The Night Passes

An installation of a group of works at Gallery Lane Cove, Sydney Australia in December 2024

This exhibition is the first stage in a longer project. A year or so ago, Fiona Davies wrote a paper for an ethnographic journal called ‘(not) surviving the night’. The whole issue was focused on thinking about the idea of investigating nocturnal ethnographies. The essay she wrote was looking at the liminal space of the hospital corridor at night and focused on the sound scape of often unattended alarms, footsteps and fragments of conversations.   

At the same time, Davies had been presenting a performative lecture that combined fiction with academic papers and oral histories to examine aspects of the patient journey in hospital. In each section Davies layered a fictional fairy tale with fragments from academic papers, oral histories and artist statements to form a forty minute performative lecture. The layering was an attempt to disrupt the hierarchy of knowledges. Davies decided to respond using this same fragmenting technique to each of the chapters in the Nocturnal Ethnographies This first stage is a response to the introduction and afterword by the editors Eleonora Diamanti and Alexandrina Boudreault-Fournier. There they describe making a film and recording sound as an ethnographic fieldwork technique. They argue that this process enables a shift from observational (as a traditional anthropological western-centered way of knowing) to an embodied immersive listening method.

Davies thought that one of the defining features of her time associated with medical care in a hospital was the time driving to and from the hospital often on badly lit, empty roads. The sound of the tyres on the road, the glitter of the headlights picking up fragments of broken glass from windscreens add up to feeling of enchantment with the night.