Today, this strength and deep integration with their environment has left them particularly vulnerable to the effects of climate change. Their skin is uniquely permeable compared to other vertebrates, making it difficult to control the movement of water across their external surface. They are extremely sensitive to even the smallest change in water quality and are an ‘indicator species’ for ecosystem health. An estimated 40% of species of amphibians are in danger of extinction.

As well as being a sanctuary for hundreds of native and migratory birds, with a diversity and abundance of birdlife rivalling Kakadu, the Western Treatment Plant is home to a variety of frog species, many of which are rare or endangered.

AMPHI:BIOS is a special sound project that invites performers and audience to contemplate the double life we can live as we move through the world; being impacted by, or impacting upon, the environment around us. The project puts us into context within songs and a soundscape that have been here long before us, and will continue long after we are gone. Our role is to allow our own permeability, entering as observer and responder, open to the possibility of change within ourselves and around us.

During AMPHI:BIOS, the 180-year-old bluestone water tower in the Cocoroc township becomes home to a grand piano and a soundtrack of field recordings from over an identical 24-hour period, of the songs of wildlife who nest along the shores of the Treatment Plant’s ponds and lagoons. Between sunset Friday 21 and sunset Saturday 22 April, a host of musicians will play overlapping sets in this sonically luscious ‘amphitheatre’, in response and conversation with the songs of the amphibians, insects and birds who have made the Treatment Plant their home.

The artists will oscillate between Two Ways of Living:
listen, convey;
absorb, reflect;
receive, shape;
observe, respond.

Pianist Georgina Lewis completed her Bachelor of Music (Honours) at the Victorian College of the Arts in 2007, studying Repertoire Keyboard with Donna Coleman. She has focused her attention in recent years to chamber settings, especially on music by contemporary and female composers. In 2018 Georgina completed her Master of Arts and Cultural Management at the University of Melbourne, focusing her final year studies on Intangible Cultural Heritage policy. Her interest in this field crosses over into her curation and performance practices.  

An entangling situation is emerging over the cycle of a night and a day in this site-specific performance scene: things are transforming; entities are fluid; appearances are more than real; ancestors and descendants are listening and asking questions of all living. Poised amongst lively fermentation, as humans glimpse the enormous composting power of earthly systems, how do we bear witness to events unfolding beyond our immediate perceivable grasp? How might we attune with all that is turning?

Mick Douglas makes temporary public artworks exploring entanglements of human and ecological relations through multi-medium installation and performance encounters.

Wyndham-based collaborating artists:

Jess Fairfax works at the intersection of art, audio and deep ecology.

Clive Gono is a Shona sculptor from Zimbabwe.

Damien Laing works with video, photography, events and places.

Connor Ovenden-Shaw, Also Known as Foot, is a non-binary queer artist

This project was generously sponsored by CHILLY BILLY and ICE BABY.

Scrub. Wipe. Rinse. Repeat. is an immersive ephemeral experiment that emphasises the vital role of sanitation in our daily lives. It engages visitors in a unique sensory experience that will leave them feeling invigorated. Despite being heavy on process, Scrub. Wipe. Rinse. Repeat. has a light touch that will satisfy (almost) everyone.

Peter Burke is an artist situated in Naarm, Melbourne. In his art practice he uses socially engaged strategies combined with current concerns and conventions of art, especially those involving social interaction in public spaces. By these means he examines topical issues and questions the general condition of contemporary society. His independent and collaborative projects intersect with performance, painting, drawing and video and use humour and surprise to create benign disruption.

Peter’s work has been presented in India, Japan, Singapore, South Korea and South Africa, as well as Australia. He currently lectures at the Victorian College of the Arts, University of Melbourne. He completed a Bachelor of Fine Art and a PhD at RMIT University.

Hero Image: courtesy Peter Burke

The Rogue Academy collective encourages conversations through art and food,  to challenge preconceived notions and inspire new ways of thinking. Their latest project delves into the parallels between the Western Treatment Plant network, the human digestive system, vermicomposting,  fermentation and celebrating the crucial role that decomposing microbes play in creating fertile soil and generating new life.

