ESSAY

by

CHLOÉ WOLIFSON

Like the figures in Peachey & Mosig’s film Finding our way in the dark, in recent years the community of Mount Victoria has grown accustomed to navigating darkness. Multiple natural disasters and the pandemic have left in their wake an extended lull, an eerie quiet with uncertain end. Now, a light flickers in the darkness, inviting the community to move towards it with hope. Lumière, Mount Victoria’s Festival of the Moving Image, seeks to reactivate this historic corner of the Blue Mountains. Moving image works by artists with a close connection to Mount Victoria (including members of Modern Art Projects Blue Mountains or MAPBM) responding to the threshold state of liminality the community currently exists in, will make themselves at home here for the duration of the Festival. From the historic rooms of Mount Victoria Manor, to the golden-age ambience of Mount Vic Flicks cinema, to shopfronts, nooks and crannies, Lumière invites visitors and the community to encounter moving image works in expected and unlikely corners. Lumière seeks to not only reactivate and rejuvenate Mount Victoria after a difficult few years, but to foster conversations between artists, audiences and artworks in the community.

The Festival has been conceived through artist commissions as well as mentorships of young people who live locally, via the Real-To-Reel Filmmaking Workshops and Mentorships. Students from Mount Victoria Primary School and Katoomba High School, working with artist Sean O’Keeffe, have produced Punarjanman, an original music video responding to the collective trauma of recent events with a celebration of resilience, hope and strength. The six inaugural trainees of Hotel Etico @ Mount Victoria Manor have worked with artist Cinzia Cremona to create the seven-channel video installation Under My Hat, a collaborative portrait uncovering shared personal interests.

Featuring artworks ranging from the newly commissioned to the historic, the festival takes place at venues built in the 19th century, reactivated now as spaces for contemporary art, on unceded land which has been in the traditional custodianship of the Dharug and Gundungurra peoples for tens of thousands of years. Moving image works are by their very nature time-based, and layered considerations of the relationship between time and place are central to Lumière. Fiona Davies undertakes intimate investigations of the liminal spaces of life and death, while Tom Loveday has a surreal take on the way humans adapt to a changing climate; Eloise Maree explores the ways photography and landscape function in the recording of memory and place, and Kenneth Lambert presents a visual and sonic distillation of a sci-fi cinemascape.

Inside the Pop-Up Horsebox Cinema, the animation Slices of Time: Eadweard Muybridge’s Cinematic Legacy, tells the story of the American photographer Eadweard Muybridge, whose pioneering photographic studies of motion, notably that of a galloping horse, ultimately led to the development of cinema. As Muybridge’s investigations attest, it is light emerging through darkness that brings a moving image to life. The works in Lumière draw this idea into focus in a multitude of ways, from Enrico Scotece’s sensory exploration of light and place, to the lighthouse in Yvette Hamilton’s video installation Hyper-radial, to the digital glitches of Naomi Oliver’s Viridescent shop window display, to the light that illuminates found, damaged 35mm slides in Beata Geyer’s Unformed.

Mount Victoria finds itself on a threshold after a series of difficult events, and Lumière is a hopeful vessel to carry the community into a rejuvenated state, to see their village in a new light.

@hungrylikethewolifson