Royal Parade
Monuments and Movements series

Live performance documentation, Southbank, Queen Victoria Gardens and Kings Domain, Melbourne, 19.19mins, 26 September 2019.
Performance assistants Pete Narzisi and Francis Carmody.
Camera by Veronica Di Mase.

The Royal Parade performance is an attempt to contribute to an increasingly fluid understanding of the histories represented through monumental art, by using the less static language of contemporary art and materials.

Whilst referencing colonial sculptures in general, this installation specifically quotes the Queen Victoria, Edward VII and King George V monuments located in the Queen Victoria Gardens and Kings Domain, local to Margaret Lawrence Gallery.

I am interested to question how does the perpetual presence of historical monuments affect the societies within which they’re situated, when our understanding of history has evolved and continues to be questioned? And as an artist, how can I reactivate the immobile and the static to draw attention to the political structures they represent?

Replicating these monuments as flat, folding silhouettes on swivel castor wheels, the installation acts as an anti-monument alluding to mobility, dissidence, dislocation and its transitory nature. The structures exist in a state of flux between being assembled or dismantled, folded or constructed, ready to be activated for a procession on the streets or alternatively being stored. The reference to a constructivist aesthetic imbues the installation with its idealistic revolutionary ideology.