OPEN HOUSE
Venue open: 12pm–4pm | Smoking ceremony: 1pm | Performance: 1.30pm
As part of Open House Melbourne 2023, the Grainger Museum will host a performance by Amos Roach, award-winning musician, dancer, director and proud Djab Wurrung/Gunditj Mara and Ngarrindjeri man. Alongside Roach’s performance will be sonic installations and performances by students from the University of Melbourne’s Faculty of Fine Arts and Music, and composers from the Melbourne Composers’ League. These collaborators have worked with Roach and musicologist, composer and flautist Johanna Selleck to respond creatively to the theme of Reimagining Landscapes and our connections with landscape and culture.
Students have also engaged with the Grainger Museum Collection through the archive of Henry Tate—an early twentieth-century Australian poet and musician who hoped to establish a school of Australian music founded on nation’s the unique landscape, flora and fauna. Birdsongs from this collection have been included in some of the compositions.
The Reimagining Landscapes project is a collaboration between Amos Roach and Johanna Selleck, and part of the Grainger Museum’s Creative Researcher in Residence program. The project centers on reimagining the physical, social and cultural ‘landscapes’ of the Parkville campus of the University of Melbourne, considering the flora and fauna that would have existed there prior to invasion and colonisation. Drawing on research by the University Sustainability Team and materials in the Grainger collection, the project also aims to facilitate discussions between First Nations peoples and environmental scientists in the spirit of knowledge sharing.
The Grainger Museum’s ongoing exhibition, Grainger Amplified, which immerses the visitor in the world of Percy Grainger’s original museum of the 1930s, will also be open to visitors during Open House Melbourne.
Presented in collaboration with the Melbourne Composers’ League and The System Garden at the University of Melbourne.
Collaborators
University of Melbourne’s Faculty of Fine Arts and Music Students:
Moses Kington-Walberg, Xiaole Zhan
Melbourne Composers’ League Artists:
Gary McKie, Ros Bandt, Dindy Vaughan, Hemi Titokuwaru, Birgit Holdinghausen, Jenny Game, Wendy Suiter, Allira Preuss
Download the Reimagining Landscapes Concert program here (PDF)