In October 2021, I took place in an online international residency project called Wild Ways, curated an facilitated by The Museum of Loss and Renewal (Tracy Mackenna & Edwin Janssen, Collemacchia, Italy) and The Walking Library (Misha Myers, Melbourne and Dee Heddon, Glasgow). Participants included practitioners and researchers working across creative disciplines and those who have a strong interest in the investigation of and relationship to site and place.

 

I collaborated with Clare McCracken, a mixed-media conceptual artist and writer working on the unceded lands of the Woi Wurrung and Boon Wurrung language groups of the eastern Kulin Nations.

 

We walked at the same time (Australian evening/UK morning), Emily across the streets of West London and Clare across her apartment in inner-city Melbourne, while she was quarantined due to COVID over 16,900km away. As we walked, we used WhatsApp to share photographs of the sights we saw and audio recordings of ambient sounds and readings from Ursula Le Guin and Virginia Woolf. I made a series of works in response to this, which culminated in a brief audiovisual work, Throwntogetherness :

 

 
 

 

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‘What is special about place is not some romance of a pre-given collective identity or the eternity of the hills. Rather, what is special about place is precisely that throwntogetherness, the unavoidable challenge of negotiating a here-and-now (itself drawing on a history and geography of then and theres); and a negotiation which must take place within and between both human and nonhuman […] We come to each place with the necessity, the responsibility, to examine anew and to invent.’

Doreen Massey, 2005, For Space. London: Sage. 140/169