"The improvisation is an informal transcription of my Dad’s death, a builder’s labourer, who died from cancer of the bile duct."
Brian Fuata, INTERMISSION (Cancer of the Bile Duct), 2024, featuring Matthew Spispah & Archie Barry—a timed twenty-minute structured improvised performance incorporating casual conversation, swearing, vocal sounds and movement—is included in SUPERMODEL: Soft Centre's long-awaited Naarm Melbourne debut, an expansive three-day program of ecstatic performances, deep-dive keynotes, screenings and workshops, transforming Trades Hall, the world’s oldest trade union building, from 29-31 August.
SUPERMODEL's stacked program of ecstatic performances, deep-dive keynotes, screenings and workshops unfold in heritage council chambers, storied meeting rooms, cascading stairwells and carpeted corridors. As a birthplace for workers rights and collective action, Trades Hall is a fitting backdrop for a program grappling with a crisis of the commons in the age of accelerating AI.
SUPERMODEL embraces collaborative worldbuilding, fan fictions and more-than-human intelligence as antidotes to an increasingly atomised and datafied world.
Photographer: Will Hamilton-Coates / SOFT CENTRE
