Midnight in Prahran
2012 — ongoing
It’s always six, Andrew says towards the end. The hallway wears an old-school clock, one that is stuck forever. I have to think of his son’s mother, how she’d lost her life. Alan dresses like it’s Sunday – vest and hat and all. He too speaks of the absence of a mother while we wait for birds. He tells me come along to dance class (over 65’s). There Aubray busts his moves like he’s still twenty, swinging two mad legs. I think of love and injury, how things are found and lost and found. Dancing defies the ghosts, they say, and time is time.
In winter, once the leaves have fallen, morning fogs come settling in. They bring with them a swallowing effect – the urban world, not mute but muffled and a bit drowned out. The chilly air then smells like fire, coffee and damp earth. When the local magpie sings on such a morning, over on the window tree, her call is loud and wallowing. You’ve heard? It comes in such assortment that your head explodes, seducing with a thousand faces.Drawing on a variety of media to find, collect and visualise stories from the suburb of ‘Prahran’, South of the Birrarung Marr (yarra river), Midnight in Prahran is a localised work about fabrics of a particular community. It is imaginary of a community in fluidity; a little like a never-ending puzzle or a humming swarm that is in constant motion, never static. Within this humming swarm, every thing wants to belong – the tear, the hope, the bird, the human. The stone, the tree and the dream.
