Abyss Lessons 
Bus Projects
curriculum details




Abyss Lessons is a five part curriculum, exploring, through geologic and hydrologic states, our human and other-than-human entanglements through depth as a measure of being. Within this curriculum, we apprehend the ‘empty’ space that characterises the abyss, in the hope that it may illuminate a way through our world which is increasingly defined by absence. Over five sessions, we will engage select abyssal sites as vessels in this program, diving into explorations of ascension and descension, the entanglements of natural and industrial worlds, spaces between extractivism and ecology. Further, we recognise the unseating of human primacy through ecological change and collapse, and seek to consider the world without humans; or, how to mark and monumentalise the other-than-human through the conceptualisation of the ecomonument.

We encourage participants to enter into these abyssal sites with us, as week by week we consider ways of embracing and entangling with volumetric and vortextual sites, through applications of flow and depth across theory, place and the personal. We will move between reflections on environmental pasts, presents and futures, the ethics of the national park, but also psycho-ecological consequences in the contemporary period. Supported by a comprehensive reading list and workshop tasks toward cross-disciplinary and collective outcomes, we invite those interested to traverse these sites with us; to step into the depths and be beholden to the abyss.



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W1: A Dismal Swamp at the End of the World – Aqueous Imaginaries and (re/de)creations
8PM AEST Wednesday 2nd September 2020

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W2: Heavenly Pit – Descension/Ascension
8PM AEST Wednesday 9th September 2020

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W3: Mir Diamond Mine, Russia – Extractive Wounding
8PM AEST Wednesday 16th September 2020

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W4: The petro-Geist (Foreshadowing and Blooming Shadows)
8PM AEST Wednesday 23rd September 2020

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W5: Wittenoom Gorge – Slow, Continual Violence
8PM AEST Wednesday 30th September 2020

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W6: Oceanic Feeling and the Eromanga Sea
8PM AEST Wednesday 21st October 2020

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Mark