Following a one-hour performance of Jen Valender's Aeolian harps harmonised with the voices and flute song of Taiwan Kacalisian Performing Arts Troupe on Wednesday, 9 October 2024, we sat down for a discussion on what it means to be, and to create, in Naarm Melbourne. This conversation, which extended beyond that afternoon, reflects on the environment as a form of ancestral presence. Wind, and windsong, is its voice.

Chloe Ho (CH): Let’s start with a little bit of background. My name is Chloe Ho. I'm Digital Archive Researcher with Art + Australia and Lead Researcher for the Study Centre project ‘Translating the Art and Australia Landscape’. This particular project is informed by over 60 years of the Art and Australia magazine.

Today's event, ‘Sounding Naarm Melbourne: Duet with Wind’ comes out of the research that has been happening, specifically a reflection on sound as a form of true ancestral knowledge. This is a teaching that the Taiwan Kacalisian Performing Arts Troupe, formed by members of Etan Creative Vision Art Studio and hailing from Paridrayan village, Paiwan Ravar Tribe, had learned from their Elder and Taiwan National Treasure Pairang Pavavalung.

Jen Valender (JV): I'm Jen Valender from Aotearoa New Zealand. My first degree was in Wellington, which, for those who don't know, is the windiest city in the world. From my time living there, I really developed an embodied sense of engaging with the landscape and being at the whim of the elements. That was really the time when I started to think about how I might harness those characters that are present in the sites that I work upon, and how that might feature it in my artwork. At MPavilion Parkville, I am presenting my Aeolian Harps. These were fashioned last year from antique surveyor’s tripods found in Melbourne University’s Agricultural College. These are gorgeous objects that already have an embedded knowledge and have a history mapping the landscape.

Taiwan Kacalisian Performing Arts Troupe (TKPAT): We are Taiwan Kacalisian Performing Arts Troupe. We come from the Paiwan Tribe in the South of Taiwan. We are really thankful that we have this opportunity to be here and share our melodies with you. There are three things that it's really important for us to be here. The first one is to commemorate Pairang Pavavaljung, which is our teacher, and our grandfather and our father. And the second is we're really, really glad that we have this opportunity to collaborate with Jen and interact with the wind in this place. And the third, hopefully the sunshine today and the wind will also give all of you good memories of today.

Jarrod Sim (JS): My name is Jarrod Sim. I conducted my PhD research alongside the village known as Paridrayan, where the Kacalisian Performing Arts Troupe are from. My research interest stems from the idea of how sound and landscape connect societies together. When I was living in the village, I learned that the word for breath and life is the same word: nasi. In the languages that I speak, Malay and Indonesian. the word nasi means rice. I then began thinking about this connection with sustenance, and how landscape and society come together to form an ontological sense of belonging, an especially integral part of cultural identity amidst a highly globalised and mobile world.

The Wind is Alive

CH: There is quite a lot to unpack here. Jen, you have already reflected on the visceral, embodied, wind of Wellington. In that piece, I really felt the wind personified.

JV: I have been working with stringed instruments for some time in my practice—I learned how to play the violin as a child, however, even then, I found myself more drawn to the instrument's sculptural form and the way sound resonates through the elegant curvature of the wood than to the discipline of perfecting melodies.

This interest deepened in 2022 when I began working with deconstructed cellos and violins, exploring their materiality and acoustic possibilities. For that work, I sought to extend the dialogue initiated by Charlotte Moorman and Nam June Paik in the 1960s with their iconic Human Cello performances, where the human body replaced the instrument’s body (to perform John Cage’s 26’1.1499 for a String Player in New York in 1965). In my reinterpretation, I simultaneously became both the performer and the instrument. Using a fire-damaged violin and cello, I performed for a forest scarred by bushfires in New South Wales, replacing missing parts of the instruments with my own body. This project evolved into an exploration of larger, human-scale instruments, which naturally led me to the harp—a form that embodies both the sculptural and performative elements I continue to investigate.

While researching harps, I met Peter Roberts, an amazing musician in Geelong who is a palliative care harpist (music-thanatologist). He plays harp music to patients on their deathbeds. Whenever a patient is passing, he plays a certain piece of harp music. Whenever a baby is born, a different piece of harp music has played in the wards. It was this beautiful life cycle expressed under Peter’s fingers that really resonated with me. That's what I think about when I put these Aeolian harps onto a landscape. Aeolian harps are wind harps, which are harps designed for the wind to play. How is an elemental and spiritual connection being performed by the site that I'm placing them upon?

CH: There is faint resonance with the Paiwan worldview. According to Pairang, the wind is an ancestral voice. While Jen portrays the wind as an assertive, powerful force shaping the landscape according to its will, Pairang presents the wind as an interlocutor—a presence that the Paiwan people are encouraged to observe and learn from.

(TKPAT): The Elders in the village, they tell us that playing the flute is like copying the sound from the nature, like the sound of the wind, or the waterfall, the river, the bees, the birds. The sound of the flute is actually the sound from the nature.

Actually, there are some basic melodies. Different people play it in different situations, such as maybe wedding, or he or she is expressing his or her memory of the past, and maybe when family members pass away. Different people play the same flute songs in different situations to express their emotions. So, it sounds different.

