and the earth sighed

and the earth sighed description

Everything it seems is “immersive” these days but this amazing installation strips the word of its buzz: just watch the kids sliding about on the gallery floor as they ‘swim’ in hyper-real ocean projections or grown-ups kicking the virtual sand as they stride across deserts.

Josephine Starrs and Leon Cmielewski are Australian visual artists whose work sits somewhere between cinema, aerial cartography and sublime landscape photography. They are passionate about presenting the land and oceans as spectacular living organisms and showing the impact of human intervention on fragile environments. The work’s beauty not so much masks as gives urgency to their trenchant political agenda.

In and the earth sighed large scale floor projections of dynamic imagery filmed from drones, and embedded with symbols and text, focus on delicate environmental interfaces: the areas where climate change is observable in real time. Lands lost to the desert or fending off the relentless encroachment of sand or fire or rising sea.

Presented in partnership with the South Australian Museum, and the earth sighed is a beautiful, moving free Festival event for everyone.

Exceptional…Their work is at the crossroads of cinema, visualization of information and data mapping, and creates contrasts and tensions between small and large screens, and between cold texts and enchanting landscapes photographed by satellite.

Wall Street International Magazine

For the audio version of this event page, click here.

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Produced by Julianne Pierce
Audio design by Alex Davies

Thanks to Marko Peljhan, C-Astral Aerospace Slovenia, with the support of the Ministry of Culture of Slovenia. Mike Manning, Synergy Positioning Systems NZ. Shannon Hurley from Australian Marine Conservation Society for use of Dean Miller footage.

This project has been supported by a Creative Australia development grant from the Australia Council’s Emerging and Experimental Arts.

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