Alexander Powers is an artist residing on Wurundjeri land in Melbourne, Australia, whose work spans experimental performance, electronic music, DJing and event organisation. Their choreographic work has been performed at Brunswick Mechanics Institute, the Immigration Museum and most recently in video form for Liquid Architecture’s online journal, Disclaimer. As a dance performer, they have most notably performed in Luke George’s work Public Actions as part of Dance Massive, as well as in works by Rebecca Jensen and Sarah Aitken.

As a DJ, performing under the name Female Wizard, they have gained national and international recognition, having played at festivals including Golden Plains, Dark Mofo, Boiler Room, Soft Centre and Hybrid Festival, creating mixes for Discwoman and Boiler Room’s Hard Dance series, receiving a four-year residency at Le Fag, and hosting their own series of experimental club events called Powertrip. This year, under the same moniker, they extended their practice into music production, and released an album of experimental techno on local label Anterograde. Across all these mediums, Powers displays a commitment to the interruption of hegemony, dedication to the experimental and a deep enquiry into finding new forms of gathering and spectating.

Andy Butler is a writer, curator and artist. His multidisciplinary practice investigates the structures of power that shape cultural and artistic production. For Makeshift Publics, he is researching how current discourses of social justice reflect the ideals of white saviourism used to justify the American colonisation of the Philippines.

Andy’s writing on art and politics has been published widely, including by The Saturday Paper, The Monthly, Art + Australia, Runway, Overland and more. Recent curatorial projects include Always there and all a part (2017) through BLINDSIDE’s Emerging Curatorial Mentorship and Those Monuments Don’t Know Us (2019) at Bundoora Homestead Art Centre. He is the exhibitions curator at West Space. As an artist, he has exhibited at Bus Projects, Firstdraft, The SUBSTATION and Footscray Community Arts Centre. In 2019 he undertook an Asialink Residency to Manila, and in 2017 he participated in FCAC’s Emerging Cultural Leaders program.

Latai Taumoepeau makes live art. Her faivā (performance practice) is from her homelands, the Island Kingdom of Tonga and her birthplace Sydney, land of the Gadigal people. She mimicked, trained and un-learned dance, in multiple institutions of learning, starting with her village, a suburban church hall, a few nightclubs and a university. Her body-centred performance practice of faivā centres Tongan philosophies of relational space and time; cross-pollinating ancient and everyday temporal practice to make visible the impact of climate crisis in the Pacific. She conducts urgent environmental movements and actions to create transformation in Oceania.

In the near future she will return to her ancestral home and continue the ultimate faivā (performing art) of sea voyaging and celestial navigation before she becomes an ancestor.

Powertrip is a club night and music label run by DJ, electronic music producer and choreographer Alexander Powers. In this project, she has tried to reimagine prescribed economic and social structures within the local underground electronic music scene, in order to reveal new transcendent forms of gathering and spectating. In this artist talk she discusses the questions and ideas that continue to lead her into this inquiry, what has and hasn't worked, and what's on the horizon.

Artists: Alexander Power & Andy Butler
Hosted by Latai Taumoepeau