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connect reminds us of our own humanity by allowing us to see ourselves in others. Six films show a social and visual portrait of over 160 people of different ages, gender, socio-economic backgrounds, cultures and religion from local communities in the USA (New York City), Germany (Schöppingen, Berlin) and Spain (Blanca).

The project presents stories and interactions that build intrigue about who we are and how we relate to one another. The protagonists share their private stories and thoughts in an honestly refreshing way, as they answer five universal questions that we all ask ourselves at one time or another. Each question is the subject of its own film, with similar answers and counterpoints sewn together to build a narrative on humanity.

The questions are: What makes you happy? What are you scared of? What do you love the most? What advice would you give your younger self? What are your hopes for the future?

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The library of emoji art is an ongoing large-scale public art project where hundreds of people unite to create emojis using their own bodies. Each performance is site-specific, designed in collaboration with its community and staged in a public space. Participants include schoolchildren, workers, fire fighters, aged care residents, sports clubs, church groups and businesses. People who would not ordinarily come together, come together to create a work of art.

For each performance, Sylvia brings the community together in workshops to design their emoji, which is then performed in public space. Each performance is paired with the most popular emoji of the year, creating a connection between individual communities and a shared digital culture.

The work asks what it means to communicate in the physical world at a time when so much of our social exchange has migrated online. Creating large-scale analogue versions of digital symbols in the presence of strangers is inherently playful and inherently social.

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The sentiment driving this work is connection. Connection between people and connection with the natural world.

Over 30 people unite in movements to create a large human kaleidoscope, performed under a huge copper beech tree on a meadow of grass and flowers on the grounds of a water-castle. It is a meditative work with an almost spiritual feel. As raindrops fall on the faces of the performers, they share in the experience of connection.

Sylvia creates a body of work that re-presents these feelings. Her 2-channel film transports us back into the performance. One channel is screened on a wall, the other on a ceiling, drawing the viewer into the meadow, the rain, the slow turning of the kaleidoscope above.

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On a Saturday afternoon in Sydney a group of healthy people, including two children fell. They collapsed to the floor. Simultaneously. The fall happened during the opening of an art exhibition in Sydney Australia.

The cause?

A dada inspired work of socially engaged performance art directed by Sylvia, performed by everyday people at Brenda May Gallery.

This short film tells the story of this group of people who only met 30 minutes before the exhibition.

What happened?

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Water ways is a film about human engagement and the waterways that connect a group of people. The film’s protagonists take us on a journey that transports us into the lives of a riverside community in Indonesia. We are given intimate observations and access to everyday people, their homes and things that are usually invisible to us, including their intrinsic connection to an environment that is both essential and harmful.

We see a slice of everyday life, that starts with a group of children playing in the wash of a boat on a river. As the waterway divides, we follow the path to a tangle of boats that ultimately leads us to the main protagonist of the film, an older woman who shares her point of view with us. This woman absorbs the details of life around her from the edge of a timber mill, as she completes her morning rituals. She takes us into her world, a textured and fascinating place that we are invited to experience and marvel at.

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How do you begin to understand what life’s like for someone working in the armed services? How do you ask personal questions of someone trained to kill? Someone who, on meeting you for the first time, instinctively thinks about how they would disable you.

These are the questions Sylvia asked herself when she was commissioned to create a work for the Royal Australian Navy’s 100-year anniversary of sailing into Sydney Harbour. As part of this commission, she was embedded with the Navy at the naval base, HMAS Penguin.

A Naval Novella is a film featuring interviews, physical workouts and anecdotes. The work demystifies the Navy by breaking down some of the barriers that exist between elite Naval personnel and civilians. It shows the human side of the Navy and invitingly allows people to access this closed culture. The work is anchored by the naval tradition of tattoos and gruelling physical training that uses rope.

For the Navy, the rope is a symbol of union, mateship and stability. For the viewer, tattoos are symbols of humanity and individuality.

