Connor D’Netto x Yvette Ofa Agapow - Material (2024)

In Alain Badiou’s In Praise of Love, Badiou describes love as “…an existential project: to construct a world from a decentred point of view other than that of my mere impulse to survive or re-affirm my own identity.” Much like love, and as we discovered while creating MATERIAL, artistic collaboration yields the both frustrating and beautiful birthing of an entity simultaneously shared and othered from its constituents’ contributions, emotions and intentions.

Prior to the undertaking of this project we had never played or collaborated in any capacity and started only from the almost nebulous proposition that we were to make an album with no other constraints or stipulations imposed on us. The work could be described then, in its most bare form, as the creation and experience of a shared world together, the outcome of which eventually manifested in a 40-minute presentation at the Brisbane Powerhouse for OHM2023. What emerged during collaboration was the persistent theme of ‘Material’ – shared interests in recurrent sonic material and cells, mutual/separate preoccupations with the physical materials used to make the music including tape, metal, natural fibres and miscellaneous objects, and a painful self-consciousness of arts’ conceptual and intellectual materials.

The preparation of the album also occurred over an extended period of time, with different pieces falling into their own places and tracks emerging at very disparate parts of the composition process. We would meet once every few weeks or so and both bring whatever we had been interested in musically at the time to share with each other, as well as stories and feelings from our separate busy lives. What has resulted is something of a sonic collage haunted by spectres of various traumas and transitional events that occurred in our lives during this time – each track, to us, seems audibly distinct yet is united by a sense of unnameable mourning and restlessness, even in its most ambient moments a poison seems to seep through the cracks.

MATERIAL, in essence, is a snapshot of two lives and artistic sensibilities converging in a shared space avoiding any semblance of clear narrative which we hope others can find their own pathway of meaning through.

“The place of art is a co-poietic time-space-event of passage, a transport-station of trauma and an occasion for joy. A transport-station that more than being a dwelling place or time is rather a time-space offered for coemerging and cofading, borderlinking and borderspacing, over different times and different places, where the same place is stretched between different times and the same time connects different time-spaces…” Bracha Ettinger, ‘Fragilization and Resistance’, p. 9.