Video stills from my exhibition, The last few months I really thought I wanted to be alone, but now that I’m alone, I realise I don’t want to be alone anymore. 

This exhibition is based on the last flamingo in Australia, but is more generally about a multi-faceted aloneness. It combines online data and expressions of aloneness, songs made from interview recordings (with music written and recorded by Tamara Violet Partridge), narrative, synthesiser, zoo habitat and many shade of flamingo.

You can read a rather lovely essay written by Miles Campisi here.

On the last day of the exhibition, I received this email:

hi kim i stumbled on your installation about the alone flamingo today. i was with friends and we were talking about what has been going on in our lives in the few weeks since we saw each other so i wasn’t really paying so much attention at first. but we sat down to talk more and i started watching the films more closely and worked out what was going on. i’d had some valium earlier so the videos were really mesmerising to me. somehow it really resonated. i feel alone a lot of the time & it’s usually ok, but recently i spent a single night with a man i’ve known a while, we were in unbroken physical contact of some sort for maybe 6 hours, feet on top of feet, back to back, breath in hair. for the first time in a long while i didn’t feel alone, not in a romantic sense, i just had something anchoring me to the world. there’s too too much in the way for it to happen again, but he won’t stop talking to me & I feel more alone than ever. so i sat there watching your films today and realised i feel like the flamingo rejecting the mirror. (used with permission from Elly Smith)

 

 

lyrics inspired from interviews with:

Elke Prielipp, Steffen Kalauch, Yaron Meron, Emily Munro, Amelia Swan, Franzi Weidle, Zac Gillam, Nic Spunde Kristen Tytler, Sharon Greenfield, Peta Murray, Helen Sullivan, Kim D’Amazing, Paul Jeffery, John Thorburn, Ann Thorburn, Andrea Gargoczia, John Dunn, Judy Dunn

works:

Forever Alone/Heat Lamp: video with text spoken by computers and taken from Reddit Forever Alone and anonymous dating profiles, synthesizer by Kim Munro

Flock/Heat Lamp: video with soundscape by Tamara Violet Partridge

Home Pond: video with song Solitude Threshold by Tamara Violet Partridge

Wish Fulfillment: video with song Being Alone by Tamara Violet Partridge

The loneliness of the long distance flamingo: a rare sighting of old pinky: video projection 

The Story: video with song Old & Alone by Tamara Violet Partridge