2-channel audio in seven parts, 2006
Reiterations (Elizabeth Street), is a series of imagined journeys through the city-spaces of Melbourne, Australia. In turn, we follow seven African immigrants who are now living in Melbourne, inhabiting their listening perspectives as they sing and move about the city. Our starting point is Elizabeth Street, a major transport node for recent arrivals using the north and west-bound transport routes.
Reiterations are things that are said or done again – but not always in the same way, in the same place. A reiteration can be a repetition with difference.
Exhibitions
Plus Factors, Australian Centre for Contemporary Art (2006); Arte Sonoro program, Madrid Abierto, Spain (2007).
Performers: Mmapelo Malatji from Botswana, Habib Chanzi from Tanzania, Zweli Tlhabane from Swaziland, Carlos Panguana from Mozambique, Francess Kalon from Sierra Leone, Valanga Khoza from South Africa, Prisca Cradick from Kenya.
Responses
'Into this hub of urban noise Leber and Chesworth have sent their individual travellers to walk and sing their way through the city. Songs that once described the pulverising of corn, or the happy return of mothers from the field . . . enter into the urban village of Melbourne . . . These African voices seem authentic and exuberant...percussive and urgent. This sense of urgency perhaps represents the larger struggle that accompanies the condition of those caught up in the diaspora, and the reserve of strength it takes to enter a new place and space while keeping a cultural memory and life intact. '
- Juliana Engberg, Plus Factors exhibition catalogue, Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, 2006