Open for Quests
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[Santa?]
Emmaline Zanelli’s latest work, Magic Cave(2024) is inspired by the spray-painted, foam sculpted annual winter wonderland at retail giant, David Jones.
Core memory: annual photos on Santa’s lap inside a dark and fantastical artificial world, encircled by brightly lit shopping centre.
Experiencing Zanelli’s artwork is indeed like stepping into a wonderfully weird magical cave.
[Mystifying Machinery!]
Think of a classic Rube Goldberg machine: self-operating napkin, ring a bell, crack an egg into a bowl. Simple chain reaction tasks overengineered into convoluted and impractical contraptions featuring multiple levers, pulleys, and in his most complex machine – a donut, bomb, balloon and a hot stove. The latter was the Automatic Weight Reducing Machine which trapped an obese person in a room without food, who had to lose weight to get free.
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Oh stupefying, mystifying machinery! The same might be said for Zanelli’s sculpture; inspired by this absurd logic and its correlating aesthetic, utilised as a way of navigating her own challenging experience engaging with and researching the South Australian mining industry for this body of work.
Over two years, Zanelli travelled multiple times to the remote town of Roxby Downs, 600 km north of Adelaide. The town was purpose-built in 1988 to service one of Australia’s largest mines: the BHP Olympic Dam mine. Roxby Downs has a highly transient population of 4,000 people who are mainly there in connection to the Olympic Dam mine. Despite Zanelli’s best attempts, civilian access to the mine stops over a kilometre away.
From a distance it looks like a ‘glittering mirage – there’s a sense of unattainability and that it’s not real.’ The utter inaccessibility of the mine proved to be an insurmountable blindspot in Zanelli’s research, which Magic Cave fills the void of. The artist has concocted a fantasy world of what could be on the other side; an expansive kingdom operating with its own tangled logic, a permissionless place of play and wonder as a response to endless and unobtainable real-world permissions.
As part of Zanelli’s engagement with Roxby Downs, she worked closely with the town’s young people aged between 4-18 years old; these sessions included filming, sound recording, and creative writing. The workshops have evolved into the 25-minute moving image work I take care of what’s mine. Where Magic Cave is a freewheeling universe of unknowns, I take care of what’s mine construes the existing world around it, carefully and compassionately crafted with respect to the real voices and experiences it carries.
[Aquariums, Mines and Heists]
The two-screen video offers an observational portrait of the town’s youth. The day-to-day is filled with the domestic and idiosyncratic as we briefly enter their world and pass time together: practising dance routines, chilling in teenage bedrooms filled with posters, tending to a variety of pets from exotic birds to turtles and hairless cats, and video gaming.
The normalcy of these scenes is heightened against the backdrop of one of the world’s largest mines, Olympic Dam, a juxtaposition explored throughout both the film and sculpture.
The video’s collaborative components are woven throughout its development and filming (with Liam Somerville and Katrina Penning), editing (by Liam Somerville), as well as the metamorphosing instrumental soundtrack composed by Mat Morrison, Zeno Kordov and Nicole Hobson, and poetic on-screen text by Thomas McCammon and Autumn Royal. The combination of these elements makes for a constantly interactive viewing experience: on one screen the youth are enacting driving, first-person skateboarding, and video gaming while the second screen careens through the brightly coloured plastic mouse tunnels of Zanelli’s sculptural work and shows archival footage of unknown miners and mining environments.
Side-by-side, it feels like the youth are moving through the metaphorical mine as though it were a giant water slide or roller coaster. At the same time, there is a conflated sense of gravitas and wonder at what the mine is like; inhabited by anonymous, uniform figures clad in hazmat and wielding heavy tools in dangerous, oozing environments. In tandem with this imaginative imagery the film’s score is upbeat and increasingly percussive, as though you were watching an action sequence from a heist film led by these young protagonists.
[That Cage/Cave is Spooky]
Magic Cave dwells in these shadows, developed as a response to Zanelli’s frustration at the mine’s inaccessibility, while getting to know the lifestyle and interests of the town’s youth. Zanelli alludes directly to these observations, collecting hundreds of pet cages and contraptions to construct her absurdist imagining of life underground. The work is imbued with layers of playful yet haunting dualities further evident in the title that Zanelli notes she chose because of the closeness of ‘cage’ to ‘cave’.
The lines between magic, mystification and obfuscation of reality are blurred. While the sculpture hints at confinement it also embodies the world-building capabilities of science fiction and fantasy. This alludes to the worlds imagined by the youth in the creative workshops, and that they frequently inhabit while gaming in their day-to-day lives. Through building the fantasy castle, Zanelli could speculate on how their lives are shaped by the livelihood of adult family members, and the mining industry more broadly.
[A Spiderweb on LSD]
Inspired by real stories, experiences and her own emotional and intellectual response to Roxby Downs, Zanelli’s fictive world is reminiscent of the work of science fiction writers Octavia Butler and Ursula Le Guin, who established the empathetic possibilities of world-building, using the genre as a cypher into the complex political-ecological conditions of life on Earth whilst offering alternative realities.
Both Zanelli’s film and sculpture glisten with an aura of speculation. Jittery wind instruments accompany the film’s opening sequence as it races along roads towards an almost fluorescent orange horizon dotted with night lights over the silhouette of headframes and other towering black industrial structures. Whilst unsettling, it feels like the beginning of an odyssey to a new world.
Le Guin, a famous American science fiction writer, wrote the seminal 1986 essay “The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction,” which disputes the spear as the earliest human tool and proposes that it was the carrier bag receptacle. Early humans could use this vessel to carry more than could be held in the hand and therefore gather more food. The carrier bag theory shifts humanity’s foundations from a narrative of domination to one of gathering, holding and sharing. Where the spear proffers a linear trajectory, the carrier bag is an assortment of events, characters and items jumbled together.
This approach allows for all kinds of eventualities to be tested out in Le Guin’s speculative fiction. Complexity and contradiction, difference and simultaneity are allowed to co-exist.
The orange horizon we are driving towards never comes any closer but is an object of speculation. Magic Caveconfigures a fictional world that might ultimately be part of this mirage, unruly and incomprehensible as it is enchanting. It calls to mind Le Guin’s description of the aspect of temporality in the Hainish Universe—one of her fictional worlds, as the “web of a spider on LSD.”
The carrier bag also contains multiple protagonists rather than a single hero. It is a collective act of storytelling. The film’s collaborative spirit and layering of realities embodies this radically empathetic sharing of histories.
[It Matters What Art Arts]
The sculpture engulfs the entire gallery space, in the same way the artist’s expansive research and engagement with the Roxby Downs community, and subsequent reflection and art-making over the last year has been all-consuming. It is a fitting evolution and transmutation of Zanelli’s’ unique diorama world-building expertise to an immersive scale.
With all its provocations, Zanelli’s work ultimately exalts in the possibilities of imagination and art, and celebrates the abundant creativity and individuality of the Roxby Downs youth. The inextricable relationship between process and outcome highlights the guiding sense of curiosity, openness and creativity driving this work, enabling unique perspectives on a complex industry via platforming unexpected voices dwelling within the satellite societies it has created as part of its omnipotent economic force.
The body of work shows how art engages attention where before there was a lack of awareness; and offers new ways of envisioning the world around us. As social theorist Donna Haraway (also deeply influenced by Le Guin) implores: “it matters what stories tell stories…it matters what worlds world worlds.”
I am reminded that although I did emerge dazed and confused from Santa’s annual artificial fairyland, mostly the experience was tinged with a child’s sense of awe: the worlds we create imprint on us as much as the ones we live in. When in doubt, go on a quest.