A dark room is so much more than it first seems. With patience and curiosity, it will come to life. In between four walls is a Cuban household, filled with objects passed down over generations that hold memories of the hands that kept them. As one walks through the room and interacts with its objects, the space begins to come alive. Visitors will take their own time and make their own way through the quiet evidence of a lived-in space, uncovering hidden moments waiting to be found.

Over the course of the piece, a clock runs a day in fast forward, and the room shape-shifts from the 1980s to 1990s and onwards, slowly, steadily, almost unnoticed. Time moves differently here. It is a piece that lives in the in-between, in the narrow space that treads the line of physical and virtual and in the cracks that separate days, years and decades. And it is precisely this in-betweenness that cultivates portals and the possibility of walking through a door and into a past waiting to be touched.

Dana Melaver

“Are we still in normal life or is this emergency life?” asks Tom, one of the protagonists. A flood separates a life in two – one before and one after. In this work we encounter people affected by the 2022 floods in eastern Australia, as they recall the moments in which everything changed. Described through miniature rooms, the piece recreates lost objects and spaces, rooms formed of memories. Beautifully and consciously crafted, the piece invokes a creative approach that radiates care, for participating collaborators, for audiences, and in the making process.

The project, centered on a virtual reality experience and including augmented reality components as well as workshops, was created in collaboration with people affected by the flooding. As the project continues to grow, it becomes a living archive of restoration, reviving lost objects. Like ducklings reappearing after a flood, life – albeit changed – does go on.

Dana Melaver