My quotidian friendship with the Moil water tower

I moved to Moil in the Northern suburbs of Darwin in March 2019. Moil for me was a badge of honour, I had made it to one of the non-hipster suburbs of Darwin, proving that I was not a blow in but a stayer, making my home on Larrakia Country.

Down the road lived artist and friend, Matthew van Roden, over many dinners we often talked about the Moil water tower that sat at one of the boundary points of our suburb. We individually drove and walked past it daily as we moved through our everyday activities. I loved to catch glimpses of it at various angles as I moved through the suburb. It sat within a Power and Water compound, next to a small public BMX park. It was an everyday public place.

I have loved water towers since reading Gary Crew’s, young adults picture book, The Watertower (Crew, 1994). Moving to Darwin and travelling throughout the remote communities of the NT, these community skyscrapers stand tall and quiet amongst these rich landscapes, as if they have somehow always been in the red dust. These iconic, everyday landmarks are a symbol of life, death, history and of resilience.

During the process of getting to know more deeply both Matthew and the Moil water tower, I began to envisage a collaboration between the three of us. Over months we experimented together, learning from each other, testing what was possible and what we collectively wanted to say. We also widened the collaboration to include two other places, the Northern Territory Supreme Court and the Parap water tower. Each collaborator bringing with them ideas, complexities and opportunities. From this we produced Botanicals for Darwin Festival 2020 which saw each location embrace one of Matthew’s skin-dance works, new media works where surface, skin, boundary and texture become re-entanglement between the urban and natural world.

This collaborative practice produced a ‘knowing’ between the three, a friendship based on a shared love of Moil, NT botanicals, that was generating a rich language across time, technicality, possibilities and impossibilities. It also opened itself up to the community:

• Neighbours of the water tower who observe as we got to know each other;

• Darwin Festival audience who came with critical discourse or stories on art, environment, botanical, water;

• Passers-by who happened upon the collaboration either on foot or by car who I hope felt their everyday reality shift for a split second as they observed.

This new constellation of material thinking felt like it should be shared with more collaborators and community members. In 2021 the Water Tower Series was produced with artists commissioned from across the NT to create work in collaboration with four water towers on Larrakia Country.

Early on in the project Matthew, the Moil water tower and I gave a collaborative talk/sharing on site about our collaboration so far. This evening was both an invitation to experiment as well as re/connect with collaborators.

First, I heard:

‘Can we paint the water tower?’
‘Is there a way to hide the cracks of the tower?’
‘How can we transform the public space into an event space?’
‘What happens if it rains?’

The concept of the water tower, the BMX park, Moil as collaborators was foreign to many of our newly invited ‘people’ collaborators. My offer was to ask the collaborators that identified as people to ‘stay with the trouble’ (Haraway, 2016). Staying with the trouble is an effort to become ‘tuned to the senses, to mindful matter, to material semiotics, to mortal earthlings in thick copresence’ (Haraway (2016) in van Dooren, 2018, p. 93).

Then as artists began to let the tower clasp their test works as an active collaborator:

‘The lines produce a whole other dimension for my work’
‘It is so quiet here, giving my work space to be contemplative’
‘Look at the stars above the tower!’
‘How will the community share in the program?’

Over that evening I observed the slow beginnings of the Water Tower Series entangled collaboration, observing what each collaborator (the artist, the water tower and others) would need to be nourished. Nourished is a word I regular use in my practice, to articulate the process of supporting a collaborator to grow strong through a collaboration that encourages them to take risks, to lean into new ways of making that allow for trans-formative creative practice, as well as community experiences. Nourishment can look like a myriad of things from understanding how best to communicate with a collaborator, knowing when to introduce new ideas or simply knowing what their favourite thing to eat is. Each collaborator is nourished and grows differently through processes.

The collection of works that were presented provided a constellation of encounters for audience, neighbours and passers-by to entangle with their everyday water towers in new ways. In my research I will develop my analysis of how and why these collaborations and encounters matter, and how we can utilise their learnings for re/learnings into the future.