(Dis)Location Define, on the two-dimensional surface of the earth, lines across which motion is to be prevented, and you have one of the key themes of history. With a closed line and the prevention of motion from outside the line to its inside, you derive the idea of property. With the same line, and the prevention of motion from inside to outside, you derive the idea of prison. With an open line (ie. A curve that does not enclose a figure) and the prevention of motion in either direction, you derive the idea of border. Properties, Prisons, borders: it is through the prevention of motion that space enters history. (Netz 2004)iv The Maori targeted Surveyor’s pegs and other marking mechanisms as a resistance to colonialism. They understood how the indexical line of the western gaze indentures the spaces and bodies of those gazed upon. This ‘line’ remains etched over our landscape and bodies, demarcating capital and worth, success and failure. We move (or are forced into removal) from one designated boundary to another, measuring our capacities and desires through fences and roads, lens and data.
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The practices of Dillon and Craig investigate this colonized lens and how it propagates particular ways of seeing. They target the indentured ‘scape’ of the Surveyor’s lens – with material and chemical slippages to consider representational culture itself – as an extractive network meme that constructs our notion of the ‘real’. They do this using the trace – harvesting, distorting, copying, and chemically altering residues of the colonized land/lens and body to try to understand its operational protocols and to voice the deep affect that resonates under the surface of Australian culture.
Carolyn Craig & Damian Dillon: (dis)location
