With Aarti Jadu, Nicholas Burridge and Geoff Robinson | Curated by Joy Zhou

Before Bluestone Meets Sandstone speaks to the geological deep time of the Western Volcanic Plain, which shapes the land of Melbourne’s west. Flowing through the plain, the Maribyrnong River witnesses life, extraction and industrialisation as the west develops and changes.

On 24 May 2026 Trocadero Projects led a place-based public program on the Maribyrnong River to practise listening, reflect on place and share knowledge. Departing from Footscray Wharf in the morning, 85 participants joined us for three sessions throughout the day on the Tramboat. Participants were encouraged to explore listening as a way to connect with the river and its unseen histories through guided listening, performance artist talks and conversations shared over food. We invited three artists to respond to this context and share ways of being with the waterway through embodiment, listening and exchange.

Heading upstream in the morning, Aarti Jadu led us through a 40-minute workshop to awaken our listening tools as we travelled along the river. This group listening activity involved gentle breathwork and other mindful practices to activate our sense of curiosity and collectively tune in to the waterway.

Following Aarti’s session, Nicholas Burridge held a performative artist talk, where the river and sculptural artefacts from his practice became vehicles for travelling through time. Drawing on geology, material science and the river's own layered history, Nicholas invited us to reconsider the sometimes seemingly static world around us – revealing it as fluid, dynamic and deeply entangled with human industry. Moving between object, story and place, Nicholas invited us to reflect on how earth and manufacture mirror one another across vast and intimate scales.

Listen to Nicholas' artist talk

After lunch we went downstream towards Port Phillip Bay, where Geoff Robinson performed Resonant Pollution. Resonant Pollution is a performance iteration of an ongoing project that focuses on listening as a mode of attuning with water ecologies and their entanglements with plastic pollution. This iteration was situated on the Maribyrnong River and engaged live hydrophone listening to plastic pollution collected from the river. The performance submerged us into the acoustic ecologies of estuarine plants and beings while speculating about a world of accumulating resonant plastics.

This event was supported through Maribyrnong City Council’s Love Your West Grants Program.

About the artists

Aarti Jadu
Aarti has been experimenting with vocal and movement workshops since 2018. Her background as a yoga instructor and her profound interest in raag music inspires her exploration of how the body can be tuned to receive generously. Playing with site, and ways of participation, her workshops offer a way to view oneself as a part of ‘nature’ – not separate from the environment.

Nicholas Burridge
Based in rural Victoria on the lands of the Dja Dja Wurrung, Wurundjeri and Woi-wurrung Peoples, Nicholas Burridge is a sculptor and installation artist whose practice explores the complex relationship between industrialisation and nature. Focused on earth sciences and the Anthropocene, his work investigates how humans re-engineer the earth through developing processes for manufacturing lava, using explosives to form metals, and building machines to make and erode sedimentary rock. Recent solo exhibitions include Terraformed (2024) at Wagga Wagga Regional Art Gallery and Built Geologies(2024) at Canberra Glassworks. Burridge is 2025 the recipient of the Helen Lempriere Scholarship.

Geoff Robinson
Geoff Robinson is a Narrm/Melbourne-based artist who creates situated projects that engage listening to connect with the durational layers of place. Often in collaboration, Robinson’s practice highlights ecological tensions between situations and places across time, as a way of understanding past, current, and future relations to ecologies and place. Recent projects include: Polyphony for Intertidal Ecologies (2025), Mornington Peninsula Regional Gallery offsite project, Monmar/Point Nepean; Composition for River Objects (2024), Run Artist Run, Narrm/Melbourne, Durational Situation/Umeälven/3022 (2022), Bildmuseet, Umeå. Robinson was awarded the Melbourne Prize for Urban Sculpture 2014 and completed a PhD in Fine Art at Monash University, Melbourne, 2018.

Photos by Jemma Harrison | audio by Simon Rose | programming support from Zoe Blain