The Sensory Portals are new intimate spaces for you to experience multi-sensory artistic encounters.

Funded by the Arts & Culture Department of the City of Greater Geelong and Creative Victoria. The conceptualisation, architectural design and siting composition of the Sensory Portals has been a collaborative work of Geelong-based artist Don Walters and architectural academic Mirjana Lozanovska and architect Stewart Seaton from the School of Architecture and Built Environment, Deakin University. 

The portals have been constructed with a view to being used by the wider community post Geelong After Dark. For GAD 2019 various artists have been invited to activate the three portals to create unique and intimate experiences. 

‘ORO’ is a traditional circular Macedonian dance performed by elderly Macedonians who had worked at Ford factory. Its rhythmic (distinctive 7/8 rhythm base) depends on each individual working towards a collective dance. Dance was a way that Macedonian workers were relieved from the grind of manufacturing work, but this dance also resonates with the repetitive and relentless machinic pace. ORO reminds each generation of the ways lives are bound into a momentum of life and pragmatic existence.

In Sensory Portal 3 ‘ORO’ you enter a rhythmic soundscape, life size images of people dance -they dance around the walls and you stand in this small space 1200 X 2400 in the midst of an energised field. If there are two or more people you rub shoulders with the dancers on the walls. They dance around you (in the centre of the space) or you dance with them.

Past Ford worker participants from Macedonian Social Club

• Ilo Najdovski

• Venta Pacovska

• Cvetko Pacovski

• Bogdan Dimitrovski

• Ilo Nikolovski

• Dosta Smileska

• Vera Toseska

• Dejka Stevkovska

• Lena Chomovska

• Dora Taseska