Range/Terrain (January 23 – February 5 2012) is an on-site residency/lab at NORPA in Lismore NSW aimed at providing a creative environment for artistic exchange, risk, dialogue and engagement with the participating artists and the community in which they will reside. Participating artists are: Paschal Daantos Berry, Karla Dickens, Khaled Sabsabi & Tony Yap.

The project provides an open lab environment that emphasises cross art form engagements in consultation and collaboration with the local arts and non-arts community. By employing experimental and hybrid art forms and aesthetically diverse art practices, Range/Terrain seeks to generate innovative reconsiderations of genre and audience engagement.

Postcard from the participating artists

31/1/2012

Now I lay me down to sleep.  I thank all my good juju for the arts…....... on the 26th of jan. 2012 i spent the day with three of my brothers... Khaled born in Tripoli, Tony born in Malaysia and Paschal from the beautiful Philippines in down town lismore ...... creating a very trippy mutli-cultural peaceful protest based on a universal spirit ..... there were a number of soggy shoes due to heavy rain fall ...... but i'm pleased to say nobody was hurt .......Karla Dickens, Facebook Post 27 January 2012

We arrived in Lismore in a deluge of rain.  There are four of us.  All from very different lines of enquiry.

We arrived the week of Australia Day.   There wasn’t much fanfare around.

This residency has been about conversations.  Our first reference was a chance meeting with elder Burri Jerome, and he talked about the hairy man of Nimbin.  His story was linked to the river and the land formations.  Tomorrow we’ll speak to Digby Moran. And Lorraine Brown.  All elders.

The river keeps rising.  Khaled hasn’t used his fishing gear, yet.  We all keep eating.

And for some reason we keep looping – in our daily discussions and night chats – about the idea of spirit, absence, culture, heritage, water, numbers that recur and intersect and the rainbow that defines this region. This stuff is difficult to make flesh. But we have been playing.  Art forms often collide and connect.  It’s still a conversation.   The end of this will become something else.  And we think we have only really arrived at the beginning.

It’s about dreaming big, to look at the possibilities of the terrain and the textures.  We talk of soundscapes by the river.  Mystics in the forest.  Taking over a shop with a sign that says Colony Bar – and just imagine what you’ll see there.

Images credits (top to bottom of page):

Video still Tony Yap by Khaled Sabsabi; Improvisation between all artists.  Photograph by Karla Dickens.; Tadpole by Karla Dickens.

Kultour's Range/Terrain has been developed in partnership with NORPA - Northern Rivers Performing Arts and supported by the Australian Government through the Australia Council for the Arts, its arts funding and advisory body.