Trespass

BACKGROUND In response to an invitation from the Adelaide Film Festival (2015) the researcher developed a moving image work exploring screen ratios [a vertical 'portrait' screen ratio 9:16'], 'faciality' (Deleuze & Guatarri), and the WA government's proposed amendments to their Heritage Act. In West Australia's Pilbara region, one of the most significant rock art galleries in the world, with human culture's earliest representation of the human face, and engravings tens of thousands of years old, are endangered. Over recent years the West Australian government developed mechanisms to deregister Aboriginal dreaming sites previously acknowledged with Heritage listings, with the full co-operation of the WA Department of Aboriginal Affairs, and for the benefit of industrial development and mining. Since the transition from pastoral occupation of Aboriginal land to mining and heavy industry in the 1970s, all across the country many thousands of Aboriginal sites have been destroyed. Over 1200 sites have been denied recognition, and dozens have been delisted, each with development applications pending. CONTRIBUTION In Trespass the researcher explores creative methodologies directed toward a questioning and re-articulation of traditional notions of 'landscape' and 'portrait'. Trespass deploys found footage and newly created material in re-envisaging what is at stake in the Burrup Peninsula SIGNIFICANCE With an estranged format (the vertical screen) creating a mode of reception amenable to refiguring and rethinking the manner in which 'landscape' and 'portrait' may be encountered and endowed with significance. In the context of a campaign for Australian Indigenous heritage, the work offers an intervention affording political critique to an emerging field of formalist cinematic aesthetics (the vertical film).