From Dust to Dust: Hallucinating the Absent Exhibition

This chapter discusses an exhibition, From Dust to Dust, developed for the Old Castlemaine Gaol, a historic prison in the state of Victoria, Australia. The prison was built with a radial architectural plan, designed to control deviant citizens through surveillance, sensory deprivation, and solitary confinement. From Dust to Dust proposed to invert this history of control by inviting visitors to navigate the architecture and site-specific works through sensory scores. Among the works was an audio installation composed by blind sound artist Andy Slater from field recordings around the prison. A paired video work translated Slater’s sonic description into gestural poetics, choreographed and performed by d/Deaf dancer Anna Seymour. The redescription of sounds into gestural language inverted the accessibility trope of audio description, where visual works are normally described for blind audiences. A few months before the scheduled opening, permissions were withdrawn to install across the Castlemaine Gaol site. This chapter suggests that an epistemology of hallucination offers a way of approaching the refiguring of remnants of the abandoned exhibition across other settings, and the extension of access propositions beyond the confines of the Castlemaine Gaol. The chapter also introduces a proposition that access and welcome can be radically expanded by framing exhibition making as the animation of a dust cloud of sensorial improvisations, translations, and conversations.