Making Connection: A Letter to Love and Territory

RMIT Mapping Future Imaginaries enabling impact research network - Making Connection program

The Making Connection co-labs take place at RMIT Melbourne 11-15 December 2023. Produced by the Mapping Future Imaginaries network, Making Connection explores the importance of creative encounters for social connection. Come and co-explore with artists, researchers and industry specialists how creative encounters build our relationships with place, and help design frameworks for making connection.

A Letter to Love and Territory

This co-lab performance maps the creative encounter of a public art sound performance located within the architecture of RMIT University Melbourne city campus. The performance utilises the sense of hearing to bring to the foreground the plight of Bornean southern gibbons whose intense territoriality puts them at particular risk of habitat loss because of deforestation. Gibbons and humans share the behavioural trait of singing, with the gibbon song most like human tone and pitch. This performance acknowledges that humans are primates who have evolved singing, but like gibbons, in this performance we sing and map territorial boundaries and identity.

Through the engagement with the lifelong work of artist Lisa Roet, who has been driven by the question “what is it to be human?”, this co -lab performance addresses environmental issues through the emotional encounter and mapping a call to action.

Grace Leone PHD Candidate, School of Architecture and Urban Design, RMIT University. Grace Leone is a transdisciplinary artist, designer, researcher, educator, and curator. Leone incorporates a range of fine art disciplines with extensive architectural knowledge to create works that question the relationship between art, the body, perception, and public space in evocative concepts. Her interventions concern the urban condition as understood through the reception of architecture’s language and image, while her object-based practice relates to a real time engagement between the body and city spaces.

Lisa Roet Artist, Alumnus, School of Art, RMIT University. Lisa Roet is a contemporary artist who for over three decades has been driven by the question ‘what is it to be human?’ Roet uses the image of the ape and monkey acting as the ‘mirror’ to humanity. Her extensive research into her subject matter and utilisation of a range of mediums and materials allows her work to explore environmental issues, genetic discoveries, and the evolving place of humanity within nature. Through an interdisciplinary approach to her artwork, Lisa has worked consistently with scientists, zoos, laboratories and museum archives worldwide, as well as field research in Borneo to develop her multi-faceted ongoing project. Roet’s work has been exhibited and curated in exhibitions worldwide including most recently large-scale public installations in Beijing, Hong Kong, Holland, and Singapore. These public installations depict newly discovered, yet highly endangered species of primates, and act as catalysts for discussions about the environment and humans place within our ever-growing urban world.

Hannah Dahlenburg. Australian- Canadian Soprano Hannah Dahlenburg is renowned for her performances as Queen of the Night, performing with a ‘sumptuous, beautiful tone, great strength and brilliance’ (Plays to See, 2017). She has performed the role to acclaim across Australia, the UK, Germany, Austria, and Switzerland, amongst numerous other roles. A frequent recitalist and soloist in Australia and Europe, she has a passion for the influence of recital programming and utilizing multimedia in her recitals. She has received numerous awards and scholarships in Australia and the UK and holds an MMus in Performance (RNCM) and BMus with Honours in Performance (UoM).

This performance generously supported by RMIT Culture