Discreet Relations of Decay, 2022
DISCREET RELATIONS OF DECAY: A floral spatio-temporal offering, 2022
Photography commission with Flash Forward 2021 Festival by The City of Melbourne Council
The City of Melborune Council Collection
Discreet Relations of Decay is a durational site-responsive photo essay observing the decomposition of five flowers dislocated from Brunswick West and offered to five distinct laneways across Naarm. Enlisting a familiar gesture expressed within Hindu practices known as Puja, the flowers were carefully thrown within the laneway as a carriage of offering.
Occurring over four consecutive days this experimental essay asks - what is the body or system of a laneway? What material conditions arise to call it such? And how can that system of conditions be seen through the insertion of a flower’s presence over time?
On the first day, I performed a repetition of throwing each flower upward within a respective laneway to visualise a moment of their suspension as an organic disruption within the dense material of the city. After the final toss of each flower, it was left remaining in its fallen position glitching between a gift and litter, open to the affective conditions of the laneway.
The conditions of the laneway for this project are time of day, climate, wind, rain, rubbish, leaves, building materials, architecture, undulations, cracks, drains, light, shadows, birds, colonisation, capitalism, labour, bodily fluids, human traffic, and more than human inhabitants.
This series of twenty-five images can be read in various ways and reading them left to right follows the order I visited the sites, while reading down across days. Opening with the first row, each flower is suspended in the act of being thrown and is followed by images of their final rested offering in the second row. The three remaining rows document consecutive days where I revisited the sites to photograph each flower’s decay and relationship with the laneway’s conditions over time.