I acknowledge and pay respect to custodians – past present and emerging – on Dharawal land where I live and conduct this creative practice. I extend this respect to all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people. Sovereignty never ceded.

Bianca Hester

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Bianca Hester is an artist, writer and educator engaged in place-based practice through artistic research. Her work investigates entanglements between colonial inheritance, extraction, environmental crisis, evolution and extinction evident within locations across the Australian continent. Employing relational feminist methodologies, she combines experimental fieldwork, engaging the geologic record (in archives and in situ), embodied site-writing, sculptural production, collaboration and performed actions to develop projects that unpack the material conditions of specific places, resulting in an expansive form of public art unfolding in dialogue with a range of interlocutors and participants.

Please leave these windows open overnight to enable the fans to draw in cool air during the early hours of the morning Australian Centre for Contemporary Art - Helen MacPherson Smith Commission
(2010)

5th August 2010 - 26th September 2010

Please leave these windows open overnight to enable the fans to draw in cool air during the early hours of the morning, was a major project that assembled architectural appropriations, sculptural objects, props, and sequences of actions into a staging of dynamic encounters between the architectural site, materials, forms, and bodies both human and non-human. A cohort of participants were invited to perform scripted actions at scheduled and random moments throughout the exhibition’s duration, alongside invigilators who documented events on camera’s integrated within the installation. As the work was engaged, traces of activity accumulated and were threaded back into the work over time.

Notes on stalling by Andrew Benjamin is here.

This conversation by Terri Bird and Tom Nicholson is here.

Five points of view by Bianca Hester & Charlotte Day is here.

Participants and performers in this work include:
Ardi Gunawan, Saskia Schut, Helen Johnson, Spiros Panigirakis, Seijiro Nishioka, Olivia Barret, Kay Abude, Mike Barrett, James Deutscher, Nick Selenitsch, Figo Gamachu, Klara Kelvy, Dominico deClario, Makiko Yamamoto, Lachlan Petrus, Mark Close, Veronica Cust, Ying Lan Dan, Adrian Barker, Susan Jacobs, Nicholas Mangan, Marcin Wojic, Warren Taylor, Ross Coulter, Ian Hester, Klara Kelvy, Charlie Sofo, Lara Thomas, Dan Bell, Sarah Crowest, Deanne Butterworth, Scott Mitchell, Benjamin Woods, Helen Hughes, Simone Slee, Veronica Cust, Charlotte Day, Lara Thomas, Jason Workman, Mark Stoner, Lochie Bradfield, Utako Shindo, Esther Stewart, Phoebe Robinson, Isadora Vaughan, Gregg Humble.

Acknowledgements
Juliana Engberg, Charlotte Day, Terri Bird, Saskia Schut, Jeph Neal, Hilary Jackman, Charlie Sofo, Olivia Barret, Andrew Benjamin, Tom Nicholson, Nick Mangan, Rory Hyde, Mark Stoner, Simone Slee, Figo Gamachu, Ian Hester, Edie Hester, Marjory Hester, Melanie Upton, Jane Rhodes, Matt Hinkley, ACCA staff, staff and students from VCA school of art and artists from Artery Co-operative.

Cinder block perimeter wall
Laid with assistance from Saskia Schut, Gregg Humble, Ari Dyball, Charlotte Day, Darren Munz, Caleb Shea, Biatta Kelly, Abdul Abdullah, Jethro Harcourt, Ben Taranto, Isadora Vaughan, Will Heathcote, Laura Whitield, Anna Miller Yeaman

Freestanding cinder block wall
Built by Anthony Cribb and Damien Cribb

Blue metal structures
Fabricated by Jeph Neal (Artery Co-Operative)

Tape flecks on floor
Laid with assistance from Saskia Schut and Isadora Vaughan

Multi-coloured fabric
Made with assistance from Charlie Sofo

Weed bucket
Dug in April 2010 with Ardi Gunawan on an abandoned Commonwealth games site adjacent to a freeway wall in Flemmington

Horse Handler
Jack Dowell

Technical assistance
Mould-making assistance: Beth Arnold, Scott Mitchell and Abdul Abdullah
Construction assistance: Nick Mangan, Brian Scales, Luke Pither, Darren Munz, Jeremy Bakker
Installation volunteers: Steph Pirrie, Justin Gayner, Dawn Tan, Lisa Immai, Kotoe Ishii
Audio Visual assistance: Emma Sullivan

Anthropogenic, Archive, Basalt, Brick, Bronze, Colonial continuums, Coal, Concrete, Cosmic, Deep time, Digging, Dirt, Dust, Embodiment, Extractivism, Extinctions, Floor, Fossil, Fragment, Geologies, Groundwork, Installation, Materiality, Object, People, Performance, Permian, Place, Plant life, Process, Meteorite, Moving, Moving image, Rubbings, Sandstone, Sculpture, Singular objects, Site, Sociality, Steel, Still image, Textual, Triassic, Walking, Wall.