About Melinda Hetzel & Co.
Melinda Hetzel & Co. collaborate to create extraordinary site-responsive and participatory artworks, which invite audiences to experience and participate in art in new ways.
Melinda Hetzel and collaborators are known for creating deeply evocative, visually stunning, performance experiences and can be found working at the edges of our respective forms. A multi-talented group of artists, we persist in raising questions about the complex and evolving relationships between the human animal and the natural and human-built worlds, evoking collective memories of grief, loss, longing and transformation. Collaboration and meaningful audience connection are at the heart of our work. We specialise in creating intimate art experiences within public space, which simultaneously form a spectacle for passersby, creating room for unexpected discovery and possibility. Based in Naarm (Melbourne), we pursue a fascination with how live arts, in combination with new technologies, can affirm threads of interconnectedness between human beings and the rapidly changing world in which we live.
Since 2013 this artist-led collective has created a diverse suite of works including - participatory performance-installation, Urban Cocoon, augmented reality experience, Fly By Night, live fortune-telling machine, Madame Tulalah's Magnificent Box, interactive, musical tree-installation, Between the Trees, durational, live and live-streamed performance-installation, Conservatory, and photographic pavement exhibition, Here We Walk. This body of work builds on Hetzel's decade as artistic director of visual theatre company Peepshow Inc.
Melinda Hetzel and collaborators are known for creating deeply evocative, visually stunning, performance experiences and can be found working at the edges of our respective forms. A multi-talented group of artists, we persist in raising questions about the complex and evolving relationships between the human animal and the natural and human-built worlds, evoking collective memories of grief, loss, longing and transformation. Collaboration and meaningful audience connection are at the heart of our work. We specialise in creating intimate art experiences within public space, which simultaneously form a spectacle for passersby, creating room for unexpected discovery and possibility. Based in Naarm (Melbourne), we pursue a fascination with how live arts, in combination with new technologies, can affirm threads of interconnectedness between human beings and the rapidly changing world in which we live.
Since 2013 this artist-led collective has created a diverse suite of works including - participatory performance-installation, Urban Cocoon, augmented reality experience, Fly By Night, live fortune-telling machine, Madame Tulalah's Magnificent Box, interactive, musical tree-installation, Between the Trees, durational, live and live-streamed performance-installation, Conservatory, and photographic pavement exhibition, Here We Walk. This body of work builds on Hetzel's decade as artistic director of visual theatre company Peepshow Inc.
Acknowledgement of Country
We acknowledge and pay respect to the traditional owners and true custodians of the unceded lands where we live and create, the Wurundjeri Woi Wurrung and Bunurong Boon Wurrung peoples of the Eastern Kulin Nation. We pay our respects to elders past, present and emerging and extend that respect to all First Nations peoples.
We also acknowledge that we are facing a Climate Emergency and pay respect to the pivotal role First Nations people continue to play in protecting and caring for Country.
We also acknowledge that we are facing a Climate Emergency and pay respect to the pivotal role First Nations people continue to play in protecting and caring for Country.
Image description: A femme-presenting person in an awkward headstand in a pile of autumn leaves, located inside a theatre foyer. The person is wearing a skirt suit with an orange top; her head, arms and shoulders are buried in the leaves. Photo: Nassiem Valamanesh, featuring Ingrid Weisfelt, Fly By Night - (Hamer Hall, 2015).