Windy and Sonic Learning

CH: I am interested in these two treatments of sound: For Jen, the harp’s different melodies signalled the different stages of life. Meanwhile, Kacalisian work through variations of the same melody to respond to different situations.

JV: My treatment of sound and ecology practice is deeply influenced by my formative years at a high school with a dual-language (Māori-English) stream and a marae on the school grounds. Although I am of European descent, this environment fostered shared cultural understandings which informed my worldview. I was particularly inspired by Māori beliefs and customs, such as introducing your mountain and river—the land and waterways you were born on—when entering a formal space. These elements (soil and water) are viewed as ancestors in Māori tradition, reflecting an ecological belief system where the body is seen as part of the earth, destined to return to it. These early experiences really shaped how I viewed myself within a larger ecosystem of both landscapes and cultures. It’s also why Peter’s palliative practice struck such a chord—it aligns with this reciprocal relationship between the human body and the natural world. This foundation cultivated a curiosity and respect for diverse worldviews, which ultimately led me to train in Anthropology and Sociology before transitioning to art. These disciplines, much like art, focus on exploring and reshaping perspectives—whether through cultural customs, social practices or creative expression.

(TKPAT): The Elders also say that we express ourselves by playing the flute. It's like speaking through flute. So, we express our feelings, our love, our blessing, or even our sadness.

CH: What I am hearing is, unlike the traditional harp, the melody played on Aeolian harps is not human. It is the raw voice of the winds on-site. I see the pre-recordings Jen made with the Aeolian harps as the first stage of listening. Similar to how the Paiwan flutes copy and learn from nature, Jen’s pre-recordings inform the melody played in a formal performance.

JV: The thing I loved about working on site here in MPavilion was that there was a lot of unknowns. I actually really like working in a space where I don't know what the outcomes are going to look like because there's always a lot of room for serendipity and then really exciting accidents and glorious things that you couldn't predict happen.

(TKPAT): When we came to Melbourne, we feel the sunshine here and we feel the wind. When we play the flute today, we express our joy, our joy to you. We also play the flute to miss our old village, our Holy Mountain Tjaivuvu and our villagers.

CH: Hearing Naarm physically, with the wind on their skin. Kacalisian responded in conversation to the local wind when they played their flutes to describe and remember Paridrayan village. This event is titled Sounding Naarm, referring to the orality of the performance and the process of discovery when we sound someone out. This encounter, this interaction with the local wind, was what they have travelled all the way here to do. Jen, you were also listening to Kacalisian of course, and adapting over the three days of rehearsal and sound checks. Most prominently, I noticed that the final performance included birdsong.

JV: One of the great things about the last three days was having the time to shape and explore what happens when these two practices collide in this space. The challenge of working with wind harps, however, is that I can’t control the weather. I had to record the harps being activated and then manipulate those recordings for the performance. This approach allowed us to create something more intentional—perhaps less spontaneous—but also deeply rooted in this site. The local birdsong, insects, and traffic—essentially, all the ambient sounds around the MPavilion—became co-creators and embedded in the recordings, becoming integral to the final performance. It was about finding the rhythm where our practices could be woven together to create a performance in dialogue.

Sculptural Memory

CH: Let’s think through the instruments and objects in this performance. Jen, I know you would identify as a sculptor. From what I can tell, you and Kacalisian share this belief that objects could hold life.

JV: The materials I’ve chosen carry a deep sense of memory and meaning. I discovered the antique surveyor’s tripods during a residency at Melbourne University's Agricultural College last year, and the staff generously allowed me to repurpose them. The residency took place on a working dairy farm, which became the focal point of both my material research and artistic practice. This connection led me to explore the use of cattle gut strings for harps, a traditional material in harp-making.

On the harp-sculptures, the tripods' measuring apparatus is replaced by an amplifier and sounding box. In a sense, I’ve swapped one instrument—a theodolite, used to measure and map the landscape optically—with another—an amplifier and harp strings—that maps wind activity through sound. This shift in sensory technology alters the way the landscape is read, moving from a visual to an auditory interpretation conveyed through the object's form.

(TKPAT): Pairang taught us that the first step to learning the flute is to learn how to make it. When we learn to make the flute, we learn to hear and tune its voice. In Paiwan language, to hear is -langeda and to make noise is -zaig. We call our flute lalingedan (la-langeda-n). -Langeda also refers to its music. The flute as an object is something we listen to. It is not mute and has its own life. 

JS: For me, it's quite interesting as well with the terminologies that is used to make the flute. The finger-holes, are called ivu ivu, which means to speak. In a way, there is this idea or the voice that comes through making the instrument and playing it. It is processual and site-specific, and always connects back to the landscape. Traditionally, and even to today, when making flutes, you have to travel to ancestral land (Sandimen) to source for bamboo, you can't actually use bamboo from other places that do not belong to Sandimen. For the construction of the flute, you are to source for a specific species known as kaqauwan, a bamboo that has been used over multiple generations and produces the unique timbre of the Ravar Paiwan lalingedan. In this sense, there is a deep-seated connection to how the voice and the landscape kind of speak in tandem with each other through nasi, celebrating life through our breath.