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Moving,,,,

Julieanna Preston


“Moving stuff” was a performance in which mud and shipping pallets shifted repeatedly across a historic, geographic, cultural and political zone demarcated by the Whau River Estuary and Rosebank Road’s industrial sector, Auckland, New Zealand. It explored the complexities of notions of ecology and economy hinged to dynamic processes of material exchange and distribution. “Moving stuff” was also an extension of themes recurring throughout my creative work: labour as a time intensive, often excessively repetitive and seemingly monotonous act, and the female body, my body, an organ that is mine to use as only I can choose, as it is employed as a performative feminist tool. “Moving stuff” tested, therefore, both labour as an untaxed investment tied to capitalism, and labour as part of a feminist, embodied materialist critique. “Moving stuff” saw me toil for eight hours a day for two days, walk more than twenty kilometres, converse with more than 600 people, shift more than 160 litres of mud and 150 pallets and finally return the site to the state in which I found it. The only limit to this labour was my personal exhaustion.

“Moving Stuff” gave rise to a series of interconnected creative works oscillating around this original performance. Three of these works are presented in this journal: a video entitled Stratified Matter: Moving things again (2013), a recording of a presentation given in October 2013 at the Plenitude & Emptiness symposium, and finally, and finally a photo essay chronicling moments from the original performance. None of these subsequent works are adequate representations of the original, nor can they ever be, rather they are works in their own right. Each of these subsequent works are, therefore, an exploration of modes of representing the original work and more importantly an exercise focused on keeping the work moving, or as social scientist Bruno Latour advocates, keeping it in circulation. Here I ask the watcher/reader to interpret the scenes presented, or better to interpolate from the scenes presented, to keep “Moving Stuff” circulating.


Published 24th September, 2015.