2025

Single-channel video. 3 min 01 sec.

Through a constellation of performances, largely set in the resonant spaces of Melbourne’s Chinatown, The Fire that wouldn’t Call Itself Ash interrogates the silent economies of migrant labour and the diasporic body as a site of both discipline and defiance. This work is born from the structural reality of migrant down-skilling, where the education and histories of immigrants, particularly women, are systematically erased. The performances transform the mundane, repetitive gestures of service work into a surreal and poetic language. Through these actions, the body becomes a vessel for unspoken memory and unceded labour, exposing the paradox of labour that is simultaneously essential and undervalued, indispensable and marginal.