N0 R3PLYInstagramthenoreplycollective@gmail.com
ARCHIVE PROJECTS2023-2025

N0 R3PLY


About

N0 R3PLY is an art collective comprised of Azul Bermudez and Sen Vanderzalm based in Naarm/Melbourne,
Australia. With a primary focus on interactive, installation-based work, their practise is concerned with the radically
changing relationship between culture, material and how meaning is imparted through physical objects and
processes. 

A key element of their artistic rationale is how the communication of knowledge generates meaning
and social memory in an age that preferences simplified or minimised interaction. To explicate their ideas, they
combine analogue processes with technology to explore the interplay between the notion of time and memory
and digital and organic systems of language and understanding.  
 


Bodies of Water


01/10/2024- Present

International Biennal of Posters in Mexico, 2024 ECOS Festival
Bodies of Water is an ongoing advertising campaign that sells nothing. Bodies of Water finds meaning in its pointlessness. Bodies of Water posits what is quantifiable isn’t the only metric of value. Bodies of Water captures your attention and sits idle with it. 

Bodies of Water raises more questions than it answers.

  1. Shoot Set Up
  2. Model Call Out
  3. Process
  4. Poster sample 1
  5. Poster sample 2
  6. Poster sample 3
  7. Poster Gallery
  8. Instllation Chile
  9. Installation Bolivia
  10. Installation Peru

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Poem:


If you tell me what you want, I can give it to you. Better yet, I can jump through hoops and take a punt. An unprompted guess preferred over a correctly executed ask. The first option perversely makes you feel more seen. I want people to work for my attention. It’s labour to ask for what you want. 

What’s gratifying about taking a stab in the dark? The thrill is in the missed marks. In the hopes they’ll get it right by accident so we can wrap it up and package it as fate. Clinging to you. You see right through me, but I want you to see. 

Why do I lay myself so bare for someone who can’t look let alone understand? I’m thinking about how you’ve basically worn the same thing for the past 3 years. It makes it easier to stick by your image when it never changes. But you don’t exist unless I want you to. 

A low disembodied voice that passes my housemate's door once every few weeks. Muffled laughs that lull to silence when your mouth is put to better use. Skin raised to close the gap between yours and mine. Subtly expanding every aspect of myself. Microscopic gestures in the hopes of eliciting a grander one. 

Wetness. Implicit of readiness. But you can’t touch me as that’s too big a move. Too obvious a play. If you joined me we’d be the only ones in the room. Then everyone would know. A wet pair is a statement. So it's better to leave me to hang out to dry because you can’t make the jump.
 
Instead, you let me fall on the sword of enemies tongues. Perhaps wetness is a defence. In a way, it acts like armour, sliding off my back and pooling into mouths agape, appreciative of the drip feed. You said you saw someone who looked like me the other day. Your explanation was manifestation. 

But not quite hard enough. Only conjuring my likeness not the real thing. I can't hear the call. Am I ignoring it? Or are there others drowning it out? I’m not asking for your attention. I’d prefer to not make demands for things I’m owed. So I’m going to make myself irresistible and you will choose it. 

You will think it was a choice you made. What are you going to do with me? Worship me? Collect me? Get bored with me? Cover me? Maybe tear me up and throw me out? Do I wear the creases of my surface well? In this form you can flip me over when you want a break from my gaze. I want to be new in your eyes, not a reproduction. 

Words spread too thin over too many others. Sheer compliments easily perforated making them all the more desired. If you want them to stick, stay very still. I sip on lukewarm conversations getting a gut full of things that no longer interest me. 

If I gave it to you, would you then be happy? If I show you mine, will you show me yours? Give in to the sink. Embrace the fold. It would be a shame to think. So the only way to know is to come closer and find out. A liberal salting. Can you taste it? On the corners of my mouth. Pooling from above. I want to see your face south of mine. 

