Unguarded Moments

We stepped out into the dark streets of Sydney's Millers Point with a bunch of video projectors and a whole lot of madness for illuminated wetness - wharves, streets, water, in fact - with the launch of Unguarded Moments. Our first foray into commissioned public installation, our first proper creative collaboration and our first time involvement with the City of Sydney's Art & About Festival; we learned a lot and we loved the ride. Unguarded Moments featured nine video projections in total located around the streets, wharves, clifftops and windows of Millers Point and Walsh Bay. As part of the Festival, the projections were on display between 23 September and 23 October 2011. Today Millers Point is rapidly gentrifying, while the apartments of Walsh Bay provide a rather sumptuous home for many fortunate, well-heeled souls. But go back a couple of decades and this is the home to generations of Sydney's waterfront workers and their families; families who could often time trace the homes of their ancestors back to those of the original settlers, just around the corner perhaps. Each of the installations drew from the archival documentation of the area as captured on film, in photographs, and through oral histories and actuality sound recordings. We were generously supported in this endeavour by the National Film and Sound Archive, and the Maritime Union of Australia, who gave us permission to use original documentary film footage produced in the 1950s by the union's former film unit, the Waterside Workers Film Federation Unit. Also drawn on was film footage by Australian film pioneer Rupert Kathner, who shot proto-'mockumentaries' here in the 1930s including the footage of the girl eating a sandwich which featured in a loop at one of the sites. As captured by the title 'Unguarded Moments', we searched this footage for moments of direct engagement with the camera's subject, to create a set of intimate portraits of unknown Sydneysiders, and offering glimpses into transient moments in time.