You Can’t See Speed: A Motorcyclist Rides Blind in the New Exhibition at ACCA

It started with a dirt bike. While Australia was emerging from Covid lockdowns in 2022, Greek Australian artist Tina Stefanou and her partner, composer Joseph Franklin, were grieving for their departed canine companion and looking for relief. “Joe went out and looked for a dirt bike to ride around on the farm – we live an hour outside of the city – and it was through this grappling with grief that he found the magic of the dirt bike.

The dirt bike he bought was from Matthew Cassar,” says Stefanou. Cassar is a mechanic and a rider. Perhaps more remarkably, he’s also blind. “So my partner gets the bike, they have a conversation. Matthew tells him about how he rides and repairs bikes as a blind person through touch and voice.”

Franklin’s interest was piqued on behalf of Stefanou who, beyond her interest in “the poetics of difference”, as she puts it, also has a longstanding arts practice focused on voice and singing.

Meanwhile, Stefanou had been invited to apply for the Culture Lab residency, a collaboration between Arts House and the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art (ACCA). “I thought, ‘That’s way out of reach for me,’” she recalls. A friend suggested she include a project with Cassar in the application – and from there “it was almost as if the project was writing itself into being”.

The resulting film – and, above all, her relationship with Cassar, which the main film and other works capture – is the centrepiece of ACCA exhibition Tina Stefanou: You Can’t See Speed.

That relationship unfolded “very naturally”, she says, over “three years of having cups of tea, meeting his family, meeting his bike coach. Both of us have had spiritual and personal, transformations through meeting, and I think that is where the conditions of art and its potentialities live.”

It’s a relationship ACCA curator Elyse Goldfinch was inspired by when she proposed the exhibition, having noted Stefanou’s socially engaged practice. “She’s not an artist who helicopters in and out of communities to extract material or labour or ideas from them. She’s someone who works in such a deeply ethical and embedded way with communities – she brings them all along on the journey with her.”

Stefanou’s exploration of class dynamics and representation is also central to this exhibition – an approach that might seem unexpected in the context of an inner-city gallery. “Matthew had an extraordinary relationship with his dirt bike in the most ordinary of places: the outskirts of Naarm, in Doreen’s new housing estates, where working-class and lower-middle-class communities seek more affordable living – though that’s changing fast,” she says. “It’s also a place where machine companions are ever-present. In suburbs like Hawthorn or other leafier inner-city areas, the sounds of leisure take on a different character. But in Doreen, the sonic landscapes – those relationships to machines and masculinity – are full of poetics and materials. I wanted to explore how to engage with Matthew without falling into the easy clichés so common in the history of Australian cinema. There are other things to uncover, like tenderness, estrangement and ritual.”

The exhibition also features the artist’s vocal practice – which is key to how she relates to the world within and beyond art – including her work with animals. “The voice is an amazing tool for crossing different thresholds. I live in Wattle Glen and have to deal with a lot of sick kangaroos and other wildlife, which means I have to go close to them to see how they’re breathing. To do that, to signal to them that I’m not a threat, I have to use clicking sounds.”

That voice-centred approach also works with humans, she adds. “When I’m working with different communities, I don’t introduce myself as an artist, I introduce myself as a singer because that is where the conversation of invitation begins – we can sing together. The films, the sculptures, the public action – they all arise from a very simple act of singing with others. And that is my modus operandi in terms of engagement and critical thinking.”

Tina Stefanou: You Can’t See Speed not only spans ACCA’s four galleries (and even the restrooms), there’s also a secret artwork outside the building. Hint: you can’t see it, but maybe it will prompt you to think about the neighbourhood you live in and the community around you.

“I hope that the show gently and imaginatively opens up spaces for thinking about class consciousness, mobility, and the conditions that shape our lives,” says Stefanou. “We are part of complex financial, ecological and social systems that enable or restrict how we move through the world, and perhaps the role of moving image, performance and sound is to materialise some of those abstractions – making them felt, in ways that sharpen our sensitivity and activate more nuanced understandings.”

Broadsheet is a proud media partner of the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art. Tina Stefanou: You Can’t See Speed is on now until June 9. Entry is free.