Forest Keegel

Initial Contemplations. Saturday October 1st, 2022.

Klare Lanson

Orchestra of Extinction (2014–) is a creative showing of important work-in-progress, stemming from an ongoing collaboration between artists Forest Keegel and Amanda King. Initial contemplations are fixated here on the importance of slow creative collaboration, one that encourages a reinvigoration of process over object. Utilising annual residencies situated within Australian endangered habitats, they use enquiry-based research to highlight the impact of the dark colonial presence on both habitat and their vanishing species. The Malleefowl, Bush Stone-curlew, Powerful owl, Brush-tailed Phascogale, Thylacine, Tasmanian Devil and Alberts Lyrebird. And now we must also add the Koala. They all bear witness in the cellar of Edge Galleries as both survivors and ghosts of their lost terrain, ironically within a space used previously to build coffins and store the dead. This is a sad design indeed.

Through process-based engagement in walking, conversation, collecting, making, drawing, video, and sound capture, the work begins to consider the deep and damaging colonial mark making on the Australian landscape. Reconfiguring the collection technique of Cabinets of Curiosities, the artists begin to assemble an alternative wonder room; one that makes human centred entanglement with environment both highly visible and heard. It creates a darkly designed atmosphere to contemplate and acknowledge the upcoming anthropocentric ruin. The hacking of colonial découpage. The varnishing of history with plant and sap-based resins. A multisensorial conversation of sorts begins to emerge. Hybrid sculptural objects within the radio transmissions of the colonial cellar. A beautifully sculpted soundscape of habitat field recordings encourages quiet to become the new loud. The smell of dank stone remixed by the hydrosols of plant matter, a time-based essence that dissipates and is difficult to contain.

The beckoning of the radiogram and micro projections within speak not only as cluttered cabinet of curious colonial objectivity but also to the damage caused by human developed technology. The privileging of silence over sound in space as installative measure might also act as a signalling to the materiality of the digital, and the paradoxical role it plays in the environment’s continued and escalating devastation. The importance of holistic thinking. Our technological devices stemming from the radiogram, after all, come from the Earth itself. They are assemblages of elements, minerals, and resources in much the same way as any other manufactured object, and their production has profound effects upon environment, the Earth’s systems, and the people who make them. We must foreground the way in which technology is bound up with these planetary changes. We must notice, we must acknowledge, we must slow down, we must change.

Images of people interacting with the Orchestra of Extinction cabinets

PHOTOGRAPHER- Shane Carey- The Sensitive Shutter

Orchestra of Extinction photographs by Julie Millowick

Orchestra of Extinction - A contemporary interpretation of a Cabinet of Curiosities that highlights extinction and the vulnerability of threatened species. Conceived in 2014 by Forest Keegel and Amanda King as a decade long project, in which they do annual residencies in threatened species habitat. Where they record sound and video to emanate from old radiogram cabinets that are encrusted with residues of habitat, such as varnish made from plant saps and local beeswax. Each of these cabinets become an archive for a particular species forming a record of what King and Keegel have learnt about them through research, time walking and recording in their habitat and speaking with scientists and local experts. They never imagined koala would be added to the list or that the perils and threats to the biosphere would become so severe so rapidly. This showing of work in development at Edge Galleries 8-22 October 2022 was the first time the ensemble of cabinets has been exhibited.

Orchestra of Extinction Ensemble

Amanda King and Forest Keegel

1. Malleefowl, Leipoa ocellata Wotjobaluk Country-Little Desert and Wimerra/Mallee-VULNERABLE

1. Bush Stone-curlew Burhinus grallarius Dja Dja Wurrung Country Central Victoria ENDANGERED in Victoria

1. Powerful Owl Ninnox stupenda - Dja Dja Wurrung Country (Central Victoria) ENDANGERED in Victoria

1. Duan, Brush Tailed Phascogale, Phascogale tapoatafa tapoatafa - Dja Dja Wurrung Country Central Victoria VULNERABLE

1. Kaparunina, Thylacine/Tiger, Thylacinus cynocephalus Lutruwita takanya Tasmania EXTINCT

1. Purinina Tasmanian Devil, Sarcophilus harrisii- Lutruwita takanya Tasmania ENDANGERED

1. Alberts Lyrebird Menura alberti- Widjabul Wia-bal Country, Bundjalung Nation, (Terania Basin Night Cap Ranges Northern NSW) NEAR THREATENED

1. Koala Phascolarctos cinereus South East Queensland Bioregion Kabi Kabi Country  (Maroochy Bushland Botanical Gardens) CRITICALLY ENDANGERED Functionally extinct

First Sighting to Extinction

Photographs Julie Millowick