Materiel World is Tasmanian performance artist Loren Kronemeyer creating a vortex in the earth, returning mined copper to its state of origin.
From the Festival of Live Art 2025.
Since it’s a vortex, both drawing in like a black hole, and exploding out like a singularity (a big bang), it is simultaneously static and dynamic.
Let’s just start with the premise that energy and matter are equivalent. Where does consciousness come from? If it is an energy, then it has a physical form. Consciousness does not disappear or end with your physical death, or your corporeal existence.
Kronemeyer’s (not so) simple aim was to return the copper back to the place it came from. The oldest and largest copper mine in Tasmania.
Lutruwita is one Aboriginal name for Tasmania. The name is far more ancient than the Dutch explorer.
Audience have been asked to collect and bring their e-waste prior. Cables, old remotes, cell phones, headphones, ear buds. People who forgot (like me) were handed some wire on going through the door. So, we can all be complicit.
There was the air of mystery from the start. People were being let in in batches of three or four.
What we found was a large banquet table laid out in the theatre. A beggar’s banquet with breads, cheese, nuts, fruit.
Like the opened gatefold sleeve of the original Rolling Stones album (RSVP on the white cover). Hints of a shamanistic ritual aspect.
What was tasked was to collect copper from all the waste paraphernalia. Wire strippers were in use. Collecting enough to melt down in a small crucible and fashion a single copper bullet. To be shot back into the idle mine.
The process in itself was fascinating. The tools and devices are laid out around Kronemeyer, which a camera then projects up on a screen at the back of the room.
In 2017, Kronemyer was the first artist in residence at the International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research.
She collaborated frequently with laboratories and received the first Masters of Biological Arts Degree from SymbioticA Lab at the University of Western Australia.
Her work has been hosted by Santarcangelo Festival (Italy), Forum of the Future (Portugal), Contemporary Art Tasmania, amongst many.
From an interview two years after Zero Year covid and the challenges to the Art World.
The biggest change for me has been that I don’t have as much stimulation in the form of live shows or gallery shows as I used to.
To make up for it, I’ve given myself more carte blanche to develop some of the more pointless or absurd ideas from my own mental arsenal, just to see where they take me. Keeping play alive in my practice is important, so I am getting as much stimulation as I can from my peers and my environment.
There are layers within layers. Tangents fly off as these layers are peeled back.
She gives us one answer to the riddle. Materiel is the military term given to inorganic inventory. Over the centuries this can be swords, spears, guns, bombs and armour.
There is old cinefilm of Annie Oakley, the famous American sharpshooter who was part of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show in the late 1800’s.
Followed by Zen teaching on the nature of shooting with a handgun.
Don’t rush it and shoot in your OWN time. The many writings of William Burroughs (Wild Bill Lee), who always carried heat, and tragically killed his wife when a game of William Tell went wrong.
The curious nature of entanglement connects this performance piece to the Place of Dead Roads, Burroughs opus to America’s Wild West.
Then the artist leads us through a meditative practice which reminds me strongly of the Qi Gong discipline which landed on me during the first lockdown and never left.
The small missile is smelt and then cooled down. Ready to be returned to the earth from whence it came. On the screen appears a vortex again, with the whitebasement noise of the Large Hadron Collider (I am projecting).
Immediately I am connected to the special mission from America. To fly the B2 Stealth bombers and land the bunker-buster massive ordnance bombs on three remote sites in the mountains of Persia. The closing of a circle.
In Aboriginal concept of time, the Present sits at the apex of a triangle, with the past and future stretching out equidistantly to complete the other two points.
What has been and what is to come are equivalent. Like energy and mass. Materiel World contains multitudes.
Rev. Orange Peel
