Rivers of hope to flow at 23rd Biennale of Sydney’s Rivus

Faced with the global environmental problem of waste and water pollution, can those at the nexus of art and science find the answer?

Artist Leeroy New’s Polyp Stage Installation at Boracay, Philippines.

Where Leeroy New is from, everything is defined through its interaction with water. Indeed, hailing from the Philippines – an archipelago consisting of more than 7000 islands and islets – the Manila-based artist has an uneasy relationship with his country’s waterways.

“Living in metro Manila, it’s kind of the accepted truth that our rivers are polluted,” he says. “It’s a terrible way of accepting that the conditions of our environment won’t be saved.”

New, whose work will be featured in the Biennale of Sydney, has been working closely with urban planners to apply his artistic training to help remedy the Philippines’ polluted waters.

New has reimagined one the largest and most central waterways in Manila, activating a conversation on waste and water which led him to claim a spot in the 23rd Biennale of Sydney’s extensive program.

The title of the Sydney Biennale is Rivus, and director Jose Roca, 59, wants to encourage visitors to think about rivers in all their manifestations: as vital natural waterways and the life force of ecosystems, as places of agriculture, trade and deep cultural meaning, and as legal entities and sites of contest.

After the previous Biennale, Nirin, was cancelled due to the pandemic in 2020, Roca says his version is the only one that has been completely devised under the constraints of the pandemic. “Covid and Covid restrictions were the brackets for the Biennale to be conceived and executed,” says Roca, whose exhibition, Rivus, just so happens to be an anagram of “virus”. Roca says the word also can suggest conflict or contest, a coincidence given the current state of the world.

“Covid loomed above us at all times, so much so that this idea of conflict is at the core of the project,” he says.

Rivus gave Roca an exhibition title, but the director was determined not to allow it to dictate curatorial terms.

The exhibition’s team of locally picked curators began looking for artists who are working in the “nexus of art and science” and on the cusp of finding idiosyncratic ways of presenting solutions as well as “exciting provocations about our future”.

“These kinds of international exhibitions give you an opportunity to really ask the question of ‘what’s next?’,” says curatorial member Paschal Daantos Berry. “In terms of Jose’s vision for this edition we had to look at the push and pull of what a river is in terms of being a central idea by curating a set of positive thoughts on how to solve this universal problem that we have, which is really the plight of our planet.”

Daantos Berry says New already shared their curatorial interest in art advocacy, as shown by the artist’s previous work on Manila’s Pasig River, the city’s most polluted waterway, long declared ecologically dead due to pollution.

In 2018, the multi-talented artist created a floating performance garden and painted a series of pumping stations as part of a travelling art exhibition to revitalise the river, which was once a main transportation route and source of water.

“I have explored these themes through large scale, sculptural structures which use discards and surplus waste from the immediate material culture of my current environment,” New explains. However, his practice wasn’t always like this.

With a very limited idea of what art really was, New spent his childhood seeking out artistic inspiration from comic books, movies and sci-fi animation.

Leeroy New’s Rhizome Colony installation at the Wonderfruit Festival, Thailand.

“I loved watching shows about special effects and movie magic,” he recalls. “To me those seemed like very creative practices that now define my whole life. My current practice of making large-scale installations is based on building worlds.”

Around the age of 12, New left his childhood home in General Santos City to attend an art high school located two hours away from Manila. As a student, New was constantly looking for new ways to refine his creativity and modes of expression. He had some “really good mentors” who helped him to overcome the “culture shock” of moving from a “small, religious and conservative city” to a place where some boys had long hair. “It was surprising to me,” he admits. “That’s when you ask yourself, ‘what kind of place did I come from?’.”

From then on New explored every art medium available to him. He even designed a costume for megawatt pop star Lady Gaga to wear in the music video for her 2011 hit Marry The Night.

“I had a mentor once who said ‘before Filipinos were painters and sculptors we were weavers, potters and carvers’ which led me to seek out other ways to creatively respond to and process my environment.”

W W W

Many of the Biennale’s works are inspired by, have a connection with, or are located next to, rivers.

In Parramatta, the Arts and Cultural Exchange has been covered by a sculptural form of recycled plastic bottles made by New.

The form is based on the organic root formations of the sacred Balete tree of Southeast Asian mythology and is an extension of New’s Balete series which began as a casual experiment during a residency in Bendigo, Victoria in 2009. New has a second installation on display at The Cutaway in Barangaroo, a flotilla of floating vessels constructed from recycled plastic bottles representing Chinese ships in the West Philippine Sea.

The materials he used were recycled and sourced from Reverse Garbage, an environmental organisation based in Marrickville in Sydney’s Inner West, which he began collecting when he arrived in Australia in early February.

New says he collected thousands of bottle caps, plastic dome lids and water containers to construct his epic sculptures, returning whatever he did not use back to the recycling facility.

This environmentally-conscious theme runs throughout the entire Biennale, with Roca, the curator of several major exhibitions, including the Sao Paulo Biennale in Brazil, and the founder of FLORA ars+natura, a not-for-profit space in Bogota, becoming a critical force in changing the currently unsustainable global contemporary art circuit.

Opting to use recycled materials where possible and placing limits on freight and travel, Roca says art fairs and biennales are consuming too much carbon.

“It’s an oxymoron to say ‘sustainable biennale’ because a biennale is about bringing the international to the local for a very short period of time. There is no way it can be carbon neutral unless you offset it with carbon credits,” Roca says. “It’s a lost battle from the outset.”

Instead of being a fly-in, fly-out director, he moved with his wife to Sydney so he could plan the exhibition on the ground. He engaged a curatorium of four Sydney-based curators – Daantos Berry, Anna Davis, Hannah Donnelly and Talia Linz – whose local knowledge and specialist expertise also helped reduce carbon-hungry travel.

Like New, several of the artists have used recycled materials to construct their pieces for the Biennale. Israel’s Gal Weinstein uses coffee grounds, which are allowed to grow mould during the exhibition before being turned to compost, for his landscape installation. Other artists, such as British duo Ackroyd and Harvey, use living plants such as grasses, to eliminate carbon in the atmosphere.

Brief wall labels identify each artwork and QR codes enable visitors to access more detailed notes on their smartphones — as opposed to a Biennale catalogue. Instead, the Biennale is producing a 500-page book, made entirely from surplus paper stock, and containing essays, poetry and lyrics that address the Biennale’s riverine theme.

Leeroy New’s Chrysalis at the Paoay Sand Dunes, Philippines. Picture: Leeroy New

“This is a different type of Biennale,” says Roca. “We have calculated the amount of carbon that wasn’t burned because of us not travelling. We also looked at the costs of local production versus shipping, highlighting the cases where shipping was unavoidable. All of these stories can be reached through the QR codes.”

For New, the opportunity to work on large scale projects was something he had become used to taking with a grain of salt.

“Because of Covid, I have this voice inside my head that tries to temper any excitement.” However, he says travelling art festivals like the Biennale of Sydney are central to tackling the “pressing concerns that involve the entire world.

“This isn’t just some attempt to display interesting objects or ideas, but providing solutions for everything we are facing now.”

Rivus, the 23rd Biennale of Sydney runs until June 13.