éponge pressée

Situations and people mutate my practice. 

I read everything as a collage of ideas.

I’m a sponge to be squeezed.

My kids are a great source of inspiration. They remind me that pretty much everything can be the start of an art project. Some of my titles are stolen from their imagination : I married a dead ice cream ( radio project with sonic flavored ice creams in a public plaza commission by LABORAL in Spain), When I snore all my dreams come out ( an installation of audio-mineral dreams transmitted from a flour castle at Penny Contemporary gallery in Tasmania).

I recently worked with my 12-year old daughter Sanne Kok Drouhin on an animation called A Country Distracts Us commissioned by the Hawkesbury museum. We were interested in the character of Shirley Gilroy who meditates beneath a pyramid at night in her full velvet leotard after her shift at the 80’s Australian hospital. We imagined that the pyramidologist Shirley has moved on from her humble beginnings in office administration and is a future goddess reigning over a female driven, sci-fi landscape full of animalistic shape-shifters and neon vibrations.

I learnt how to DIY what I dream about, gather a community of creative minds and combine forces to use space and material around us.

In 2008, Radio Campus Paris gave Coraline Janvier and I a weekly broadcast that we occupied with whatever experimental at that time and pataphysical debates...we started the radio show at an illegal dress up party in the catacombs. 

I started a monthly exhibition with Léonore Fouré in a one meter square room in our flat, and a yearly festival Kontact sonoreS with my brother Simon Drouhin and Tania Buisse in my hometown.

When I came to Tasmania, Brian Richie trusted me to make chocolate records and therefore Sweet Tribology, a touring radio picnic made by female artists, after I co-produced the first live audio-visual streaming of Pierre Henry commission Paroxysms for Mona Foma 2012 and brought Brian an autographed book by Pierre. 

Phillipa Stafford and I started to work together on Sisters Akousmatica for Next Wave festival 2016 after she told me : if we don’t like what we are doing, we stop and we start again. That facilitated trust and confidence in my own practice within a new cultural language and network of artists in Australia.

Then Situate Arts Lab 2016 facilitated a life-changing collaborative book-score-radio-relay-walk in public space, A.I.R. (Altitude Immersive Radio), in South Africa during Vrystaat Arts Festival 2018.

In 2019, I expanded my sound practice during a residency at the Cité internationale des arts in Paris, mentored by the Structures Sonores et Cristal Baschet.

I also started to use a pink rope in my practice after I met Dr Tapiwa Guzha, a rope artist and ice cream maker, formally molecular biologist, in South Africa. I could explore another approach of shared space during the Tankwa Artscape residency in the semi-desert of Karoo, witnessing tension between species and dust.

Julie Drouhin

March 2020