You can purchase a recording of the concert for $10 here
Water. Clean, fresh flowing water. Indigenous cultures the world over have known forever that water is the precious, sustaining source of life, health and vitality. But as we’ve become more and more detached from the natural environment as a species, clean fresh water has become taken for granted: it’s literally on tap. Water and our relationship to it is connected to all the natural systems and like them, it’s in decline. And even in cultures and traditions where water or specific waterways are held to be deeply sacred such as the Ganges in India, pollution is so extreme the water is now toxic. Throughout history, water has been symbolically used as ritual cleansing, purification, symbolic of life, but it’s becoming so dense with plastic and other debris that life in the oceans and rivers is on the brink worldwide.
For this digital concert, Dreambox Collective partnered with Tangaroa Blue to explore our relationship with the ocean and dependence on plastic. Tangaroa Blue is an organisation with resources and activities Australia-wide focussed on volunteer-based clean up of ocean debris and fostering awareness. Partnering with them fuelled our collective strength and reinforced the need for positive practical action now.
Dreambox members at a clean-up event along Cooks River facilitated by Tangaroa Blue
Held over Zoom in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, the concert consisted of new works interspersed with a live presentation by guest speaker Mathilde Gordon on the impact we have on our waterways and ocean species. The concert concluded with a plastic pledge in which our audience members pledged to remove a type of single-use plastic for the duration of August 2020 – click here to find out more about this call to action.
Dreambox artists in this project
Ivan Zavada
Guest speaker: Mathilde Gordon, Tangaroa Blue
Click here to read our interview with Mathilde
Mathilde’s passion for environmental protection comes from growing surrounded by nature. Having always lived by the ocean, this has led to her pursuit of a range of different activities like scuba-diving and kayaking, opening her eyes to not only the beauty that lies beneath the surface, but also the environmental pressures that the world’s oceans face.
Mathilde started volunteering for the Tangaroa Blue Foundation in 2014 whilst she was studying Zoology at James Cook University. She was shocked at the amount of rubbish picked up off the Australian coastline, and in 2016 decided to start living single-use plastic-free. In 2018, she and a friend kayaked over 2,000km from Alaska to Vancouver Island to raise awareness of marine debris. They completed the expedition single-use plastic-free and raised $20,000 for ocean conservation organisations. Mathilde is now a Project Officer for Tangaroa Blue, where she coordinates clean-up and source reduction events for the Australian Marine Debris Initiative (AMDI). Her passion for data collection means that she’s often at the sorting table at clean-ups, entering marine debris items into the AMDI database. In her spare time she is currently delving into the world of sailing, a potential new obsession!