Riverfest: Threading the Waters

Threading the Waters is an immersive projection-based video and sound installation, facilitated in collaboration with Birrarung Riverfest 2025, artist Evie J Taylor and Up The Creek.

Engaging with the river systems, this work seeks to prompt a conversation between community and the environment, touching on ideas of ecological memory and belonging in place.

Blending projected video constellations and poetic fragments, Threading the Waters invites audiences into a moment of stillness, honouring the interconnectedness of all beings and systems, and acknowledging the interdependence between human and ecological health – both healing and finding belonging on interpersonal, ecological and cosmological levels.

Visitors are encouraged to drift between moments of connection and introspection, tracing their own relationship with landscape, self, and time. Projected outdoors and in dialogue with the local environment, Threading the Waters becomes a soft offering: a return to the space between stars and rivers, memory and presence. The installation is paired with sound by freelance Sound Engineer and Sound Artist Thomas Catalan.

This project builds upon Evie’s ongoing body of work, Starsong, which explores the relationship between the personal and cosmological, through ideas of interdependence. This is expressed through abstract video constellation projections, soundscapes and poetic text. On the banks of the Birrarung, a site long significant to the Wurundjeri Woi Wurrung people, this iteration aims to respond directly to the land, river systems and histories that define this landscape.

Community Gathering

Join the artists for a special launch event including poetry reading, live music, picnic and screening.

6.00 – Projection begins

7:00 – Acknowledgement of Country and Riverfest 2025 Welcome by Carolyn Tate, on behalf of the Yarra Riverkeeper Association

7:10 – Storytelling of the Birrarung: Living in Interdependence

7:20 – Poetry Readings by Antonio Montaine, Hannah Hartnett, Ria Sebastian Kealey and more

7:45 – Jad Pinnone Music Performance

8:10 – Threading the Waters: Introduction by Artist

8:25 – Spillway Music Performance

About the artists

Jad Pinnone

Anchored by a resonant voice, exhibiting the best of a storyteller and expressing his influences stemming from his Shilha Moroccan and Italian cultural roots, Australia’s Jad Pinnone is a sonic poet blending ambient blues, folk, and soulful R&B-infused maqam chants. Drawing from Moroccan folklore and spiritual Gnawa music and merging it with the alternative, Jad creates hypnotic soundscapes rich with dreamy, atmospheric elements that transport the listener to another world.

Spillway

Spillway are a two piece art folk punk band based out of Naarm consisting of Alex Pug Williams on vocals and guitar and Camilla Eustance on vocals and viola. Weaving together intensity, absurdism, truth-telling and raw power into their songwriting, Spillway are a welcome balm for this era of collective chaos.

Please note, this is a free event, but bookings are encouraged.

Book now

This project is supported and brought to life with the help of Up the Creek.
Up the Creek is a Melbourne based outdoor organisation that seeks to respond to the contemporary disconnect by creating immersive experiences rooted in regenerative tourism and eco-leadership.