‘Spliced: An Obituary in Three Movements’ is a visual and textual honouring of the unspoken human and non-human lives taken, displaced, misnamed and misremembered by colonial cultures of dispossession. Made to emulate a colonial Victorian Garden, living trophy cabinets for the horticultural spoils of war and occupation, the Sunken Garden offers a space of respite from the elements, both natural and historical. In such a space of rest and reflection, one might come to commune with the dead. Those named and honoured, as well as those obscured and displaced. This textual and visual ode / honouring seeks to name those stolen futures, creating a speculative ecology of healing, visioning and repair to haunt the sunny pathways that run parallel with horror. What rises up from a sunken garden, which voices clamour to speak? And how, amidst all the noise of our own forgetting, might we remember how to hear them?
Artwork by Ama Josephine Budge, in collaboration with Mohammed Z. Rahman.