For Treatment III: Night + Day, their project Cultivating Conversations invites guests to sit, eat, consume and process. Collaborating faculty including Sharon Flynn of The Fermentary and our honourable dinner guests, with Hong Kong-based artist Gai Ya Qi, will help challenge the stigma surrounding waste by highlighting its beauty and transformative potential. Cultivating Conversations, is informed by key ideas around corn, waste processing and systems of digestion and transformation through worms, food, bacteria and stories.

Join Rogue Academy in the Cocoroc Town Hall for conversations and meals:

Friday 21 April, 7:15pm

Saturday 22 April, 10:15am &1:15pm

And conclude with a digestive Earthworm Meditation, An Ode to an Annelid, on  Saturday 22 April, 6.00pm    

More information:

On Friday night, 21 April, guest faculty Sharon Flynn, Australian author and founder of The Fermentary,  will be in discussion with audiences over food from 7.15pm.

Alongside lacto-fermented corn and corn silk kombucha,  fermented foods and rice for you to taste in a variety of forms and Sharon will be sharing her knowledge on fermentation, divergent food thinking, the multispecies endeavour that is being human and the parallels that can be made between fermenting microbes, the waste system, digestion and the cyclical nature of life. 

At 10.15 am, Saturday 22 April, Rogue Academy will continue speculate about how our digestive systems, fermented foods and nature echo the workings of the waste plant.

At 1.15pm,  Saturday 22 April, the Rogue Academy will host guest faculty Paul Balassone,  Heritage Advisor Aboriginal Engagement & Community Connections, and Peter Kissonergis Location Manager at Melbourne Water, both stalwarts of the Western Treatment Plant and key to the trilogy of successful Treatment projects over the past 7 years.

Their final guest is Hong Kong-based artist Gai Ya Qi hosting a vermi-meditation, Ode to an Annelid, which invites a reflection on worms and their indelible impact on our biosphere – to help wind down at the finale of TIII: Night + Day at dusk, 6.00pm 22 April.

Rogue Academy also invite audiences to participate in a blue muffin experience which will shed light on food transit times and how the gut microbiome works.  

Lasty,check our toilets at Cocoroc Town Hall for the scrolling [24 hour] Food Diary data, capturing the source of waste that comes through to the Western Treatment Plant.

Artists

Amanda Shone is a Melbourne/Naarm based artist. Through an installation and performance-based practice, she responds to the physical, elemental and nuanced histories of place. She invites the audience to explore the tension between actual and pre-conceived ideas of experience. Her work is currently investigating the interconnection of personal and collective memory in public spaces. Amanda has a solo and collaborative art practice and is currently working with Fiona Lee as part of The Rogue Academy, an art, education and research platform.

Fiona Lee (PhD) is a Geelong based artist-researcher, curator and founder of the art-education collective, The Rogue Academy. Currently a lecturer at Deakin and Arts Advisor at Golden Plains Shire Council, her research, practice and work have a focus on public art, public engagement and community participation, sculpture, installation and painting. She has had several international residencies in Paris, Scotland and Canada funded by the Australia Council, University of Alberta, Arts Tasmania and the University of Tasmania. As part of the collective The Rogue Academy, she has worked on site-specific public participatory artwork, with Amanda Shone since 2015.

Guest Faculty

Sharon Flynn and The Fermentary (Collaborator)

The Fermentary is the culmination of a life-long passion of Sharon Flynn, author of Ferment for Good and Wild Drinks. Since 2014, the Fermentary has been primarily a manufacturer of award-winning sauerkraut and kimchi, supplying Australia’s best restaurants and shops.

Michael O’Brien recently completed a Masters in Design at the Hong Kong Polytechnic University. His most recent work is entitled ‘Exploring The Drilosphere’ Vermi-mediation and the socio- cultural drilosphere.

Paul Balassone is the Heritage Advisor Aboriginal Engagement & Community Connections, Melbourne Water and advocate for the arts.

Peter Kissonergis is the Location Manager at Melbourne Water and advocate for the arts.

Markus Wernli works on communities of flourishing—the prototyping of pluriversal, social arrangements, that explore more regenerative, ecologically entangled ways of living, householding and designing. Markus currently works as a Research Assistant Professor at PolyU School of Design (Hong Kong).

Join Public Art Commission for an online conversation reflecting on works commissioned and presented as part of the Treatment III program from 17 March – 30 April, 2023.

Presenters will include lead artists, collaborators, heritage experts, and co-curators Cameron Bishop and David Cross.