Engages,
Sandra Bridie and Melody Ellis Q & A Walking in the configuration of infinity
Dates: 2-3pm Saturday 22 May
Melody and Sandra discuss their project Walking in the configuration of infinity, which combined a series of Walkshops presented by members of nonfictionLab, a walking lecture and performance by Alice Cummins,and the inaugural Reading Room presentation at Bus.
Walking in the configuration of infinity presented a discursive and perambulatory exploration of the act of walking (or being unable to walk) from the perspectives of art, writing, performance, documentation and storytelling.
Bridie presented a library of reading material in the new Reading Room at Bus including some of her own publications on fictional walking artists. Melody collaborated with Francesca Rendle-Short, Brigid Magner, Peta Murray, Oliver Shaw, and Sholto Buck – all members of RMIT’s non/fictionLab on the delivery of three writing ‘walkshops’ that engaged participants in the question of how one might come to writing walking, or, walking writing? And what are the various intersecting creative, critical and political considerations that the term ‘walking’ might elicit?
Artist/curator Sandra Bridie has been walking and inventing fictional walking artists since 2004. This interest has inspired two actual long-distance walks – 800 kilometre across northern Spain in 2015 with her daughter Rubie, and 1200 kilometre walking solo across France and Spain 2018. She has also documented weekend wanders along the Merri Creek and a series of less than 5-kilometre walks around East St Kilda, abiding by the strictures of Melbourne’s second most severe COVID lockdown in 2020. Bridie’s fictions include Sandra Bridie b.1952: Ten Walking Meditations. …, the recent AB Hope, b.1990: Walking Grids, (Constraints of Time and Place), 2020, and Sandra Bridie: Walking in the configuration of infinity, 2015. 2020.
Melody Ellis is a writer and academic living on Boon Wurrung country, in Melbourne. Her work is preoccupied with an interest in subjectivity, the body, power, and place. She brings to her writing on these themes an attentiveness to critical theory, aesthetics and form. Melody is a member of RMIT’s non/fiction Lab and is a Chief Investigator on the Australian Research Council funded Discovery Project Connecting Asia-Pacific Literary Cultures: Grounds, Encounter and Exchange.
IMAGE CAPTION: Rubie Bridie, Sandra Bridie: Infinity walk in Galicia, Spain, 2015. Documentation of performance.
