Creating a lament to help process Canberra’s Black Summer.

Posted on 25 May, 2023

A multi-media experience at PhotoAccess may go some way to healing the wounds that Canberra’s Black Summer created.

Between Presumption and Melancholy is a series of videos created by Toni Hassan which create a platform for public mourning and also re-enchantment. The works capture discussions among women in the capital region, sharing their first-hand experiences of Australia’s Black Summer.

The exhibition offers a safe space for viewers to process and engage with emotions related to climate grief. By exploring personal and collective experiences, Toni paves the way for a new understanding and acceptance of our ongoing reality.

Toni, a Canberra-based writer and emerging visual artist who completed Honours in visual arts in 2021, began the project “to process my own grief about that myth-busting summer and the stubborn roadblocks in the way of attempts to reach a low-carbon future”. Listening is at its centre.

“I asked myself ‘how can I make visual art that bears witness, and engages my own grief in ways that can be cathartic?’.

“I have an ongoing personal concern that a real tragedy in our national politics, even in 2023, is the absence of a sense of tragedy and lack of official public discourse or space for shared empathy about climate change’s effects, past, present and future.”

She created the work with dialogue which began with breathing exercises.

“I wanted to move beyond the adversarial politics and optics of climate change policy debates and engage the whole body; responses at head and heart level, because even though polls at that time (2021) and since have consistently showed that four in five Australians recognised climate change as a concern, citizens of this country rarely discuss the issue in personal and vulnerable ways.

“I use voice as sound and language with visual methods to help make tangible the effects of climate change on the breath and body.”

Toni chose the medium of voice recording and videos because it has a relatively low carbon footprint and describes the entire process as cathartic.

“I found solidarity and new kinds of language to describe a world that suddenly felt unmistakably broken.

“I think the work belongs to the long and ancient tradition of lamentation. It’s not looking back for its own sake on what may be difficult but finding love, lament’s partner, to make sense of and reassemble events and to stir hope. I think lament, expressed in different forms of art, can re-envision sorrow.”

Toni has also produced a book with the transcripts of 13 interviews and art (painting, photography, sculpture and performance) made since. It’s called Conversation Pieces: Remembering Australia’s Black Summer.

Main image: The artist holding “Conversation Pieces”, 2021 (Photo by Brenton McGeachie).