Soft Machines was a project involving VCA Honours students and São Paulo University students in both my class and Lucia's respectively. The students asked Lucia and I to participate, and so we collaborated: realising a version of the same work in both locations. Our small contribution Cool Water, 1988, 2025 takes its name from Davidoff's eponymous perfume.

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Soft Machines explores how thoughts transmit across continents and time zones, materialising simultaneously at the Museum of Contemporary Art (MAC) at the University of São Paulo and the Victorian College for the Arts in Melbourne. In science fiction, teleportation takes matter, objects, and beings and vanishes them from one place to appear in another. Though this might be fiction, in quantum teleportation, particles are reconstructed at distant locations through pairs — measuring one instantly influences the other across distance. To poetically extend this hard to grasp logic, the materials we see in points A and B  — Australia and Brasil — move, arise and are reformed between and in these two continents via the soft machines we invent.

 

The exhibition's title is borrowed from William Burroughs' cut-up novel of the same name. Like Burroughs' scattered narratives, this collaboration takes place in random and multiple ways — allowing ideas conceived on one continent to take shape on another through the hands of distant partners. Burroughs' cut-up technique and our shared ability to generate multiple meanings from fragmented, and reconstructed language suggests to us the possibilities the misheard, the transcribed, the interpreted, the misassembled offer each of us for something new and meaningful to occur.

 

Art students from VCA, together with artists studying at the University of São Paulo, spent weeks in intense communication, overcoming language barriers and time differences, paired across the 15,000 kilometres that separate their studios. Some of them realised their partner's concepts remotely. Others built works through continuous dialogue, exchanging creative decisions like a slow-motion cadavre exquis. Still others found hybrid approaches that emerged organically from their long-distance conversations.

 

The separation between the exhibition spaces themselves embodies this dialogue. In São Paulo, we explore the modernist transparency and open spaces of Oscar Niemeyer in a building designed for other purposes and later adapted to house MAC, while in Melbourne, the VCA Artspace occupies former warehouses and stables on Wurundjeri Country converted into an art school. Some of the works exhibited respond to these architectural origins and previous uses of both spaces, while others reflect on the cities and their vernaculars. What emerges from this experiment, is a set of works that could not be anticipated and a channel for contacts of many kinds that we hope might outlast the exhibition, so that these soft machines might continue to communicate, operate and transmit.