I came back from Aotearoa at the beginning of April, feeling somewhat exhausted after four months of travel – but very happy to have had the last six weeks of that time in Dunedin, my home town. I haven’t lived there for more than thirty years, but it’s still full of great memories and many dear friends, as well as new connections.

There wasn’t much time for resting and adjusting, as two weeks later I was off to Graz, Austria to perform with Eva Ursprung and Alexandra Gschiel at the finissage of Eva’s exhibition The Art of Surfacing. We had less than a day to prepare our performance, which was a continuation of the material from Mobilise/Demobilise and in particular the performance that Eva and I gave at Audioblast in 2024. Eva’s installation provided a great setting for our performance, using UpStage in combination with video, mirrors, and sound effects. There was a good audience and the performance was followed by music. It was great to spend time in Graz again, and we had time to visit the Kunsthaus where we saw a great exhibition of the sculptor Helen Chadwick (not to be confused with my dear friend and colleague, singer and composer Helen Chadwick).

Back from Graz, I washed my clothes and repacked my suitcase and headed to Nürnberg for the Libre Graphics Meeting. I had planned to present the latest improvements to UpStage together with our lead developer Gloria, however there had been delays in the development – partly due to moving UpStage to a new hosting sponsor, Prodigi. Sponsored hosting is essential to the survival of UpStage when we have no income (as is the current situation), but the server move was fairly complex and we are still ironing out the last kinks. As Gloria had nothing ready to present, I did a quick pivot and presented recent performances in UpStage instead, to show how artists are using the platform rather than how it works under the hood. The LGM audience is largely developers so I’ve tended to focus on the development side of UpStage when presenting to them, however this time the audience appreciated learning more about how the platform is used. Maybe next year I will propose a performance, rather than a talk … let’s see! Meanwhile there is a recording of the talk here.

A week after LGM, Magdalena München was supporting a visit from Beth Stephens and Annie Sprinkle, involving a screening of their film Playing with Fire: an Ecosexual Emergency and an “ecosexual walking ritual”, Imagining the Earth as your Lover. The main organiser was Lenbachhaus, as part of their Buntes Garten Ciao festival, so it was a pleasure to be able to be involved without carrying the organisational or financial burden. The film is a very interesting artistic documentary about recent wildfires in the area where Beth and Annie live; and the walking ritual was a fabulous participatory event in the Lenbachhaus garden, involving a colourful cast of locals. The evening before, Beth and Annie had had the sad task of having to let go of their beloved elderly dog Butch back at home in California, and acknowledgement of this was included in the ritual by the dog statue in the garden.

Shortly after this I had my own letting go to contend with: my father had stopped eating and was clearly in his last days. While I hastily organised travel back to Aotearoa, my sister got down to Dunedin in time to give my brother and I a last video call with Dad, and to be there with him when he died. I arrived two days later and we plunged into organising the funeral. It was rather surreal to find myself back in Dunedin so soon, but very heartening to have a strong and supportive community of friends there. My sister and I reminisced about our childhood as we selected photos and music, and made all the necessary decisions – Dad’s puns and word games, how he read to us, his love of classical and baroque music, his work at the medical library and all of the committees and community groups he was engaged with, his travels and his Swedish penpal of 76 years, Ingegerd. He was 91 when he died and had truly lived a full and rich life.