You Can’t See Speed is a limited-edition vinyl accompanying the artist’s major solo exhibition at the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art. Attending to the interconnected and multisensory experience of film beyond vision, You Can’t See Speed features vocal resonances and spoken descriptions written and recorded in collaboration with participants from Stefanou’s film works, alongside music composed by the artist. A cacophony of lived experience, oral storytelling, and vocality.
The B-side centres a collaboration with blind motorbike mechanic and rider Matthew Cassar and composer Joseph Franklin. Anchored in ideals of trust and experimentation, the work traces Cassar’s journey through high-performance dirt bike riding as a surrealist voyage of adrenaline and self-actualisation. In his own voice, Cassar reflects on the layered worlds—both on screen and within—where ‘image meets experience’. Cinema becomes sensorium, as singing, thrumming, electronically mediated dirt bikes, outer-suburban field recordings, exhausted vocalities, hymns, trumpets, harmonics and grain converge in a rush of sonic and embodied image-making.
Tina Stefanou: You Can’t See Speed attends to the interconnected and multisensory experience of film beyond vision. The exhibition continues Stefanou’s interest in the voice as medium, from spoken sonic soundscapes to vocal techniques such as humming. It also expands on her methodology of deep, long-term, co-creative collaboration and socially engaged practice involving interspecies-communal-performance making and breaking bread (or grain). Her diasporic, working-class ethic and approach to making challenges institutions of power and capitalistic logics, embedding the commons – from the planetary to the everyday – within her life and work.