Diana Baker Smith
Falling Towards Another (A Score for the Void)
2024
Graphic Score and Live Performance

Falling Towards Another (A Score for the Void) is a site-specific performance and installation commissioned by the Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts (PICA) in 2024. Situated in the architectural void of PICA’s mezzanine—once part of a public school built in 1899—the work draws on the building’s colonial history and transformation into a contemporary art institution.

Baker Smith developed a large-scale graphic score, painted directly onto the mezzanine walls, that maps the building’s former features—windows, archways, doorways—now bricked over but still faintly visible. These visual marks become both a record of architectural loss and an invitation to consider how institutions shape historical consciousness. Inspired by archival drawings, the score uses notational forms to trace the spatial absences and temporal shifts embedded in the site.

Working with dancers Emma Fishwick and Isabella Stone, and composer Jane Sheldon, the score was translated into a live performance and a video work titled Falling Towards / Flying Away. Across these forms, the project explores the interplay of movement, sound, and spatial memory as a means of reckoning with the cultural logics underpinning settler-colonial institutions.

Taking its title from Karl Marx’s description of land, labour, and capital as bodies “constantly falling towards one another and at the same time constantly flying away,” Falling Towards Another uses the logic of the score to examine the tensions and continuities held within colonial architectures. Through choreography, sound, and collaborative gesture, the work invites audiences to consider how bodies—and histories—move through space, and how sites themselves carry the rhythms of rupture and return.

“The building became a kind of score in itself—layered with erasures and interventions that speak to the institutional logic of forgetting.” — Diana Baker Smith, Art Guide Australia, 2024

Work Credits
Dancers: Emma Fishwick, Isabella Stone
Choreography: Diana Baker Smith, Sofie Burgoyne
Textile consultation: Leah Giblin
Design assistance: Zoe Gojnich and Kate Polkingorne
Clothing: Kowtow

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The 2024 Judy Wheeler Commission is made possible by the generosity of the Simpson Family.

Installation view and performance, Diana Baker Smith, Falling Towards Another (A Score for the Void), Judy Wheeler Commission, Perth Institute of Contemporary Art, 2024. Photo: Daniel Grant.