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colonial again
artist / performer
Colonisation. The white guys ‘fix’ it. Over and over again. And make things worse. And never learn form their mistakes.
As a performer, I inhabited the space of the ‘lady’ coloniser. Researching laneways around Carlton, I discovered stories of women’s committees who sought to enforce ‘pure’ hygienic standards to laneways and children. I also uncovered Melbourne’s original ecology was a swampy, lush rainforest.
A durational work, the performance played out over several hours. It depicts a white woman inhabiting outfits from several eras, carrying out buckets after buckets of water to ‘do good’, endeavouring to scrub clean the mud and her outfits. Instead, everything becomes covered in S***.
The work depicts the endless repetition, and catastrophic impacts, of white colonisation, the lack of agency and recognition for indigenous leadership, and the parity of ‘purity’ with ‘clean and white’.
Artist: Marcia Ferguson. Costume: Kelly Shaw. Materials: Clay, water, charcoal, tumeric, coffee, cochineal, water, buckets, scrubbing brush. Photos: Carla Gottgens