Torrent Blossom
Torrent Blossom is an online exhibition centring artists and writers whose practices challenge the colonial state of Australia.
From turbulent waves of social, cultural, political and environmental upheaval, it emerges, bathed, in the digital blue glow of our shared captivity and consciousness. Curated by Firstdraft and supported by the City of Sydney, Torrent Blossom brings together a selection of new and existing video artworks, presented in dialogue with newly commissioned critical and poetic texts.
Rachel O’Reilly
Drawing Rights
2018
Drawing Rights is the first moving image work from Rachel O'Reilly's ongoing project The Gas Imaginary. It uses original computer graphics (collaborated with Pa.LaC.E), corporate plans, and activist drone footage of fracking wells to narrate the racial and ecocidal logic of Australian property laws that precede the ease of development approvals on stolen land. The ‘Torrens Title’ property registration system invented for the colonisation of 'Australia' was the first fully fungible capitalist model of landed property in the world. Invented by Robert Richard Torrens in 1858, a shipping officer with no legal training whatsoever, it based land on the model of autonomous shipped property. It also removed the common law requirement to survey past histories of ownership at land sales. Today, the settler’s 'inalienable' land merges with sacrifice zones. Torrens' model spread rapidly across the British Empire, and is now the dominant logic of land management globally. The film draws on recent research on Torrens Title by Brenna Bhandar, Sarah Keenan, Renisa Mawani, and dialogues of The Gas Imaginary project with Gooreng Gooreng elders (esp. Juliri Ingra and Jackie Johnson), environmental and Aboriginal activists (esp. Roxley Foley, Gumbaynggirr).
Drawing Rights uses original computer graphics… corporate plans, and activist drone footage of fracking wells to narrate the racial and ecocidal logic of Australian property laws that precede the ease of development approvals on stolen land.
Rachel O’Reilly
Rachel O’Reilly, Drawing Rights, 2018, HD video with sound, 17 minutes 9 seconds. Commissioned by Frontier Imaginaries and the Van Abbemuseum. Courtesy the artist
Director/Research/Voiceover: Rachel O'Reilly
Visuals: Pa.LaC.E (Valle Medina and Benjamin Reynolds)
Editing: Sebastian Bodirsky
Sound: Tyler Friedman
Advisory: Juliri Ingra (Gooreng Gooreng), Roxley Foley (Gumbaynggirr)
Research text: Dematerializations of the Land/Water Object, by Rachel O’Reilly
