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Apparatus of Lost Identities

Part 1 Project 2024
Chiyuan Li
University of Sydney | Australia
The Apparatus of Lost Identities is an archive for stories of homesickness and longing embodying Sydney Harbour. A mobile theatre on a recycled barge, it carries performances from Sydney’s south shore to the north, where the Pacific Ocean backdrops the finale.

This harbour has witnessed countless odysseys of those from distant places beginning new, safer or fairer livelihoods beyond its shores, at the sacrifice of losing connection with their heritage. Here the land, water and all-encompassing beings within has been the traditional custodians’ home for countless millennia. Yet, this harbour is a chronicle of dispossession and loss of such cultures.

A multi-faceted retelling of homesickness is established by guiding audiences spatially astray as the theatre is adrift, a lost island in a myriad of peninsula, before reuniting against the clearing of the endless ocean horizon.

An intersection of spatial atmosphere and storytelling, the theatre going ritual is reconditioned into an exploration in ways empathetic space may give forgone stories a stronger voice.

Eventually, erosion of material too is a keeper of time’s passage. Exterior copper fades to green as decades come, creating a facade amnesia, a clock foregrounding the protection of narratives at risk of fading to history.


Tutor(s)

2024
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