To Wander Off As Things Are Called To Order

In 2023, an unexploded bomb washed up in Perth; swimmers were evacuated and it was detonated hours later. In 2024, tar balls arrived on Sydney beaches; petroleum and plastics coagulated and brought to shore by the tide. In 2025, climate-change-fuelled algal blooms killed scores of the ocean’s residents along South Australia. Through the urban drainage systems of Naarm, eels migrate and reproduce beneath our feet. The presence of these phenomena feels reminiscent of myth, where the things that wash up portend or demonstrate the infinite unknown of the living systems we are embedded in. These phenomena are the catalyst for a new text-based performance work created by Andrew Sutherland and Noemie Huttner-Koros. In this era of climate breakdown, what do the things that wash up represent and how might we embrace these assemblages of our own creation? What are these hybrid things that in some way should not exist, and yet we feel a pull towards, in needing to recognise the mutant? What do these formations tell us about what we might become? If one of the consequences of colonial-capitalist society is our disconnection from the refuse & ‘trash’ (and the acceptance that certain places will be designated as ‘sacrifice zones’), then this work aims to understand how we might engage with these emergent objects, perhaps finding some joy in the strange, re-orienting our relationship to apocalypse, horizons and deep time.

Created by Noemie Huttner-Koros and Andrew Sutherland

Dramaturg: Julia Croft