COVER IMAGE: Georgi Ivers (Left) & Michael Terren (Right) at the Mildand Junction Arts Centre Auditorium. Photo supplied

Repairian Livestream Event by Vahri McKenzie and Gemma Ben-Ary
Midland Junction Arts Centre Auditorium
September 28 & October 5, 2025

The Mandoon Bilya (lower Helena River) is a popular site in the eastern suburbs of Boorloo. Its winding course around Woodbridge offers walking trails, recreational spaces as well as graffiti ‘galleries’ beneath bridges and railway crossings. It is also an environment under stress. Decades of pollution, water extraction, and invasive species have left the site utterly degraded. Repairian, the project of Vahri McKenzie and Gemma Ben-Ary, addresses these concerns through a socially engaged practice. Their artistic enquiry – or ‘call to action’ as McKenzie terms it – foregrounds collaboration and interdependence with the human and the non-human.

Riparian is a term relating to riverbanks and adjacent wetlands. Repairian expands this definition to describe the artists’ efforts to ‘repair’ a lost bond with the environment. The project started with a residency at the Midland Junction Arts Centre (MJAC) in 2024 and has included community workshops, a visual arts exhibition, and thorough documentation online. One could regard the live-streamed performance as another aspect of this fluid form of presentation.

Repairian unfolds as an hour-long synchronous event. The footage, mixed by Georgi Ivers, is projected on a large screen and plays in conjunction with sound design by Michael Terren. Described as an immersive installation, Repairian weaves metaphors of ‘junk’, ‘graffiti’ and ‘weeds’ into a series of pieces ranging from the ritual-like to the outright prankish. Despite the low-res video quality, the deftly positioned phone cameras offer expansive views of the river banks. There are also close-up and hand-held shots that put audiences in media res with the performers.

A raptor-like figure emerges from an abandoned bridge structure. Its body is covered by a web of junk. Clanging, creaking, and groaning sounds mimic its crawling movements. A troop of performers is seen walking laboriously across a grassy expanse. Their bodies are tied up with meshes of trash which slow down their walk. Trash Trail is asequence that reoccurs throughout the work in different permutations. A non-sequitur takes us to a park where two Yoga practitioners show-off acrobatic moves. For them, the environment is a mere backdrop for the individualistic pursuit of wellness. Things get raunchier when they start using their bodies as ‘human paint brushes’,  wallowing in the ink spilled over their Yoga mats. Continuing the slapstick tone, Flash Mob Paste Up features youths in balaclavas covering a graffiti tag with wallpaper. It is a dynamic performance, with kinetic use of multiple cameras and propelled by Terren’s glitchy techno pastiche, perhaps a nod to the ‘monkey mind’ defacing the site so blithely. Despite a taut choreography, these two sketches seem a little overlong.

More nuanced is the inclusion of stories from community members. The recordings offer historical insights as well as everyday minutiae of their lives along the Mandoon Bilya. The final scenes are reminiscent of Terrence Mallick’s The Tree of Life (2011). Here the cast gathers for a folk-like dance in a clearing. Like in Mallick’s movie, the quasi-surreal scene seems to hint at new states of consciousness. Performers break the fourth wall and salute the audiences in what is a heart-warming coda.

The costumes and mise-en-scène imbue the settings with equivocal meanings however. Ben-Ary’s weed-derived linocut patterns and eco-inks are both attractive and troubling, as are McKenzie’s junk assemblages. The most compelling moments in Repairian have a process-driven quality, one that brings attunement or a relational engagement with the environment. Trash Tail, for example, has a self-generative premise that allows the artist to co-create with place; as the tails around the performers gather more junk, their attempts to walk become more intertwined with the site. With its kaleidoscopic yet straightforward narratives, Repairian offers a vantage point from where to consider the site’s complexity. It is a work with a hyper-local yet resonant scope, connecting viewers with what McKenzie regards as ‘a place close to home and close to my heart’.