Throughout August the CAT Gallery has been a rehearsal space; a lab for live, embodied experimentation and collective learning. Join Rehearsing the Future curator Sofie Burgoyne and artists Nadia Refaei, Alex Last and Jon Smeathers for a conversation on the public and private rehearsals that have taken place in the gallery. Occurring on the last day of the project, this event is an opportunity to ‘open up’ and discuss the experiences, concerns and imaginaries that have emerged from the rehearsals.

For One day we’ll eat together, Nadia Refaei  is working in the gallery to prepare for, and enact, symbolic and virtual meetings with her family in the Syrian diaspora. This phase of ‘preparation’, is witnessed only by the artist and family, and gives way to a public invitation to the open gallery to enter and view what remains. During A Fleshy-Rooted Perennial, Alex Last has invited participants to join in on rehearsals of sensory experience, visualisation, and dialogue that delve into ecological entanglement. Last posed the question – In a globalised world and living on stolen country, what does it mean to put down roots? Here Thru One General Assembly, Jon Smeathers is a member-run and advocacy union investigating the algorithmic governance of YouTube’s deep learning mechanisms. The purpose of the Union is to offer its members a platform to share recommendations, concerns and to discuss future measures to instigate permanent changes to YouTube’s content preferencing in Hobart. Through Rehearsing the Future, Sofie Burgoyne has set up the gallery as a test site for imagining alternate futures.