Let's Be Together Series

This is the beginning of the Let's Be Together series!

Join us for the next few weeks as we travel down winding conversations about various moods and thoughts, being lonely together, being loud together, and more. Throughout the series, guests and I have given ourselves small prompts for making which have been documented and included, and we invite you to take part in one small prompt of ours: recreate the Movements, film it, and show us at letsbetogether20@gmail.com.

Episode 4 – First airing 6pm, Thursday 28 May

Kusal Ekanayake and I trek down to the crevasses of our memories as we discuss the different ways we engage with the past in this final episode of the Let’s Be Together Series. We wondered what it meant to be homesick in the time of COVID-19, how nostalgia has shaped our approach to life and how it has affected our creative practice. As we shuffle through childhood shows, old homes, and extended families, we also chat about the longing, being homesick, for something we don’t yet know.

We hope you enjoy this nostalgic time with us!

Episode 3 - First airing 6pm, Thursday 21 May

Hannah Phillips and I delve into our complicated relationship with hope and how it manifests in our daily lives as well as within our work. It seems that we need hope now more than ever due to COVID-19 and we are surprised and grateful for the way it appears. We bond over our newfound love for growing things, cooking things and encourage one another to continue as best we can. We want to fight for the rights of our nurses, our carers, our essential workers, the people of Aotearoa and we understand that it’s a struggle that will continue long after we are gone. But we can have our pipe dreams, we can speculate, and we can have hope in the small things.

We hope you enjoy this bittersweet time with us!

Works we would like to highlight and recommend during this episode:

The Side Eye: Essential

ideas for a new art world

Episode 2

Christian Lamont and I enter into a chaotic discussion about our times at art school, our strange memories of collaboration, and look deeper into our incessant desire for auditory engagement. We invite viewers to queue up this curated playlist we have created together and come watch us aimlessly paint our faces as we contemplate our futures of cyborg life.

We hope you enjoy this unhinged energy with us!

Episode 1

Sakura Shibata and I juggle our experiences and thoughts on the idea of loneliness as we tentatively poke at our tendencies to quietly back into a corner. We wonder what it is to have grown up with the fuzziness of loneliness, how it affected us and our artistic practices, and find consolation in the limbo of it. Throughout the video are works from our time at university but littered in between are also bits and pieces we’ve collected during the process of making this project come to life. By giving ourselves prompts based around loneliness, we explored different ways of approaching making.

We hope you enjoy this quiet time with us!

Join us back here 6pm every Thursday in May.