Projects

A Tilting Body of Precarious Maps and Migrant Constellations

A Tilting Body of Precarious Maps and Migrant Constellations is an interactive exhibition space that hosts artwork created by artists around the world.

Argentina & Bolivia & Brazil & Chile & Colombia & Costa Rica & Cuba & Dominican Republic & Ecuador & El Salvador & Guatemala & Honduras & Mexico & Nicaragua & Panama & Paraguay & Peru & Uruguay & Venezuela & Aotearoa New Zealand

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A Tilting Body of Precarious Maps and Migrant Constellations website

alys longley. A Tilting Body of Precarious Maps and Migrant Constellations. 2020.

A Tilting Body of Precarious Maps and Migrant Constellations is a live, interactive exhibition space and digital game that hosts artwork of over 100 artists from across the world. The project was designed to bring artists and art lovers together during the COVID-19 pandemic, but has continued to provide a low-cost, energy-efficient way for artists to work together across borders.

New Zealand artist and researcher alys longley and Chilean artist Máximo Corvalán-Pincheira created this project while they were developing a physical exhibition called Beberemos El Vino Nuevo, Juntos! | Let Us Drink the New Wine, Together! for the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Santiago. Concerned that the physical exhibition would be cancelled due to the pandemic, they joined forces with DOTDOT, a creative design company, to develop a virtual exhibition platform and performance space instead.

The title, A Tilting Body of Precarious Maps and Migrant Constellations, reflects how people use mapping, migrating and constellating as ways of building networks and working with others to create new things. It also describes how virtual worlds from different creative disciplines (such as performance, choreography, sound composition, contemporary poetics and visual art) can interconnect in unusual, playful and slightly disorienting ways.

The result is an interconnected series of virtual worlds that cross all creative disciplines, including performance, choreography, sound composition, contemporary poetics and visual art.

Since it was launched, over 1200 people worldwide have visited the exhibition space, and many others watched live online performances during the pandemic. The space has also given the artists new ways to exhibit their work and enabled them to forge new connections and opportunities to collaborate with artists from other countries.

A Tilting Body of Precarious Maps and Migrant Constellations was supported by the New Zealand Ministry of Culture and Heritage, University of Auckland Waipapa Taumata Rau and Creative NZ Arts Council of New Zealand Toi Aotearoa. To develop the project, alys and Máximo worked with Australian artist and academic Linda Knight; Chilean artist and researcher Francisco González Castro, and dancer Macarena Campbell-Parra; New Zealand dancer and designer Kate Stevenson, and artist and audio engineer Jeffrey Holdaway; and Swedish writer and educator pavle heidler.

The project team received a SloMoCo residency that allowed them to work virtually with artists in Argentina, Mexico and the US. A Tilting Body of Precarious Maps and Migrant Constellations was featured at Bus Projects, Melbourne (2021), the London-based Livingmaps (2021), the Dublin Dance Festival (2022) and the Australasian Drama Studies Conference (2022).

DOTDOT, co-founded by Kate Stevenson and Chris White, uses social and immersive experiences to have an impact on people. DOTDOT has continued to develop and extend the functionality of the platform, and the project team continue to create new work to exhibit on it, including artwork involving artists in Australia, Chile, Ireland, Sweden, Thailand and the US.

Published 02 November 2023