In Profile

2013-2015

In Profile: Lily Hibberd, Twin Cinema: Four Devils and a Woman in Red

Twin Cinema: Four Devils and a Woman in Red, 1) Bridget Crone, Lily Hibberd 2-4) Yallourn Theatre demolished, memory screen; Commissioned by NETS Victoria for The Cinemas Project curated by Bridget Crone
photo Din Heagney

Over more than a decade, artist Lily Hibberd has developed an impressively polymorphous practice, ranging from painting to installation to playwriting, filmmaking, live performance and bookmaking; and from gallery-based, individual endeavour to collaborative, community-centred projects. A prolific creator, she also founded independent contemporary arts publication un Magazine (http://unprojects.org.au). Her interest in cinema traces back to her 2003 work, Blinded by the Light, included in the CCP’s Art + Film exhibition (see RT57).

For curator Bridget Crone, Hibberd was an apt choice for The Cinemas Project, in which five artists worked in regional Victorian sites and former sites of cinemas. Crone paired Hibberd with the Regent Theatre in the isolated Latrobe Valley town of Yarram, one of few locations where the original cinema still stands. The project resulted in Twin Cinema: Four Devils and a Woman in Red, an exhibition of objects and memories at Latrobe Regional Gallery, 4 Devils, Hell and High Water, a play in six acts and an enigmatic silent film, both performed by local residents.

Hibberd was keen on Crone’s suggestion of Latrobe Regional Gallery. It’s a former cinema site and you can still see the proscenium if you know where to look, Hibberd says. “Both of us thought of it as an echo…I’m very interested in memories that have been apparently fragmented or dispersed over time; so attention to something lost brings a kind of productive memory to bear on the community.”

Hibberd has been concurrently working on an IASKA Spaced 2 project with the communities of Punmu, Kunawarritji and Parnngurr in the Western Desert and the Parramatta Female Factory Precinct Memory Project, with formerly incarcerated women (see RT121). “I’ve become more interested in being, not necessarily the author of all the work…[but] producing, I guess, provocations through the work. So that people will be able to be involved and engaged and actually be creators too.”

In the Latrobe Valley, Hibberd found that the process of ‘mining memories’ over 18 months or so brought up more than coal. “There were deeper waters there,” she says—mythologies that seemed to arise not just from shifting industrial histories, or the valley’s frequent, intense fires, but also, in Yarram itself, from regular flooding. “The history of water in the region is played out through the theatre. The building itself has pressed metal panels around the balcony of Neptune [the Roman god of water]. It’s like you walk in there and that’s the first thing you see—and I thought, water, right!”

4 Devils, Hell and High Water, a play in six acts, commissioned by NETS Victoria for The Cinemas Project curated by Bridget Crone
courtesy the artist

The Regent began to gather a wider story than the cinematic memories which range across half a century from its first commercial screening of FW Murnau’s 4 Devils in 1930 to its last, The Woman in Red, in the 1980s. “The theatre was built by this amazing woman, Margaret Thompson…Her first theatre was called the Strand [now demolished], and, on the first occasion when I had a gathering, people came and were sitting in the Regent, and I was saying, ‘Tell me what you remember’—and people were like, ‘Oh we thought we’d come to talk about the Strand.’ Every time I tried to do this, people talked about the thing that had disappeared or been lost or taken away: it was where they wanted to deposit, in a way, their story.

“You’ve got this doubling of the thing that is apparent, and the ghost or the lost thing. We’re talking about a lost industry, a lost history, lost towns—Yallourn [home of the Strand] was completely razed when they realised there was coal underneath. So that process when people started to talk about the Strand, which was no longer there, instead of the Regent [which is], well this is a very powerful mnemonic force.”

Twin Cinema: Four Devils and a Woman in Red, Lily Hibberd installation shots, commissioned by NETS Victoria for The Cinemas Project curated by Bridget Crone
courtesy the artist

The cinema, says Hibberd, has historically been a crucial social space in regional towns, “the connective tissue” that binds people together. Moving beyond the ‘individual vision’ of art-making teases out not only community memories but deeper themes and tropes—such as that of displacement—aided by the “estrangement” that such a project facilitates, prising things out of their context and viewing them from a distance.

“So the Latrobe Valley is actually a huge development of economic madness. Like ‘dig it up and move it.’ And thus people’s way of dealing with that was really interesting. I wanted to put the people I was meeting in touch with themselves, to actually say well it’s not just about art, it’s about recognising what this social activity—cultural production—is that we’re all involved in.”

Lily Hibberd, Twin Cinema: Four Devils and a Woman in Red, Latrobe Regional Gallery, Morwell, Victoria, 12 April-8 June; 4 Devils, Hell and High Water, a play in six acts, The Regent Theatre and Gippsland Regional Arts, writer Lily Hibberd, director Darren McCubbin, The Regent Theatre, Yarram, 24 April; commissioned by NETS Victoria for The Cinemas Project curated by Bridget Crone; http://www.lilyhibberd.com

The Cinemas Project also features Brook Andrew (Bendigo Art Gallery, 12 April-1 June 2014), Mikala Dwyer (Mildura Arts Centre, 8 June-24 August), Bianca Hester (Coles Carpark, Warrnambool, 4-5 July), Tom Nicholson (Sorrento, Indented Head, Geelong and at Geelong Gallery, 6-9 July); http://www.thecinemasproject.com.au/

See RT122 for an interview with Bridget Crone for more about the Cinema’s Project

RealTime issue #121 June-July 2014 pg. web