Reading walking lithic bodies 2022

Take part in an intimate collective walk to different locations around Tallawoladah (The Rocks) with artist Bianca Hester.

Reflect on the entanglement of social and environmental forces in each place - and the way colonial inheritance, environmental crisis, evolution and extinction bind them together.

Combining listening, walking and tactile engagement, this event also draws on Hester's artistic process of making rubbings and castings of rock surfaces. New writing by the artist, along with extracts from her books Sandstone (2020) and Groundwork (2021), will be spoken in fragments by multiple voices as part of the journey.

The experience will culminate inside the MCA where Hester's installation Constellating bodies in temporary correspondence is on display. Reading walking lithic bodies responds to the volcanic field of Tamaki Makarau Auckland (where Constellating bodies... was made) and the sandstone geology of the Sydney Basin (where the work now resides).

This performance will be followed by a free book launch for Hester's new book Groundwork at the MCA at 11.30am.

Presented by the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia as part of Sydney Festival 2022.

About the walk

The walk will commence outside the MCA Forecourt and will move to multiple locations in The Rocks, up to Observatory Hill and back to the museum. Please be aware this performance involves walking on uneven cobblestone and narrow pathways, medium inclines, moderately steep staircases and grassy areas.

About the artist

Bianca Hester's art practice explores contested locations, particularly within urban domains. Through a combination of fieldwork, archival research, writing, studio production and performed actions, her work unpacks the multilayered histories and contemporary conditions of specific sites to examine ideas of social indebtedness and responsibility. The result is an expansive form of public art that brings together objects and documents, collaborators and participants in a durational process. Hester lives and works between the unceded lands of the Wodi Wodi people of the Dharawal Nation, and the Gadigal people of the Eora Nation.