PEDESTRIAN BRIDGE OVER LA TROBE STREET | MELBOURNE CBD

IN-SITU DRAWING / SITE MAPPINGS – INSTALLATION – PERFORMANCE – SOUND – TEXT

Performed on opening night of State of Design Festival

Concept, drawing and installation: Caroline Vains

Performance: Caroline Vains and Charlotte Alexander

Ecstatic Relationality and Window Shopping was a multi-media performance installation conceived for Melbourne’s annual State of Design Festival’s opening night in 2010. Initially, I used red electrical tape to inscribe/draw experiential site mappings onto glass walls on either side of the pedestrian walkway that connects two mega shopping centres in Melbourne’s CBD (Melbourne Central Shopping Centre and Myers Shopping Emporium). Fellow performer and daughter, Charlotte Alexander, and I then performed a critique of consumer culture sitting in front of these site mappings, and facing each other on opposite sides of the walkway.

As inferred by the title, Ecstatic Relationality and Window Shopping, the installation documented a mother-daughter shopping trip taken in Melbourne Central a few weeks earlier. It traced out the various relational experiences of the trip as recalled by both parties, and maps them into a new site.

During the performance, we cut off the labels of two suitcases full of clothes and laid them out to document the geographies of manufacture. Audio recordings featuring Charlotte’s and my voices narrating our respective accounts of the shopping trip (emotional, experiential, sensory, anecdotal, etc.) played behind us as we ‘worked’. (This idea was a development of the ‘sweat-shop action’ presented by Prof. Dr. Jane Rendell, from Bartlett University, U.K., during her site-writing workshop. Refer dedicated tab for more on this symposium).

Top photo shows view through one of the site mappings out to the city and street below photo by Caroline Vains