HOOKS AND SINKERS
By Jason Maling
Un Magazine Issue 2

The first thing we saw was a shuffling figure with slightly buckled legs hunched over a rickety old pram. As we drove a little closer we noticed a thick cord extending from the front of the pram and connecting to the back of another shambling figure. This one had a large strapped on metal frame that arched around the side of her head to a camera protruding just beyond her chin. You could be forgiven for thinking intensive care patients had been abandoned in the wilderness.

These characters had been walking non-stop since 5pm the previous evening. Their ramblings crisscrossed the city, then headed directly northwest, the orientation of the inner-city laneway from which their journey began. They had braved the outer suburbs in the late evening and broken through the depressive hours of the early morning to emerge into crisp sun-lit pastures way off the Melways. Myself and another colleague were the last-leg support crew for those on their last legs.

To Briele Hansen, “Walking is a physical manifestation of the ramblings of the mind.” The performative simplicity of walking non-stop from sunset to sunset in one direction could certainly have been a successful piece in itself. But to film the entire journey in one continuous shot, with the intention of editing it down to a 12 minute sequence, demands a curious sensitivity to both the limits of one’s body and technology.

When I met up with Briele to see a preview of the images that make up the final sequence for the installation A Lane Away (commissioned as part of the City of Melbourne’s Laneways) 2004, she seemed submerged and frustrated with the scale of the editing project. “I feel like I’m doing the walk five times over.”

This contradiction between the painstakingly static process of editing and the expansive freedom of the walk is a good example of the principal tension that pervades every facet of Hansen’s practice: from the conceptualizing, through the production, to the final installation. Experiencing her work is a little like fishing; an acutely mannered exercise in the ephemera of time and the unpredictable. Her use of technology is a well-considered fly cast into a deep pool of sensation. We the viewers sit comfortably on the bank eating the sandwiches. Hansen states that:

I am interested in creating a transitional experience, an experience that pulls one into the work, some kind of journey, but that also highlights one’s presence within the here and now. There’s a pull in the work between the alluring, the motion and rhythms and the actuality of the moment. By setting such defined parameters for generating the images, Hansen faces the difficult task of realising an experience for the viewer that both explains and transcends the concept. This duality must also be reconciled in the dislocation between a prolonged experiential stillness and a condensed, imaginative exit.

“I couldn’t anticipate what the process was going to do so my idea was to frame the activity within the technology and do the same again by transcending the technology through the content. I’m interested in the relationships between places and how our mind and our body can both separate and connect us.”

The final sequence is projected onto the back wall of Lush Lane, an inclined narrow, lesser-known alcove of the city. According to Hansen, as you look “up into this void between two buildings... the imagery will become an extension of the laneway. I want to absolutely immerse and transport people within the urban space but at the same time create a means of escape.”

‘Techno-pastoralist endurance art’ was what I thought as I watched the closing moments of the 24 hour walk. It was one of those unanticipated, godly moments. The closure was that the walkers ceased moving wherever they were at 5pm. Obviously Briele knew the sun would be descending; what she nor anyone else could have planned was that a few minutes before five, the walkers would turn around a bend – ascending onto a high plateau – and that the sun would descend behind a ridge of hills ahead at precisely that time. If A Lane Away goes halfway towards framing the sublimity of that moment it will be a unique and powerful work. The installation of A Lane Away will be visible in Lush Lane from dusk to midnight from 22 September – 12 December 2004.

Jason Maling is a Melbourne-based artist and writer.