Becca Wood
An audio guided walk through the Avondale Racecourse
First launched Saturday Afternoon 12 September
Artist Becca Wood invites you to join her at the edge of Avondale Racecourse for The Public Stand, an audio guided walk through the Racecourse grounds.
The walk can be undertaken as a solo or group experience at anytime the Racecourse is open to the public. Please respect the Racecourse rules and avoid walking on the Track. Stream or download the file on Podomatic, Spotify or Apple podcasts. Download a map of the route here.
The Public Stand is a choreoauratic walk that brings attention to the uncertainty of what lies ahead for the Avondale Racecourse. Wearing headphones, the participants tune in towards their moving bodies, the site, the disappearing the unseen and the unspeakable. Through walking with and listening to the site’s histories, this series reimagines lost and forgotten stories, and present and possible futures. As a collective, the audience walks together towards the unknown.
Having presented previous works on sites and in buildings that are in a state of disrepair or uncertainty, Wood continues to raise consciousness of threshold spaces and the forgotten stories of our cities. She says: ‘Slowing down to listen, the sounds sink inwards to the middle of me… Slowing down my pace in the cityscape in order to make visible the hidden spaces, lost landscapes, – feeling the shadows cross me, the back streets… the voice of the street – this part of this, or part of us?’
Becca Wood has been working in performance practices that slip between bodily, spatial and digital environments for the past 23 years. Previous works have involved participants as instructed performers exploring sites in response to pre-recorded sound tracks and spatial arrangements. To describe this practice she coined the term ‘choreoauratics’. It fuses choreography and sonic investigations with philosophies of listening, the body, place, digital technologies and sociality. Choreoauratic events intervene in public spaces, working poetically towards a recovery of the imperceptible and the disappearing.
Presented as part of About walking, by Te Uru Waitākere Contemporary Gallery
