CF Presents X GroveMindz | FLOOD

CF Presents GroveMindz | FLOOD

One of Cement Fondu’s ongoing digital programs, CF Presents commissions visual and musical artists to collaborate on new and experimental digital offerings.

In 2023, we’re excited to launch our fourth installment of CF Presents, FLOOD, which will be presented in the BETTER NATURE Art + Events program in partnership with Golden Age Cinema.

“A harsh decade of unsettling factors in Brisbane’s far west has set in motion the blooming of a new style of movement; Flooding. A local dance style originating from Ipswich, QLD Australia, as a response to the 2011 Floods and Australian suburban lifestyle.

Flooding embodies distorted and grotesque characteristics that have grown from these experiences. A beautiful response to suburban lifestyle within challenging times.

Embark on an episodic digital journey, exploring Flooding in different environments. From the grotesque reality of Ipswich’s floodplains to the elegant possibility of movement.”

The new commission will be premiered at the Golden Age Cinema, Sydney on Thursday 16 November, and shared online via Cement Fondu’s IG, Vimeo, and here on our website. Stay tuned to see more!


 

FORAGE TO FEAST

Forage to Feast
Wild Edibles Walking Tour & Gourmet Tasting Menu
$65pp RSVP

Join us on Sunday 3 December as we forage for and learn about wild edibles in a guided walking tour, workshop, and dining experience led by one of Australia’s foremost foraging experts, Diego Bonetto.

Through the streets of Paddington surrounding Cement Fondu and into nearby Trumper Park, Trumper Pond and into the glorious surrounding parkland, Bonetto will teach participants about common wild edibles in the Sydney Basin area. From learning how to identify wild plants for soap-making or ointments to using botanicals in cordials and spirits, this foraging experience will reveal how the native and non-native species growing in your garden are used for food, craft and natural remedies. You will discover ways to safely harvest from the urban wild and enrich your diet with vitamins and minerals while learning solid skills in plant identification, re-learning old stories and paying respect to public and ancient resources.

Following the walking experience, you’re invited to join Marnee Fox, food designer, stylist, and chef back at Cement Fondu for a curated wild food menu of canapés prepared with the wild edibles from the area so participants can experience the plants they have foraged in their full culinary potential.

Please note: This event is a vegetarian tasting and that some items on the menu do contain eggs, dairy and nuts (not peanuts). Please come prepared to be outside in the summer sun with appropriate weather protection – we will seek to pause for foraging in the shade along the way.

From 3pm. Participants will be contacted prior to the event to confirm the meeting/start location.

Spots are limited! Purchase tickets HERE.

ARTIST X ARTIST | KIEN SITU X ASHLEY CHANG

ARTIST X ARTIST
KIEN SITU X ASHLEY CHANG

Join us for the final weekend of Earthen featuring an unmissable artist talk between BETTER NATURE artist Kien Situ and YouTube Cultural and Trends Lead, Ashley Chang.

Kien Situ is a multidisciplinary Asian-Australian artist based in Sydney. His practice spans architecture, sculpture, film and installation. With a thematic focus on ruin, distance and time; it exists to challenge, deconstruct and meditate on notions of space, heritage and identity as the ‘other’ in society. Reflecting on his Sinospheric background (Chinese/Vietnamese diaspora), he explores interrelationships between geography, matter and identity in his new commission for Earthen.

Ashley Chang is the APAC Culture & Trends Lead at YouTube. Prior to joining Google he was foundation Editor-in-Chief of digital pop culture publication Pedestrian.TV, Senior Editor of ABC iview and a Social Media Lead for ABC Television. He has been enlisted as a cultural expert for the Sydney Morning Herald, The Guardian, B&T and the ABC. He has written about pop culture for the likes of Dazed and Confused and Monster Children magazine and has appeared as a podcast guest for the likes of The Guardian, Audible Originals, Triple J’s Hack. He has delivered keynotes on the topic of digital culture on behalf of VidCon, Brandcast, Creators For Change, YouTube Festival, Re:Frame, UNSW, United Nations Development Programme, MusicNSW and Publishers Australia.

Free RSVP here.

ACOUSTIC ECOLOGIES | NIKI JOHNSON

In response to the mycelial forest Frozen Fungi by Victoria Pham in our Project Space, percussionist and composer-performer Niki Johnson will build an acoustic ecology out of the frozen artefacts through a live-sonic activation, bridging live music performance and art installation to create a sonic landscape unearthed from the depths of the soil and complex intertwine of mycelium threads.

Niki Johnson is a percussionist and composer-performer whose musical practice incorporates interdisciplinary collaboration, performance art, contemporary classical repertoire, and improvisation. She collaborates with fine-artists, and experimental musicians to create new artworks existing in the liminal spaces of art mediums. Niki holds a Bachelor of Percussion Performance from the Sydney Conservatorium of Music, and is a current PhD Candidate at Monash University. Her research explores percussionists’ collaborations with sculptors and designers, and the process of co-creating, and composing for new sculptural instruments.

FREE RSVP HERE

WORKSHOP | LIFE & LAND WITH RACHEL FARAG

Join Rachel Farag, co-curator of the BETTER NATURE Earthen Art Store, Life & Land in an intimate clay hand-building workshop to explore the transformative power of clay and relationships with life and land.

Farag, born in Egypt and raised in South Sydney, creates multi-sensory installations using ceramics, spices and soil to create memories, raise questions, be nostalgic, and reflect on experience and identity.