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In November 2011, on the two-month anniversary of the Occupy movement, police arrest over 100 protestors in New York, the mayor apologises to peaceful protestors in Seattle after police use pepper spray and a returned veteran from Iraq is injured in California when police shoot him with rubber bullets. In Montréal, they have the bubble.

The bubble and other stories from Montréal is a celebration of people who are trying to change the world and a portrait of the everydayness and practicalities of people living together in a protest environment. A film shot entirely at night follows relationships built across people from varying backgrounds through the stories they tell and the actions they share.

The Occupiers strengthen the unity of the movement by singing and dancing together and sharing in the making of beautiful bubbles, using only the wind and a simple silken cloth that envelops their bodies.

Together they call on the world to eliminate economic inequality and to redistribute resources from the 1% for everyone to share.

“We are the 99%.”

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Talking about death is difficult. And yet not talking about death can sometimes be more difficult.

In her film, A shared space, Sylvia approaches the subject side-on by showing us death from the perspective of two grave diggers. Our protagonists have been preparing graves for more than 20 years and for them death is a very normal part of life. They enjoy their job and take pride in burying the dead.

The film starts by showing us a graveyard on a beautiful serene day. The grave diggers work in a quiet and harmonious way and their movements almost seem choreographed as they prepare the burial site. Today, however, there is an unexpected outcome. Something the grave diggers have never experienced.

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birds and clouds from one life to another by Sylvia Schwenk and German artist Nikola Dicke references Bertolt Brecht’s poem The Lovers, which centres on the lives of a flock of cranes. Over 300 people come together in the German/Dutch border town of Bad Bentheim to watch and participate in the work.

Model airplane performance · Bad Bentheim · 2012

Three model airplane clubs from these two countries fly their planes as a large group, each club with its own distinct choreographed flight set to music composed for the performance. Model airplane pilots typically fly alone, never in formation. Now they fly like a flock.

Origami crane sculptures · 2012

After the model airplane performance, the audience and pilots fold small origami cranes and build large origami crane sculptures. These are later flown over the airfield in a third performance, also set to music. The event ends with a barbeque where connections made during the performances continue.

Origami workshop · 2012

The work draws on the everyday. Model airplanes, origami and shared meals are each familiar pleasures, but not usually experienced together. By combining these through this collective and playful event, birds and clouds from one life to another gives them a new aesthetic quality. Like the cranes in Brecht’s poem, the meaning of the work takes flight when these newly created actions combine.

Extract from publication birds and clouds from one life to another

birds and clouds from one life to another adopts a socio-political approach that simultaneously activates spatial and social processes and negotiates the political and aesthetic field. Art as a moment of revelation, not creating life through imitation or reflecting life’s context to represent content, but to be aware of the reality of life. Art not as a tangible physical representation, but as a way of thinking.

Florian Waldvogel, 2012, published in birds and clouds from one life to another: a project by Sylvia Schwenk and Nikola Dicke — Waldvogel is Director of the Hamburg Kunstverein, Germany

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What happens when a football crowd becomes the art?

At half time during the regional Aussie Rules Grand Final something odd happened. Men, women and children dressed head-to-toe in white overalls jogged single file onto the oval. The suits suggested an emergency but the behaviour was playful. The crowd watched. Children tried to kick balls at them.

The white-suited figures spread across the field. Some lay down tracing the lines of the goal square with their bodies and others stood arms stretched becoming the goal posts. As the crowd watched their bemusement turned to fascination. Their disbelief gave way to a feeling of permission and the crowd ran onto the field and lay down alongside the performers. Together they completely covered the white lines of the centre square.

Over 400 football fans became the work.

Extract from publication Along white lines

The relationship between the artist’s crew of 30 volunteer performers and the public becomes collaborative, the innocent action of lying on the ground one of definition. The football field is a codified space described by lines, distances and boundaries that, without the football teams, becomes a delimited space of possibility. Schwenk’s work is a democratic experience where every step of her process is open to the audience to engage, interact and direct the outcome.

Andrew Frost, Engage, Explore & Evolve, 2012, published in Along white lines — Frost is an art critic, writer and television broadcaster