We caught up earlier in the week with local musician and Radical Ecologies artist Mei Saraswati to talk about our upcoming exhibition and her part in it. Mei is a local Perth artist who is interested in the interconnectedness of the environment throughout time and place.
What is your understanding of ‘Radical Ecologies’ as a concept?
Communities within our world who take leaps or chances for the sake of evolution (spiritually, materially, sexually).
How does your work fit in with these ideas?
Thinking of your tears as dinosaur urine, once upon a time. The boundaries of our bodies and nations and time constantly being broken by the fluidity of water. With the existence of water, humans are apart of nature – not separate from, like we’ve been acting lately, in western society. So a energy shifts and changes, cannot be eternally compartmentalised. Likewise our thinking should be the same, not in boxes but regarding the world as both our habitat and family.
Can you tell us a bit about this project/your new record?
Movements samples a puddle on a porch on Charles street during down pour, a tap dripping in Tapping and water swirling on the Swan River.
Water Travel samples memories of water from… travels. From a stream near the Baha’i temple in Tiapapata (Samoa), to a geyser in Rotorua, (recorded after my Ah Mah’s funeral), to a spring on Penang Hill whilst on a family reunion hike, to kayaking on the Swan River in Maylands and finally the underwater invertebrates in lake Joondalup on a very windy day.
Check out Mei’s new track O Sea of all Bestowals from her album Devotion:
https://meisaraswati.bandcamp.com/track/o-sea-of-all-bestowals
