Makeshift, Sojourn in Espérance Bay (2011)
Artists: Makeshift (Tessa Zettel & Karl Khoe)
Work: Sojourn in Espérance Bay (2011)
Partner: Cannery Arts Centre
Location: Esperance, Western Australia
Informed by this local legend and historical area photographs of the goldfields, Makeshift created and filmed an unusual dining tableau in Pink Lake. Intended as a kind of apparition that the delirious M. Riche might have seen in his desperate hours, the tableau incorporated borrowed objects, edible native plants, and the participation of guests from the community with connections to the land.
Makeshift's exhibited installation comprises video documentation, domestic items collected in Esperance and a French stereoscope from the early 1900s that enables visitors to view 3D images of Esperance's food supply as it exists today. Together these works combine to provide viewers with a type of self-contained time machine, a chance to look backwards and forwards in time at alternate ways of living in Esperance.