Mammoth
The Anti-artifact projectHeidi Axelsen, Hugo Moline, Adriano Pupilli
Arduino, car parts, found objects
Cockatoo Island
Underbelly Arts
There is a huge object floating in Fitzroy dock of Cockatoo Island. It bobs gently, tethered by thick ropes, it looks as though it has long ago given up trying to escape, its head a nest of seagulls, its belly covered by weed. Around the perimeter of the dock stand a motley collection of other great machines looking on, arms broken, heads missing, pitted with rust.
The gargantuan machines of Cockatoo Island are a particular source of fascination for us. Awe-inspiring, mystic yet sad, somehow defeated, made redundant, slowly turning into museum pieces, like brawny old men feeling useless in retirement.
Our project seeks to engage with and resist their decline into sterilized artifacts by engaging with their enormous potential as imaginative infrastructures. Harnessing their massiveness, intricacy, specificity to generate a new relationship to these machines.
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Insomniac seagulls spray through the black night air as I wander the Docks Precinct where once-purposeful machinery - paragons of their era - now rust and hulk. There I encounter a crane that talks back. When you yell into a box at its base, the sound is returned from deep within the machinery's guts in bestial booms that carry muffled echoes of your own intonations.
Called Mammoth: The Anti-Artifact Project, this simple yet endearing work claims to "breathe life into the island's museum of broken-down machines".
Returning to Underbelly in Sunday's glorious sun, it becomes clear the best works are those like Mammoth that exist in synchronicity with the island - or are palpably inspired by it - rather than competing with it. Such site-specific artworks are nourished by The Lab, the two-week period in which artists develop their works on site.
Reviewed by Kate Hennessy. ‘Festival at its best when artworks are as one with the island’August 6, 2013 Underbelly Arts Festival
Complete August 2013, funded by Pozible crowdfunding
Links: SMH, Guardian
