Boats

Info

• Title : BOATS

• Year : 2024

• Medium : Multisensory installation comprising a commissioned gin, multichannel sound, curated dinners, and public interventions

• Duration : Variable.

Details

BOATS is a multisensory project exploring migration through taste, sound, image and public space. Developed in Tasmania, the work takes as one of its points of departure the language of Australia’s 2013 “Stop the Boats” campaign, shifting attention away from the abstraction of political rhetoric and towards the movements, histories and human experiences contained within it.

At the centre of the project is a bespoke gin titled BOATS, produced in Tasmania using seventeen botanicals drawn from West Africa and Australia. Seven West African ingredients – including alligator pepper, calabash nutmeg, scent leaf and aidan fruit—are brought into relation with ten Australian botanicals such as juniper, strawberry gum, kunzea and kelp. Their combination creates a liquid in which different geographies, climates and sensory memories coexist within a single composition.

Gin becomes more than a beverage within the work. Its botanical structure provides a way of thinking about movement through plants, flavour and cultural knowledge: ingredients travel, acquire new contexts and encounter one another through processes of extraction, blending and transformation. The act of drinking therefore becomes one of the ways through which the project is encountered physically and sensorially.

The bottle itself extends this narrative. Wrapped in paper printed with excerpts from news reports relating to migration and marked with Nsịbịdị symbols associated with boats and water, it operates simultaneously as container, sculptural object and carrier of information. The histories circulating around migration are therefore embedded not only in the contents of the bottle, but also across its surface.

The gustatory dimension of BOATS extended further through a dinner developed in collaboration with chef Vince Trim. Drawing from the same West African flavour palette that informed the gin, Trim incorporated these ingredients and tastes into Australian dishes, creating an entirely new menu for the occasion. Rather than reproducing existing West African recipes, the dinner brought different culinary traditions into relation, allowing flavour itself to become a site of adaptation, translation and exchange.

The project also unfolded across Hobart through public billboards and sound. The sound component, Matters Arising, is a multichannel electroacoustic composition incorporating the voice of John Kamara, the 2023 Tasmanian Australian of the Year, through a speech delivered at the Tasmanian Parliament. The spoken voice enters into a broader sonic environment, bringing lived and political dimensions of migration into relation with electronic composition.

Across these different forms, BOATS allows migration to be encountered through several overlapping registers: as political language, as movement across water, as personal experience, as botanical and culinary exchange, and as something carried through sound and memory. Rather than reducing migration to a single narrative, the project brings these materials and perspectives into proximity, allowing the relationships between movement, place and belonging to remain open and continually shifting.

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