Teresa Rizzo
Photo: Teresa Rizzo by Alexander Hayes, 2021
After a number of delays due to hospitalisation and other vagaries of the human condition, I managed to meet this morning in Perth, Western Australia with feminist author and photographer, Teresa Rizzo. With more news of suicidal calamity in the community, I lifted my heavy head up to the skies pleading for some semblance of peace amongst this unending social carnage that affects all communities and all families, right across any semblance of society
Whipping her leather jacket off after parking her Vespa scooter kerbside, Teresa and I struck out and walked all of 50 metres to the first cafe in the neo-modernist forecourt of the Alex Hotel, Northbridge. My incessant chatter ebbed and flowed amongst the observations of this powerful writer, known for her ‘cinematic assemblage’ as conceptual renderings of modern classics through the lens of Deleuze, firmly re-worked philosophically as a feminist.
“… Arrogance. That’s how it would come across to me if you stated you knew what type of ‘character’ in life I am”, Rizzo retorted to my analogy of human monster meets hapless prey.
Having ordered two hands of crushed avocado and mixed tomato splits, I turned our conversation to reflective listening in which I painted a picture of an existentialist ‘grounding’ for common accord, to find with no surprise that our common life experiences as children of migrants have synergies and relatively similar lay-lines.
“… For instance, it seems that life presented me with a whole series of people who thought that to provide me with the advice they had to state what I was doing wrong or incorrect … as if they had any understanding of what it was like to grow up as a child in a staunch Italian family. “
I suggested we hit the streets of grimy William Street to which Rizzo with a broad grin stated, “ … we must return to the scooter to get my camera.” With a wavering finger and yet resolutely nostalgic mind’s eye picture I was brought up to speed with this creatives filmmaking days and nights, of the 70s and 80s sub-cultures, nightclubs now giving way to day spas.
We ducked left into an alleyway alongside Uncle Billie’s Chinese Restaurant and amongst the mishmash of Chinatown central we respectively snapped away at the palimpsest of a thousand late-night graffiti artists struggling to find a square inch to get seen on.
Our conversation became more animated as we broke through the foodcourt morning bustle and back towards the Kakulas warehouse on Wellman Street, an old haunt of mine 20 years prior.
“… The Moon Cafe, you know the one … that was our central place to meet you know right up till we left for Sydney.”
I rattled off a few names and choice late-night cocktails as we stepped through the back alley of what was once the bastion for the Perth Vietnamese community. Our conversation turned to politics, topics of assimilation and colonization, and then, through Rizzo’s many challenges that have forged the filter through which she sees the world.
Photo: ‘Beggar’ by Alexander Hayes
Stepping in from the blazing sun for coconut water I soon discovered another and fascinating angle of where our aesthetic appreciations meet and perhaps where the synergy for our human companionship nestles. In the manner of speaking of ‘seeing’ our respective perspectives seem to firmly lock around the examination of power relationships, differentials, and the vagaries of the human condition as we struggle to maintain a semblance of dignity in a morally corrupt representative democracy.
Photo: ‘Northbridge"‘ by Alexander Hayes
Amidst recollections of new theorizations of the cinematic experience, I was quick to point out that the relational aesthetic connections between film and viewer fascinate me as much as Rizzo. To my pleasant surprise, my public space and audience engagement emphasis where power relationships meet control factors including national security were met with the wonderful angle of the fluidity and duality of human existence.
The cogent reality of classic ‘solid’ and pervasive themes such as slavery or enduring colonial oversight, religious surveillance, and sexuality all were lost in a moment as we both tried to recount where Rizzo had left her leather bike jacket.
“… a momentary lapse of reason … of course, I jammed it in the bike locker when I pulled out my camera silly.”
We both laughed and with a hug, and agreeing that ‘be present, aware, engaged’ is a great mantra to wake up every day and live by … Rizzo whipped away on her urban ride. I was left standing and wondering what our next meeting will entail, given the topic is the works of filmmaker, literary theorist, poet, novelist, and political activist Pier Paulo Pasolini, killed with two parts of a table and stick that he had suggested he wanted to sodomize a ‘rent boy’ according to The Guardian, "dead in a squalid tryst gone wrong and best forgotten, perhaps even deserved”.
Photograph: Allstar Picture Library
