To Wander Off As Things Are Called To Order
created with Noemie Huttner-Koros
work-in-progress showing at La Mama Theatre
HopePunk Climate Festival, Sunday 20 September 2026
work-in-progress showing at La Mama Theatre
HopePunk Climate Festival, Sunday 20 September 2026
with dramaturg Julia Croft
In 2023, an unexploded bomb washed up in Perth; swimmers were evacuated and it was detonated hours later. In 2024, tar balls arrived on Sydney beaches; petroleum and plastics coagulated and brought to shore by the tide. In 2025, climate-change-fuelled algal blooms killed scores of the ocean’s residents along South Australia. Through the urban drainage systems of Naarm, eels migrate and reproduce beneath our feet.
The presence of these phenomena feels reminiscent of myth, where the things that wash up demonstrate the infinite unknown of the living systems we are embedded in. These phenomena are the catalyst for a new participatory performance work created by Andrew Sutherland and Noemie Huttner-Koros.
In this era of climate breakdown, what do the things that wash up represent and how might we embrace these assemblages of our own creation? What are these hybrid things that in some way should not exist, and yet we feel a pull towards, in needing to recognise the mutant? What do these formations tell us about what we might become?
If one of the consequences of colonial-capitalist society is our disconnection from the refuse & ‘trash’ (and the acceptance that certain places will be designated as ‘sacrifice zones’), then this work gently asks us to engage with and mould these emergent beings, probing our relationships to oceans, refuse, and the creations of our own making that we cannot yet name or identify.