Unsettling
2015

performance

Unsettling is based on the vermillion-coloured horse-drawn exhibition wagons used by 19th century Canadian land agents who worked farm to farm and door to door in the United Kingdom, recruiting colonial settlers one at a time. Colonial recruiters worked face to face and with Unsettling I do too, as I move in and through the audience, interacting with viewers. The piece offers opportunities for close physical relationships between the viewer, the source material, and the appropriator / subverter / maker / performer---me. The small and intimate operation of Unsettling is crafted to assert that it is not only possible, but also necessary, to imagine decolonization in personal, tiny, but doable ways.