Liss Fenwick

MASTOTERMES

Video, site-specific duration and sound

2021-ongoing 

MASTOTERMES is a video, sound, and photographic work sharing the perspective of a termite colony chewing, digesting and depositing English language books underground on the rural block I grew up on in the (so-called) ‘Northern Territory.’ 

In this work spanning several years, the iconic human knowledge-source becomes food-source for Mastotermes Darwinensis, the giant northern termite. 

I began working with this termite colony when they started eating my late father’s shed. I fed them his books. His collection was strongly influenced by his rural QLD upbringing and his view of ‘progress’ in the colony. I expanded the termites diet to include other books related to the worldview of our human colony on what was until recently, Larrakia land. 

Termites are widely poisoned, as the mischievous insects are known to surreptitiously undermine a whole structure. Through this work I imagine both ‘living’ and ‘future’ unmoored from the problematic supremacy of Euro- and anthropo-centric knowledge systems.