HOLDING SPACE 2025: Rituals of Welcome Short Films
Short films
2025
HOLDING SPACE is a three year annual program of artistic commissions, creative developments, workshops, public programs and events that aims to provide a provocation and a forum to share cultural and creative ideas, experiences, understandings and learnings centred around belonging and community connectedness. In 2025, the theme was Rituals of Welcome. Learn more about the 18 artists here.
The following four short films were created by the 2025 HOLDING SPACE artists: Jacinta Tobin, Oonagh Sherrard, Shervin Mirzeinali & Wendy Qi Zhang.
In their video works, these artists have responded to the concept of Rituals of Welcome by exploring stories of lived experiences, ancestral memories and traditional ceremonial practices of welcome. They have also explored their cultural heritages to re-imagine and create new cultural practices and diversity of expression.
The short films were part of the exhibition at the Community Refugee Welcome Centre on the 6th and 7th of December 2025. Please head here to learn more about the visual artworks displayed during the exhibition.
Welcome to Country, continuing culture for thousands of years
Jacinta Tobin
Reflection time has been sitting deeply with me, as I continue to count the Elders who guided me and encouraged me to stand up and be proud of my Country, Lore and Culture. To show others, we are still here showing good manners and right way intent. A Welcome takes time and prays to our Ancestors, part of the Creator of all that is. Respect is the key for all living things. This is how a “Welcome” has always been.
Sound Walk by the Water
Oonagh Sherrard
In July 2025, Dharug educator Stacy-Jane Etal and sound artist Oonagh Sherrard led a Sound Walk by De Freitas Wetland and Prospect Creek in Fairfield. This audio and video work is based on that event.
In the video, the surface of De Freitas Wetland is covered with native Duck Weed, lemna disperma.
Ngarra Ngurragu (Listen to Country). A song by Stacy-Jane Etal © 2025
Ngarra budbud ngurragu (Listen to the heart of Country)
Ngalawa ngarra ngurrawa (Sit and listen to Country)
Ngarra ngurragu bayala (Listen to Country speak)
Mii ngarradyimi (What do you hear?)
Prospect Creek takes its name from its source at Prospect Hill, likely named by Lt. Watkin Tench in 1790. The establishment of farms at the head of Prospect Creek in the early 1790s, led to a series of violent conflicts between European and Aboriginal people. The Dharug warrior Pemulwuy likely used Prospect Creek as an escape route when he was shot and captured in 1797, following attacks and raids at Parramatta.
Colonists moved down Prospect Creek, towards the Georges river – farming the upper freshwater parts of the creek. Aboriginal people continued to live, travel and fish along Prospect Creek into the 1950s and 60s.
In the late 1880s a massive water storage reservoir was built at the head of Prospect Creek, storing drinking water from the Hawkesbury Nepean dams to distribute across Sydney.
In the 1920s, the De Freitas family from British Guyana established a garden nursery by the wetland which carries their name. Some rose bushes from this time remain. By the 1980s the wetland was overrun with weeds and sediment and heavily polluted with debris including dumped car bodies.
Following a community campaign, the wetland was rehabilitated by Fairfield City Council in 2011. Over 10,000 native plants were planted to improve water quality and provide habitat for native wildlife.
Rhythm of Speech
Shervin Mirzeinali
Rhythm of Speech explores the musicality of language and the beauty of accent as a space of belonging. Developed through workshops with young participants from diverse linguistic backgrounds, the work focuses on the word “welcome”, a gesture that holds both cultural and emotional weight.
The piece unfolds as a journey from articulation to abstraction: beginning with close-up studies of the mouth pronouncing the word, it gradually expands into layered voices speaking in English and then in participants’ native languages. As meaning dissolves into sound, words transform into textures, rhythms, and tones, revealing speech itself as music.
This work reimagines accent not as a marker of difference or limitation, but as a rich and expressive form of identity. By detaching language from its meaning, Rhythm of Speech invites the audience to listen beyond understanding, to hear in each voice a shared humanity, and in every accent, a rhythm of welcome.
Tea Time with your Soft Body
Wendy Qi Zhang
Tea Time with Your Soft Body is a visual meditation rooted in my ancestral heritage of Fujian, drawing from the Chinese tea ceremony as a living practice of attunement and transformation. Guided by the concept of the “Soft Body”, a fluid, ever-shifting self, the work explores how ritual can act as a portal between inner and outer worlds. In the tea ceremony, we witness the flow of transformation. The way things take shape, dissolve, and return in new forms. This rhythm of becoming mirrors the experience of belonging. It is fluid, cyclical, and continually renewed through connection. Tea Time with Your Soft Body is an invitation to turn inward and connect with our senses. Rituals here become pathways, not boundaries. They offer gestures through which we might find our own meanings and ways of being. The work opens a space of welcome, a place to share our many selves and layered identities, where belonging is not fixed but gently brewed again and again.
CREDITS
HOLDING SPACE is funded by the NSW Government through the Multicultural NSW COMPACT Program. Our project collaborators are SSI’s Community Refugee Welcome Centre located at Callan Park, Lilyfield, and Community Partners Sydney Opera House.
The 2025 HOLDING SPACE artists are Damon Amb, Elizabeth Jigalin, Ezra Mukendi, Hosna Saif, Jacinta Tobin, Jessica Tobin, Justine Youssef, Kumari Abeydeera, Maryam Hosseini, Oonagh Sherrard, Paula do Prado, Shervin Mirzeinali, Shyamla Eswaran (Bindi Bosses), Vishnu Arunasalam, Wendy Qi Zhang, Metin Yilmaz, Damian Wright, Guillermo Robayo Gómez & Black Feather Circle.
Webpage header image captured by Damon Amb of audiences viewing Oonagh Sherrard's Sound Walk by the Water.
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Our office is located on Darug land at Fairfield City HQ. We would like to acknowledge the Cabrogal Clan of the Darug Nation, the traditional custodians of the land. Our work takes us across Darug, Dharawal and Eora lands. Sovereignty was never ceded.