CLOSING EVENT 4 – 6 pm, SUNDAY 11 FEBRUARY 2024.
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It began as a vague sense of unease, unconnected to anything in particular. Ordinary objects of the built environment began to take on a threatening demeanour, looming over the bright and baking streets.

Then, one day, the children disappeared. An entire city of empty beds. Each child had left a note: ‘gone underground – stay safe’. Their bedsheets were gone too…

The Dance of the Remediators is an archive of a possible future; a materialised dream sequence of people being called into action by coal’s humble living relatives. 

A base-camp is constructed for a revolution of intimacy, patience and vunerability. An expedition is planned to uncover dark-hard-coal’s ancestral softness. By recalling coal’s long photosynthetic memory, can we salvage the future?

Here, at the edge of climate calamity, the domestic-left-over, the soft-and-slow, the fragile and care-full are made mighty. This work prototypes earnest and absurd devices, gentle megastructures and everyday actions, for remaking the world through care, play, wonder and hope.

ABOUT HEIDI & HUGO

Heidi Axelsen and Hugo Moline are a collaborative creative duo working between the discursive criticality of arts practice and the applied, spatial and urban scales of architecture and design. Axelsen and Moline’s work is deeply site specific: typically being generated by long-term collaborations with particular places and the complex overlapping communities who dwell and pass through them and experiments with forms of speculative fabulation and forms of grounded community-based research and social process.

Their work critically examines the current ways in which the world is arranged and why are the things our lives depend on the most (eg. plant life, or care work) so undervalued. As a response to these questions they make work which speculates on other ways of organising ourselves or relating to others and build fragments of these other worlds, tools, furniture, shelters and systems which may enable these alternate relations to flourish.

Heidi and Hugo have been living in Newcastle since January 2022 and prior to that were based in Katoomba, Blue Mountains. Their work is strongly influenced by these two places and the contrast between them. You can learn more about their work here. 

Hugo Moline is a lecturer in Architecture at the University of Newcastle.