Photo: Artist supplied
Angela and Holly met in 2015, when Georgie Meagher, the director of Next Wave at the time, connected Angela, a festival artist working on a piece called Desert Body Creep, with Holly, a writer and artist working at Next Wave as an associate producer. Next Wave has a strong track record of employing artists as producers and in other roles, which means that the parameters of the artist-producer role can be more fluid and surreal than they might be in other organisations.
Angela was reading Reza Negarastani’s Cyclonopedia, teaching herself puppetry with a giant gummi worm, and thinking about plot holes as speculative terrain rather than narrative flaw. In the two year cycle of the Next Wave Kickstart development program through to the Festival, Angela and Holly worked closely, uncovering affinities in their work and developing a friendship in the process.
From there, they started working together on Uncanny Valley Girl (UVG), a work that Angela had started developing at Firstdraft (2015) and Vitalstatistix (2016). Alongside musician/producer Corin Ileto, Holly came on board as a writer and co-researcher, though it was unclear how writing would be incorporated into UVG, a solo choreographic work, and Holly was studying at Strelka Institute in Moscow at the time. Nevertheless, what was clear was Angela and Holly’s desire to work together more closely, that this was the right team, and that the details around format could be worked out through the process. In the meantime, both Angela and Holly were curated into a show called Rogue Agents, curated by Auto Italia, an artist-run gallery in London, that was presented at Firstdraft in Sydney. Holly organised for two performers, Athena Thebus and Jana Hawkins-Andersen, to perform a reading of her text Have the Dusk Deepen (after Anne Carson), at Firstdraft, while she flew from Moscow to Los Angeles, a Strelka field trip. Angela collaborated with Bhenji Ra on the performance NRG, presented on the basketball courts that overlook Firstdraft. Linda Dement, the cyberfeminist artist and programmer, was also exhibiting in Rogue Agents.
Angela toured Desert Body Creep to New York, and on the way back to Sydney arranged for the layover in LA to be extended so she could visit California’s Death Valley, a surreal experience that drifted and morphed its way into Uncanny Valley Girl. Throughout the time in Death Valley, Angela and Holly, back in Moscow, spoke, and Holly took notes on some of the conversations they had, and sometimes ran them through Markov chains to blend human expressions with the voice and processes of the non-human, in order to develop something like an uncanny valley of machine-assisted language in poetry. Linda Dement came onboard to create a code which performed Holly’s text, on two screens, during the performances of UVG in Sydney, Helsinki, Utrecht and Bristol. UVG premiered in Melbourne, and Holly had just moved to the Netherlands. That summer, Holly presented a human-read version of the Uncanny Valley Girl poem-in-development at Trust, as part of a night of readings she co-hosted with Lukáš Likavčan called Just to be Clear.
Up to this point, Angela and Holly had worked the whole of the development of UVG by distance, across fluctuating time zones, until Holly came to Australia for the lead up to the performances of UVG in Sydney, where last minute UVG merch was made before the first performance, a white t-shirt saying “a flock of flocks of flocks of flocks,” and a peach crew t-shirt stating “Code’n’Echo Valley” in a Coca-Cola font, signage installed on the venue doors which read “Ice the handle, Twist for more”, and Angela was encouraged to sing some of the lines from the Uncanny Valley Girl poem, which Corin added to her compositions for the work. While in Sydney, Holly also presented Hydrangea, an installation collaboration with J.G. Biberkopf, at Firstdraft and at the Conservatory in Fitzroy Gardens, in which Angela’s voice can be heard at the beginning, recorded as the welcoming, system voice inviting audiences to find a comfortable position for the duration of the performance that was about to start. This introductory system voice was inspired by a self-help seminar Holly noticed in Yes, Man (2008) starring Jim Carrey.
Back in the Netherlands, at Extrapool in Nijmegen, in an event organised by Annette Knol around philosophy, language and image, Holly explained the process behind making the Uncanny Valley Girl poem then caught the train back to Amsterdam and went to sleep. In 2019, Angela had an artist residency in Paris and Holly was still in Amsterdam. They were in the same time zone again, and wanted to continue working together, on a new collaborative project, but what? Holly came to Paris and they made a mind map of thoughts, interests, and ideas for potential new works, using lots of little post-its and stickers on the back of a roll of wrapping paper found in the store room of the Australia Council’s Cité Internationale des Arts studio.
Both were invited to perform at the opening event of a newly-founded bookshop and project space for performance and publishing in Brussels, called *rile, run by Chloe Chignell and Sven Dehens. Angela performed Body Loss and Holly read a text called Confetti. They then drove back to Paris together, stopping along the way at a castle surrounded by lush trees and grass, under a light rain drizzle. Angela travelled to Amsterdam that summer, and stayed in a student accommodation building that Holly lived in as well. They worked at Jacuzzi, an artist-run dance space in a warehouse in the centre of a residential block, secluded, hidden, and surrounded by passion flowers and bees, in the red light district, as well as at the university library in the center, and at the goat farm in Amsterdamse Bos—learning from creatures who effortlessly scale cliffs. Cliffhanger began to take form and they held a small work in progress presentation at Jacuzzi that was attended by every artist who had decided to stay in Amsterdam over the summer.
And now our time zones are just 30 minutes apart, and we are separated by a proximity = transmission viral pandemic that has also solidified into chunks of policy. We are again working apart collaboratively, on screens and in cars and also staring out the window. Stretching and growing our research branches, in preparation for developments in late 2020, including EXPAND at The Mill in November.