(excerpt 1:30s) The colony cares for everyone (9:01s)
Sound design by Bridget Chappell
THE COLONY CARES FOR EVERYONE
HD Video, site-specific duration with sound
2021-ongoing
The colony cares for everyone is a video set at a lithium mine in the Northern Territory, featuring a termite colony consuming what I term ‘settler fanfiction’ books: literature that celebrates the history of colonialism, and the extractive industries that underpin it.
My connection with this termite colony began on Larrakia/Wulna land, where I grew up. Termites were eating my late father’s shed, and I began to feed them his books, eventually expanding their diet to include both current and historical settler fanfiction, and related books.
The title of this work critiques the rhetoric of mining being in the ‘national interest,’ which often conceals corporate interests profiting from extraction. While lithium mining is promoted as part of the 'clean energy revolution,' this ‘sustainability rhetoric’ is another form of settler fanfiction that I offer to the termites.
I aim to reimagine the values in our settler fanfiction by dwelling on how termites deconstruct and transform, envisioning a future unraveling of Eurocentric and anthropocentric knowledge systems, rooted in resistance and interspecies care, revealing the gaps in our understanding.
The colony cares for everyone exhibitions -
PhD thesis exhibition. Site specific installation, RMIT chancellery boardroom in the Former Magristrates Court building, 2024.
Mastotermes Darwiniensis/mɑːstɒtɜːmz ˈdɑːwɪŋ.ɪen.sɪs/Giant Northern Termite (2023), MARS Gallery, Windsor, 2023.
Walking Through Darkness, curated by Catlin Langford, CCP, Fitzroy, 2023.
Das Kapital, curated by Amanda Morgan, Kieran Boland and Brie Trenerry, The Bank, Windsor, 2023.
Retribution, curated by Carlo Ansaldo, Northern Centre for Contemporary Art, 2022.