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. As part of her research for the work, Havini participated in a research expedition with the Schmidt Ocean Institute, mapping the seabed of the Australian Great Barrier Reef in 2020.
She responds to this experience through her own inherited Häko epistemologies of navigating time and space using a sonic call and answer method.
Presented in a series of sonic cycles, the artist shares her own archive of traveling 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 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 works 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.
