Cover Image: Performers activate the salt map in Microfictions, surrounded by audiences who move freely through the warehouse space. Photo: James Nilson.

Microfictions, Vessel Contemporary Gallery

Vessel Contemporary has consistently sought exhibitions and performances that push the bounds of traditional exhibition spaces and challenge its audiences’ perceptions. Microfictions, hosted in Vessel Contemporary for this year’s Fremantle Biennale, is an artwork encompassing the ambitious thematic scope of mapping the everchanging state of the earth and human history.

An Australian debut in collaboration with the Fremantle Biennale’s SANCTUARY 25, Microfictions is an experiential performance piece by Himali Singh Soin and David Soin Tappeser, creatively known as Hylozoic/Desires. A series of these performances was held at Vessel Contemporary in Fremantle between 13 and 30 of November for the biennale’s program, as part of the event’s large-scale, site-responsive works.

Microfictions is a meditative and contemplative experience on the fluidity of ideas, memory, environments, technology, trauma and healing. Themes as expansive as these need a sturdy and clear artistic format to communicate them, and duo Hylozoic/Desires have found an innovative way to do them justice.

The artwork is based around a sand mandala, whose shape is determined by a green outline projected onto the floor, representing the changing landmass of Pangea, the supercontinent of all Earth landmasses from millions of years ago. As time passes, the outline of Pangea slowly morphs, eventually taking the shape of an imagined series of landmasses in Earth’s distant future. 

A group of performers dressed in black move white sand, crushed limestone, salt, gold flecks, camel hair and cuttlefish with a series of tools to fit within these outlines, mimicking the movement of tectonic plates over thousands of years. Accompanied by an abstract soundscape of poetry and instruments, which simulate the rhythms of time and the Earth, the interconnectedness of all these elements is the method by which Microfictions explores philosophies of cultural, ecological and technological pasts and futures.

I attended the final performance of Microfictions, where the audience was encouraged to participate, moving the sand and objects around the evolving mandala to match the outlines of the landmass. I swept the sand into place, becoming Mother Earth, and lay in the hammocks strung up around the space as time passed and the land changed beneath me. I found I was thinking about ideas larger than myself, of the sheer scale of this grand design, the existence I am a part of. This is what Microfictions excels at, accessible cosmic perspective.

Microfictions gives the audience permission to contemplate enormous ideas in a space that seems removed from space and time. It puts into perspective your existence within the maelstrom of creation, of the universe, and the infinite intermingling elements that come together to create life as we know it.

As this is Hylozoic/Desires Australia debut, I sincerely look forward to future performances of this calibre return to Perth, ones with the capacity to challenge the bounds of existence and imagination.