Answer to the Call
08 July — 13 July 2025
Produced by NorthSite Contemporary Arts, at BULMBA-JA Theatre
Taloi Havini
An immersive twenty-two-channel soundscape Answer to the Call aims to revitalise the presence of many people through the use of sound.
In November 2020, Taloi Havini was a resident of Schmidt Ocean Institute‘s Artist-At-Sea program, observing the mapping of the Great Barrier Reef with state-of-the-art technology on the R/V Falkor. Through the inclusion of her own Hakö language and instruments that conjure her navigational ancestors, Havini moves beyond a sonic measuring of space and distance, asserting the presence of a much deeper, cyclical understanding of the ocean, space, and time.
Responding to this, Answer to the Call, aims to revitalise and give presence to a multitude of experiences in a space-time continuum amidst intersecting trajectories, pastimes, and lessons in deep-time listening.
Presented in a series of sonic cycles, the artist shares her own archive of travelling chants, underwater/hydrophone recordings, an instrumental piece composed by renowned Bougainville/Papua New Guinea musician Ben Hakalitz and panpipes by Mario Celestino.
Re-imagined and installed within the Bulmba-ja-theatre for the audience during Cairns Indigenous Art Fair Answer to the Call, 2021-25 proposes ways of ‘knowing’ the nearby Ocean through attentiveness to the movement of sound.
The work’s return to Cairns, where part of it was composed and recorded with Hakalitz and Celestino – acknowledges the importance of these collaborating, regionally based artists and the significance that the generation and sharing of intergenerational knowledge plays within Havini’s practice.
Artwork Credits:
Composition & Sound Design: Hayley Forward; Sound Engineer: Felix Abrahams; Traditional instruments: Ben Hakalitz, Mario Celestino, Hakö elders. Answer to the Call, 2021 Commissioned by TBA21–Academy and co-produced with Schmidt Ocean.
