DESKS will line Shoreham Beach next week as part of an interactive performance work. Artist Janenne Willis will host Nature Obituary at the beach on 3 August. She will invite audience members to sit down at the desks to pen obituaries to Mother Earth. Select pieces will then be read aloud by performers Willis, Tariro Mavondo, and Felicity Mashuro.
Willis said the performance will be an “opportunity to collectively honour the natural world, to collectively record natural history and to collectively grieve our environment lost”. “I’m deeply curious about what will come through when humans sit together in nature and write and listen about what is lost. There are healing and hopeful possibilities in that. It’s about reanimating nature as a means of enabling connection, relationship, and care,” Willis said. “This is a site-specific live performance with writing at its centre, which is one of the ways I have healed from heartbreak. I love art that defies needing to be any one form. Will people turn up to grieve?”
Willis is part of the Deep See Survey performance group. The collective’s season in 2024 consists of four live shows, four live workshops, and four poetry circles. It has received money from the Mornington Peninsula Shire’s performing arts fund to stage its program.
The free event will begin at Shoreham Beach at around 1.30pm on 3 August, and conclude at around 4.15pm. For more information visit deepseesurvey.com/nature-obituary.
First published in the Mornington News – 30 July 2024
