‘ORO’ is a traditional circular Macedonian dance performed by elderly Macedonians who had worked at Ford factory. Its rhythmic (distinctive 7/8 rhythm base) depends on each individual working towards a collective dance. Dance was a way that Macedonian workers were relieved from the grind of manufacturing work, but this dance also resonates with the repetitive and relentless machinic pace. ORO reminds each generation of the ways lives are bound into a momentum of life and pragmatic existence.
In Sensory Portal 3 ‘ORO’ you enter a rhythmic soundscape, life size images of people dance -they dance around the walls and you stand in this small space 1200 X 2400 in the midst of an energised field. If there are two or more people you rub shoulders with the dancers on the walls. They dance around you (in the centre of the space) or you dance with them. ‘ORO’ brings ‘life size’ projection of a dance of past factory workers from the industrial periphery to the Town Hall forecourt. The closed interior enhanced active cultural exchange of projection and Geelong After Dark 2019 participants. The same lens of ‘otherness’ brings an artistic practice to industrial vacancy.
“ORO’s” cultural gaze and exchange links with works in Terrazzo (2019) and Terrazzo-Doge, and are interwoven with Mirjana Lozanovska’s traditional research on migration and architecture, with major public interest. The geo-cultural displacement and in-placement within ‘ORO’ as well as the three Sensory Portals created immersive interiors that were digitally produced but corporeally performed by participants. This mediation between the digital, the visual, and the corporeal is at play in many of Lozanovska’s works.
Public Viewing at Geelong After Dark May 2019.
Media and Promotional Material; 15,000 people attended GAD; CoGG
$6000. A photograph of this installation features on correspondence of staff from Arts and Culture CoGG.
https://www.geelongafterdark.com.au/2019-images
Original creative work and installation by Vacant Geelong team: Mirjana Lozanovska, Anne Wilson, Cameron Bishop, Akari Nakai Kidd.