But there's no mercy for stooges who sleep in beds of Martine Rose. I used to like that I could smell you on me. I waited a while before I sweated you out. I don't know why. If I could speak in a language you’d listen to. Maybe something softer. Less weighted with expectation. Would you catch the meaning then? If I reduced it to a whisper you had to strain to hear? Red faced and handed.

Skimming and afraid to nosedive. To settle. To stay. Maybe I’m too dense. Too full. And you only touch what floats. If I promise to miss you, will you leave me alone? If I told you I liked it would you stop? Would you look longer if I told you not to?





VOLUMES


21/09/2024

Shortfilm
The film aims to explore the nuances of access through the subject of the pool. Private pools are markers of leisure, privilege and individualism - bodies of water for the express purpose of serving those who own them for a few opportune months of the year. And the activity of 'bombing' or repeatedly jumping into a pool to create a large splash is both the epitome of child-like fun and a blindness to water being a valuable resource. 

The disparity of water usage across class raises a broader issue whereby water is a privilege rather than an inherent right. With this, we do not aim to critique but simply explore modern anxieties or the lack of when it comes to how we interact with and use water.


  1. Oficial poster
  2. Stills pool
  3. Stills site

---------------------------------------------------------------

Excerpt from Joan Didion’s ‘Holy Water’: 


I have always wanted a swimming pool, and never had one. When it became generally known a year or so ago that California was suffering severe drought, many people in water-rich parts of the country seemed obscurely gratified, and made frequent reference to Californians having to brick up their swimming pools. In fact a swimming pool requires, once it has been filled and the filter has begun its process of cleaning and recirculating the water, virtually no water, but the symbolic content of swimming pools has always been interesting: A pool is misapprehended as a trapping of affluence, real or pretended, and of a kind of hedonistic attention to the body. Actually a pool is, for many of us in the West, a symbol not of affluence but of order, of control over the uncontrollable. A pool is water, made available and useful, and is, as such, infinitely soothing to the western eye. 


"The West begins," Bernard DeVoto wrote, "where the average annual rainfall drops below twenty inches." This is maybe the best definition of the West I have ever read, and it goes a long way toward explaining my own passion for seeing the water under control, but many people I know persist in looking for psychoanalytical implications in this passion. As a matter of fact I have explored, in an amateur way, the more obvious of these implications, and come up with nothing interesting. A certain external reality remains, and resists interpretation. 


The West begins where the average annual rainfall drops below twenty inches. Water is important to people who do not have it, and the same is true of control.





SEQUENCE 
OF 
SPACES


24-25/05/2024

NGV, Art Book Fair Satellite Program 2024
Sequence of Spaces was an interactive multimedia exhibition that explored the intersection between written language and visual storytelling. Set in a liminal office space, the installation invited visitors to type words into a keyboard which produced a corresponding visual narrative that was projected live. 

Merging code, poetry and visual ephemera, these sentences created by participants were then printed to be taken home. 

Through the work, the act of typing was transformed from what is often a solitary and arduous endeavour, into a larger creative collaboration. How we interpret written language also greatly differs from how we engage with images, and the correlations we create between the two are often difficult to explain or justify. 

As such, the work asks for engagement to exemplify how our individual experiences and ways of seeing can contribute to a shared narrative.


  1. Promotional work for NGV
  2. Official poster
  3.  Set design, Office core
  4. Office core
  5. Office core
  6. Office core
  7. Exhibition souvenir, postcards


#73


31/08/2023
sound, light, space, sound, light, space


Presented as part of ENTR ACTE (an undefinable event that sits somewhere between a house party and a group art show), it’s a multiform night exploring sound, space, and light as mediums for expression and facilitators of togetherness.

As part of ENTR ACTE our project #73 was a large-scale creative coding installation that combined visual ephemera with poetry, presented at Miscellania in the CBD. 

Displayed in a grid format comprised of 73 squares, the software randomised the presentation of the images and text to create an ever changing narrative.



  1. Locust poem
  2. Fly poem
  3. Centipede poem
  4.  #73 Display
  5. Printed tiles
  6. Patrons at the event


 




    KISS


    POEM
    Poem installation at TBC gallery, group show.