Launch: Thursday 23 February 2023, 5.30–7.30pm
Dates: 24 February – 25 March 2023
Times: Tuesday – Friday, 10am–5pm and Saturday 10am–2pm
Workshop: Ecological grief – a space for Lament with Julia Adzuki. Saturday 25 February, 10am–1pm. Learn more.

How do we practice the rites and rights of Nature? Can we touch sense the sentience of trees? Does the fallen forest still resonate?

Styx Lament took place in an area of clear felled old-growth forest in the Styx Valley in November 2019, as a collaborative and embodied approach to environmental grief. A performance ritual exploring listening and lament as acts of sonic activism, rendering the senses receptive to place, exploring relations of care at a site of destruction.

The process began with a song, calling ancestors together with Ruth Langford at LongHouse. Followed by plant mediations, Skinner Releasing (somatic movement) and Deep Listening practices with SymbioLab. A group of 17 people joined in a 2 day ritual of movement, meditation, listening and sharing stories in the Styx Valley, between tall trees and logging coups. Carrying the body of a felled tree, slow walking to the end of the road, sitting in a circle on the stump of a sentinel, there was grief and an immanent sense that the forest still holds us.

A collaborative artistic process led by Julia Adzuki together with Patrick Dallard, Lisa Flack, Luke John Campbell, Rodrigo Diaz-Icasuriaga, Anna Wylie, Katrina Schlunke, Raku Pitt, Clare Pitt, Sara Wright, Tresa Briscoe-hough, Amalia Patourakis, Pema Choo, Sue Stack, Amy Barrows and Warwick Lloyd Mauger ‘daynu’.

Filmed and recorded by Tomas Björkdal in the Styx Valley.

Sound sculptures with Musk Daisy Bush and Eucalyptus regnans charcoal by Julia Adzuki and Patrick Dallard. Film editing and multichannel sound installation by Tomas Björkdal.

Proudly supported by Moonah Arts Centre, the Swedish Arts Grants Committee and Viriditas Foundation.