Another Rounding of Facts Exhibition Review by Tom Nicholson     A sign on the door outside Louisa Bufardeci's installation, Another Rounding of the Facts, instructed visitors to enter one at a time. Apart from creating an unprecedented queue outside the space on opening night (and the impression, at first sight, of a blockbuster exhibit, or, even, an outbreak of incontinence), Bufardeci's instruction heightened the claustrophobic character of Studio 12. Inside, the sense of enclosing, or encasement even, was articulated through a continuous white, in which every available surface had been painted, and a faint beeping, pulsing but arrhythmic. Bufardeci had installed six digital metronomes on seven-foot tall stands arranged in a circle, each set to a different rhythm. Their irregularity, punctuating the quiet of the space, seemed to be a function of this intensified experience of interiority, like shutting out the rest of the world and listening to the sounds of ones own body.   Bufardeci's work is related to what might be described as an emerging thread of abstraction amongst young Melbourne artists, evident in several exhibitions in artist-run spaces through 1999, most clearly in system*, at Linden Arts Centre and Gallery in April 1999 (in which Bufardeci was a participant). This take hinges on the relations between, on the one hand, systems of abstraction, and on the other, social divisions. Another Rounding of Facts was characteristic: at the base of each metronome stand, and barely discernible at first, was a tiny printed text. Each text described how the rhythm of the corresponding metronome had been determined: for example, "Australian Deaths in Custody and Custody-related Police Operations 1996." Such statistical titles, each revolving around instances of death through the disciplinary arms of the state, significantly inflected the phenomenological dimension of the installation. The beeping became a kind of Morse-coded lamentation, or utterances of the wronged and dead, like the apparition of Hamlets father, only in an age of secularism and mass assassination, in which the posthumous pleas are constituted, not through ghosts, but statistical data. The subject of this inflection, both literally and linguistically, was the body.   Bufardeci has repeatedly returned to simple mechanical rhythms in her work. In her Myer Window installation of November 1998, projected texts were only visible by peering through small peep-holes, in an otherwise blacked-out window, and alternately flashed at the viewer to "breathe in" and "breathe out". Like most of Bufardeci's work, it was structured by the tension between an insistence on the body and its negation. In Another Rounding of Facts, the body was a schematic presence in the metronome stands, elongated and balanced with fragility. While the metronome itself is, in its very raison dêtre, regular (as against the vagaries of the body), both the faintness of the sound and the overall arrhythmia generated a sense of pathos familiar to the experience of our own bodies. Importantly, the irregularity of the beeping - and its apparent endlessness - was only comprehensible over a duration, demanding acute attention to memory as sounds overlapped and then drowned in ceaseless and fugitive movement. In Another Rounding of Facts, this thematisation of our capacity to perceive was a connection between physiological and historical memory. It was also an address to the body - indeed to the potential of the body - beyond the cultural logic which predominates within capitalism.   © Tom Nicholson, 2000 Originally published in Art /Text #69 p 89-90, May, 2000