Photofields Industry Day – Afternoon Session

3–4pm Keynote: Grandeza Studio
In this keynote address, Grandeza Studio, a collective of architects and artists who work between Sydney and Madrid, will give insights into their interdisciplinary practice and share the process of making their video and mixed media installation, Pilbara Interregnum: Seven Political Allegories.

4–5pm Out of Sight
Journalist and documentary filmmaker Yaara Bou Melhem hosts a conversation on how Photographic and moving-image practices can provide audiences with unique insights into remote environments.

Grandeza Studio is a collective of architects, artists, educators and researchers. Based between Madrid and Sydney, the studio was founded in 2011 by Amaia Sánchez-Velasco, Jorge Valiente Oriol, and Gonzalo Valiente Oriol. The collective studies late-capitalist spaces and narratives to identify and challenge the mechanisms that veil and normalise late-capitalist structural forms of violence. The team won the Golden Bee Award for the best international contribution at the XXII Triennale di Milano for its design of the Australian pavilion. Its work has been published and exhibited internationally.

Yaara Bou Melhem (moderator) is a journalist and documentary filmmaker whose work has received two UN Media Peace Awards, two New York City Film & Television Festival Awards and five Walkley Awards. Melhem’s debut feature-length documentary Unseen Skies explores the inner workings of mass surveillance, computer vision and artificial intelligence through the works of US artist Trevor Paglen. Screened in competition at the 2021 Sydney Film Festival, the film’s production partners include Oscar-winning Participant (USA) and In Films (AUS). Melhem has also directed documentary shorts including War on Truth about Nobel Peace Prize winner Maria Ressa and her global campaign against disinformation. Melhem, who was a foreign correspondent with Dateline, SBS TV and Al Jazeera English for more than a decade, is the inaugural journalist-in-residence at the Judith Neilson Institute for Journalism and Ideas. She is currently directing a series for the ABC.

Raphaela (Rosie) Rosella is an Italian-Australian artist whose practice draws on her experience being raised in Nimbin, an over-policed, low socio-economic community in northern New South Wales. Working at the intersection of socially engaged art and long-form documentary practice, Rosella has spent more than 15 years co-creating photo-based projects with women in her life to resist bureaucratic representations of their lived experiences. This archive has been used across memorial services, legal proceedings and art exhibitions including Photo Biennale Photoquai (France), the Organ Vida International Photography Festival (Croatia), UNSW Galleries in Sydney and The Centre for Contemporary Photography in Melbourne. Rosella engages in a theoretical dialogue around the authority of archives, photography’s complicity in maintaining imperial regimes and the constraints of the carceral state. Her work has resulted in several co-creators obtaining reduced custodial sentences and successful bail and parole applications.

Merilyn Fairskye is a visual artist based in Sydney whose recent video and photographic work explores the effects of powerful events on humans and the environment. Current projects examining the relationships between technology, atomic landscapes and community have taken her on location to the Polygon in Kazakhstan, Sellafield in England, Chernobyl in Ukraine and other key nuclear sites, resulting in an art film, video installations and a photographic series exhibited in Australia and internationally. Fairskye’s work has been presented in more than 180 exhibitions and festivals. Her feature-length art film, Precarious, was nominated for the 2012 Al Jazeera Documentary Channel long-form film award.

Hayley Millar Baker is a Gunditjmara and Djabwurrung lens-based visual artist born and based in South-West Melbourne, Australia (1990). Through examining the role our multi-faceted identities play in translating and conveying our experiences, Hayley interrogates and abstracts autobiographical narratives and themes relating to her own identity – drawing on and centring the power and strength of spirituality, Indigeneity, womanhood, motherhood, and the psyche. Her oblique storytelling methods and methodologies encourage us to embrace that the passage of identity, culture, and memory are not linear nor fixed.