LANDRELATIONS Tricia Flanagan

Landrelations is an exhibition of experimental media and performative artefacts. Tricia Flanagan’s speculative wearables and organic environmental devices, visualised in her video artwork, reveal the intelligence of natural systems across the Brigalow Belt Bioregion. In the 360-degree exhibition experience, the artefacts and cultural probes interact with trees and trace biodata at macro and micro scale ecologies. Weaving invisible data with tangible material artefacts immerses participants into relations with land.

Wearables and artefacts can be displayed as highly-crafted sculptural objects in a gallery context, and can be performed and enacted to gather fresh data in each outdoor location. The exhibition tours a 360-degree projection cylinder on a purpose-built trailer. This art/science/technology experience of country aims to develop critical consciousness in the social imagination and ‘plant seeds’ for transition to biosphere regenerative practices.

Landrelations leverages the findings and outputs from Tricia Flanagan’s Creative Australia Research Fellowship that sought to investigate the Brigalow Belt South bioregion, the rich biodiverse vegetation corridor which once ran half the length of the east coast of Australia. The fellowship traced remnant Brigalow and companion species across NSW. An immersive 360-degree projection situates viewers in a virtual landscape and takes the audience on a journey across the legendary Brigalow Belt from macro to micro scales, visualising alternative critical and speculative design futures for plant/human interaction.

By exploring the experience of plants, a life-form so divergent from our own that we barely recognise it as alive at all, we begin to see our own existence in a new light and question our relationship to the world we inhabit. The transition to sustainable futures must involve diversity of knowledges and values. Tricia Flanagan’s human-plant interaction methodologies engage other-than-human agencies as co-designers for future ecologies. The aim is to build ecologies of empathy for other-than-human entities by leveraging the agency and capacity of biological organisms, using hybrid design and craft approaches driven by eco-perspectives.

An ongoing commitment to developing Landrelations posits an exhibition format and extended curatorial strategy designed to evolve and regenerate in relational engagement with each environment on the tour. The exhibition caravan situates a virtual ecology in the context of the natural world, positioning the viewer in the interstices, fostering deep-listening and engagement with the land. Using hybrid design and craft approaches the project showcases speculative wearables and organic environmental devices to reveal the inter-corporeality of co-species.

The ethic of listening deeply to make visible such intangible landrelations informs the ongoing creation of artefacts on site. These exquisitely crafted artefacts act as cultural probes to imagine alternative critical and speculative design futures for plant/human interaction. The Landrelations Tour uses a novel visualisation platform – a portable rear projection cylinder housing five configured projectors in a designed touring trailer to take the exhibition back to regional and remote communities where it was conceived and extends the trajectory north and south to reach audiences interstate.

The exhibition caravan situates the multi-media video cylinder as a virtual ecology in each location, extending the content for the participant to foster relationships in conversation with the land. The exhibition format will evolve and regenerate in relational engagement with each environment, local materials and networks of communities. Exposure to global innovation in the arts/science can link local knowledge and creativity. This will encourage and support, social and cultural development in regional communities and further develop partnerships and networks to incubate ideas relevant to each community.

The vision of the Landrelations Tour is to germinate an ever-expanding network of practices, entangling the ethics of making and critical ecology's themes. Images of works featured in the Landrelations exhibition are available at: https://triciaflanagan.com/works/

• SHADOW TREE

• WARRUMBUNGLE, KAPUTAR AND TOWARRI TARTANS

• FIBRE TO ROPE (Durational performance)

• DUTHCHAS

• BIO-ACOUSTIC GLEANER

• RESPIRATION CIRCLE

• DYE SAMPLER

• BRIGALOW BELT (360 projection)

• TETE (Tree Energy Translator Empath)

• CYBORGANIC BW–V2