Colosseum

Colosseum (2021) is the final part of a trilogy of works created by Martyn Coutts and Ian Pidd for the Unconformity Festival’s Opening night. The brief for these works is that they needed to be free, accessible, draw deeply from the culture of the West Coast of Tasmania and include a spectacle. Building on The Rumble (2016) and Tectonica (2018), Colosseum used the visual language of Queenstown and surrounds to tell short filming stories that involved local residents playing heightened versions of themselves. These slow motion expressions of the residents and the landscape draws from 19th century portraiture or video art representations of the 20th century. The soundscape rendered by Dylan Sheridan, amplifies every slow motion crack and breath, creating an otherworldly space, elevating the Lynchian unease of Queenstown and its surrounds. The output of these short films was a large-scale projection in the centre of the town over the opening night of the festival. The steeply-raked seating providing the ‘colosseum’ to view the pedestrian spectacle of these ordinary citizens. The democratic use of everyday people, the free and accessible nature of the work and the celebration of the town of Queenstown points to the usage of social practice as a form within this work.