Brickell has collaborated with the whenua, moana and atua in the creation of all works in A koru is a trajectory. Rākau sanded by Tangaroa has been lovingly twined by Brickell in varying shades of blue, resulting in contorted sculptural forms that embody the relationship between sea and land—Tangaroa and Tāne. Rimurapa washed ashore has been taken into the artist's care and warped to reflect its tumultuous journey from the moana to the whenua, much like tūpuna Māori who navigated Te Moana-nui-a-Kiwa.

Racing cyclone Gabrielle across the motu to arrive at the residency and watching its destruction unfold across her home city of Tāmaki Makaurau and her rohe on the East Coast, the duration of Brickell’s residency was dominated by the cloud of ongoing ecological and economical disasters. Rimurapa plays an important role in cooling our oceans, but grows scarcer in response to their warming.

A koru is a trajectory is a phrase that came to Brickell as a parallel reflection on the macro forces of late global capitalism and the environmental crises it ever accelerates, and also on how the koru form that pervades mātauranga Māori is a fundamental shape of the physics and of navigation that on a micro level, the body comes to learn how to weather.

Filmed around the site of the Western Treatment Plant (WTP) in Werribee, Victoria, Australia, Metabolism considers metabolism as an ambivalent process that connects external and internal forces: from chemical energy-creation within our bodies, to capitalism’s ‘metabolic rift’. For the Wadawurrung people, Wirribi-yaluk (Werribee river) is the backbone and spine of Country, a waterway that has sustained life since time immemorial. Wirribi-yaluk runs along the eastern edge of the WTP, a living and flowing entity connecting old ways with new. Since colonisation, the land, waters and air of this place have been drastically shaped to produce and metabolise food, waste, energy and water. New housing developments with names like ‘Riverwalk’ and ‘Manor Lakes’ spring up within smelling distance of effluent ponds in an ongoing process of birth, death and renewal. Through multiscalar ‘ways of seeing’, in Metabolism, bodies are porous and interconnected—from the microscopic to the planetary. 

Created across seasons, in dialogue with the site-as-protagonist, Metabolism considers the interdependencies between human and more-than-human bodies, interior and exterior ecologies, and the consumption, colonisation and capitalisation of body-as-land.  

CREDITS

Director, Editor, Producer, Writer - Eugenia Lim
Cinematographer - Tim Hillier
Composer, Sound Designer, Mixing - Carolyn Schofield (Fia Fiell)
Drone Operators - Trent Perrett and Glenn Hester
Production Coordinator - Bianca Chang
Wadawurrung Cultural Advisors - Stephanie Skinner and Corinna Eccles
Performers - Lee Wan and Harshanie Habarakadage
Western Treatment Plant Operations - Peter Kissonergis
Melbourne Water Heritage Advisor - Paul Balassone
Colourist and Post - Chris Tomkins
Title Design - Amery Oke-Johnston (Thought & Found)
Sound Mastering, Recording Engineer - Pat Telfer
Artistic Advisors - Amos Gebhardt and Gabrielle Brady


Metabolism was filmed on and in the lands, waters and skies of the Wadawurrung. We pay our deep respect to the sovereign traditional custodians of this place for their deep, ongoing practice of care for country, kin and culture.

Commissioned by Public Art Commission, Deakin University and the City of Wyndham. Presented by PUBLICS.


Eugenia would like to thank: Peter Kissonergis, Paul Balassone, Catherine Rees, Lee Wan and Harshanie Habarakadage at Melbourne Water; Trisha-lee Donavan at Wadawurrung Aboriginal Corporation; David Cross, Cameron Bishop, Simon Reis and the Public Art Commission team; Paul O’Neill and PUBLICS; Amelia Wallin, Anu Pennanen and Stéphane Querrec; Gabrielle Brady and Amos Gebhardt for creative support; and all her Metabolism collaborators, human and more-than-human.