More information to come. No prior experience with clay required.

FREE RSVP HERE

SCREENING | GOLDEN AGE CINEMA

On Thursday 16 November, we are delighted to present MUDDY WATERS, a special edition screening at Golden Age Cinema for our 2023 BETTER NATURE Art + Events program.

In an evening dedicated to entangled relationships with the earth, from the banks of the Nile to the floodplains of Ipswich, we see bodies emerge from muddy waters to create, protect, release, and react, engaging earth as a living and generative co-entity.

Featuring Ali Cherri’s Cannes-selected film THE DAM alongside the new video series FLOOD by dance collective GroveMindz, the screenings will be followed by WATER MEMORY, an experimental hybrid DJ set by akka.

Presented in partnership with Golden Age Cinema.

Limited seats available. Purchase tickets HERE.

STREAMING SURROUNDS | TEMPORARY POSITION

Temporary Position brings Streaming Surrounds to Cement Fondu’s Better Nature program. Artists Zoe Baumgartner, Holly MacDonald, Oonagh Slater, and Mashara Wachjudy each navigate intimate and shared environments for a night of multimedia performances that traverse scales, temporalities, and perspectives.

By contrasting personal proximities against immense geographic and biological ecosystems, the artists highlight the multiplicity present in shared contexts. Streaming Surrounds places the dramatic and overlooked cycles of life side by side to reveal the parallels between personal and external worlds, in turn reflecting how systems of environments prompt our being.

Collaborating with individuals and communities, Temporary Position hosts IRL and URL happenings that explore alternative presentations of narrative. The project creates a meeting space for differing practices to instigate ideas, community making and conversations. Open and fluid in form and duration, Temporary Position takes shape as exhibitions, performances, screenings, workshops, and web residencies.

Zoe Baumgartner

Employing an understanding from both photography and design, Zoe Baumgartner’s practice strives to clarify and expand conversations of visual communication. Her practice investigates human and non-human relationships, interactions and reliances- exploring how they grow and develop, and why. In her slow form performance GRIND PRACTICE, Zoe will explore agency and inheritance through repetitive cast making, to mark and visualise how we absorb and release stress within our bodily environment.

Holly Macdonald

Holly Macdonald combines ceramic with installation, drawing, and interdisciplinary collaboration to explore the relationship between maker, material, and place. Holly approaches the ceramic process as a collaborator with clay. By following the material into often unknown sculptural outcomes, she aims to foreground material agency and remain open to what we might learn about ourselves and our world from working with a soft and responsive material such as clay. Who moves who in the moments when material and maker press together? Holly will be asking this question of clay through an extended performance of the ceramic process abstracted by somatic movement.

Oonagh Slater

Oonagh is a dance artist living and working in Melbourne/Naarm on Wurundjeri land. Her practice marries the poetics of mundane action with the expansive imagery of fiction and mythology. Deeply rooted in the body, her work contemplates memory, lineage, landscape, and intimacy. In her performance, Oonagh considers our ever evolving experience of time and the present moment in a world of documentation and surveillance. Returning to the body as a source that carries memory, place and fiction, she constructs shifting temporalities in the minutiae of a movement, a repeated arrival and a looping present.

Mashara Wachjudy

Mashara’s practice considers observations, thoughts, and feelings surrounding memory; archives; architecture; mythology; cross-cultural experience. She is interested in the meetings and intersections of these things and how these layered relationships can be translated. Thinking about layers and intersections of history, place and time, Mashara’s work looks at the archives we accumulate and collect and how we carry them with us.

FREE RSVP HERE

ARTIST X ARTIST | ROBERT ANDREW X LUCY BLEACH

Join us for a conversation between Earthen artists Robert Andrew and Lucy Bleach as they discuss their works and to launch our BETTER NATURE Art + Events program for 2023.

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.

Lucy Bleach’s art practice focuses on humanity’s enduring relationships to volatile environments by engaging with communities that directly experience such interactions and with scientists who monitor the earth’s motion. She generates artworks where processes are contingent on geological force and which anticipate their own ensuing instability and transformation. She works across sculptural forms, living elements, sound, light and moving image, and uses her practice to initiate unpredictable outcomes, investigate transitions of matter, and slow the process of material collapse.

Free RSVP HERE.

EARTHEN | EXHIBITION LAUNCH + ARTIST TALK

Please join us on Friday 13 October for the launch of Earthen our second annual BETTER NATURE Art + Events programAt 5pm, the program kicks off with an artist talk by Robert Andrew, followed by a Welcome to Country by Aunty Lola Ryan and launch proceedings.

In response to our time of ecological crisis, BETTER NATURE Art + Events embraces the complex entanglement of human and non-human worlds. Each year, BETTER NATURE explores different ecological ideas from a more-than-human perspective, challenging our prevailing human-centric paradigm to create moments of collective clarity and hope.

In 2023, BETTER NATURE embraces the theme Earthen, turning our attention to the world beneath our feet. It presents an exhibition of ground-breaking artists from across Australia as the central node in a network of events, workshops, screenings and activations.

Through newly commissioned and site-specific works, the exhibiting artists engage earthly materials in processes that transform, transmute, impress and uncover, revealing intangible ideas, energies and cultural stories.

From contemporary dance, music and talks to hands-on experiences with wild edibles and ceramics, the Art + Events program brings together diverse ideas within a ‘compost’ of creative practices, offering inspiring ways to break down the perceived separation of humans and earth.

FREE RSVP HERE