Noosa Botanic Gardens, Lake Macdonald
It seems kind of absurd to wake up before dawn (or just before dusk, as the case might be) and head out to the Botanical Gardens to traipse around on a nonsensical tour lead by nonsensical tour guides. Or maybe it’s absurd not to (I mean, what do you call waking up five days a week to drop your kids at an institution that funnels them towards spending their most energised and alert hours staring at a 30cm x 40cm backlit square, shuffling 0s and 1s around (that’s binary code, for those just joining us) in order to transfer some different 0s and 1s into another institution’s backlit squares so that you can draw on them and give them to someone else simply in order to eat and keep a roof over your head (just barely, for many), often giving a chunk of those 0s and 1s to “the Government” to squander on “important” things like fossil fuel subsidies and prisons for children (not yours, hopefully) – which is exactly what I’ve been doing for 30 odd years and probably will for 30 or so more.
Sorry – got waylaid a little there.
Anyway, it was the Dadaists who eschewed logic and reason – postulating that these provided the social and governing frameworks that resulted in the atrocities of World War I. Instead, they embraced nonsense, the irrational and an anti-bourgeois sensibility as a radical reimagining of how we could live. The Midnight Horrors combine profound levels of nonsense with a genuine love of nature to take you on an uncanny tour of the beautiful Noosa Botanic Gardens (formerly a tip) – home of dozens of varieties of birds. There’s no guarantee you’ll see any birds. The walk may not even be about birds. It may be about the absence of birds. What it will be is a reflection on human impact on both the land and animals, climate crisis and the awesome danger and beauty of nature.
By the way, this isn’t an installation either (even though we’re listing it under the ‘installations’ section) – but if we’re throwing out the rule book on logic and reason, why does it matter?!
ARTIST BIO
Lead by Teneille Clerke & Tobias Manderson-Galvin, the Midnight Horrors is comprised of core members and supported by a wider artistic network of troublemakers, occultists, and ne’er-do-wells who work together making essential work that engages community through art and climate action.
A silly walk through nature where birds may appear—or not. It playfully explores climate change, humans, and our impact.
