"Darling Darling" 2021

Gabriella Hirst

Born 1990, New South Wales. Lives and works in Berlin, Germany, and London, England. Pronouns: she/her.

 

"Darling Darling" 2021

two-channel HD video, colour, sound, gilded SD card, 24:55 minutes

 

Darling Darling was commissioned by the Ian Potter Cultural Trust (IPCT) under the Ian Potter Moving Image Commission for exhibition by the Australian Centre for Moving Image (ACMI).

 

In Darling Darling, Gabriella Hirst thinks with riverine spaces in relation to acts of care and the privileging of Western cultural material over natural ecological systems. This film depicts contrasting scenes on two screens, with sound leaking across both sides. On the first screen, we encounter the drought-stricken Baaka/Darling River filmed cinematically under the close guidance of Elder Uncle Badger Bates on Barkindji Country. The river is nearly empty due to unsustainable settler-colonial water-management practices upstream, related to cotton farming irrigation and other thirsty introduced crops. As one of Australia’s most critical water sources, the Murray Darling has a subterranean basin that spans present-day Queensland, New South Wales, Australian Capital Territory, Victoria, and South Australia.

 

On the second screen, an art museum conservator fastidiously repairs a nineteenth century oil painting of the same river from the Art Gallery of New South Wales collection, W. C. Piguenit's The Flood in the Darling (1890), painted in the German Romantic tradition. Positioned adjacent to UQ Art Museum’s collection study room, where conservation work also occurs, and to the Maiwar/Brisbane River, Darling Darling underscores hierarchies of care in relation the privileging of culture and the denigration of nature.

 

Environmental historian Jason W. Moore uses the term ‘cheap nature’ to describe these relations. He argues that when nature is not endowed with an economic value, it is freely available to be extracted, instrumentalised, and exploited to the point of depletion, resulting our current climate predicament, which he terms the ‘Capitalocene’.

The gilded SD card on the nearby wall, which contains the digital artwork file (on loan from the ACMI Collection), is a tongue-in-cheek acknowledgement of the artist’s complicity within these structures of value that define the cultural and economic systems of the art world.

 

Warning for Barkindji audiences: This film contains footage of Barkindji Country in a state of distress.

 

Gabriella Hirst acknowledges the Traditional Custodians of this site, the Yuggera and Turrbul peoples.

 

Darling Darling credits:

Barkandji consultant: Uncle Badger Bates

Producer: Bridget Ikin

Director of Photography Baaka-Darling River: Meg Whit

Director of Photography AGNSW: Justine Kerrigan

Film editor: Sam Smith

Sound recordist: Daniel Miau

Sound editor: Liam Egan

Regional liaison/location manager: Justine Muller

Production coordinator: Mia Timpano

Production assistant: Lesley Holland

Videographer AGNSW: Christopher Snee

Camera assistant: Cameron Dunlop

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Sections of the work were filmed by permission at the Art Gallery of New South Wales (AGNSW) in close collaboration with Conservators Paula Dredge, AGNSW Head of Painting Conservation, Andrea Nottage, Painting Conservator and Barbara Dabrowa, AGNSW Senior Conservator of Fine Arts – Frames

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Gilded SD card made by Barbara Dabrowa

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Painting: W.C. Piguenit, The Flood in the Darling 1890, 1895, Art Gallery of New South Wales