The Unsettling is a cross-disciplinary and cross-cultural collaboration between Melbourne-based choreographer Atlanta Eke and Sydney-based choreographer Ghenoa Gela, which draws on the niche genre of Horrorcore Hip Hop to explore the invisible violence of the colonial present. In looking at the question of whether a white Australian artist (Eke) and a Torres Strait Islander artist (Gela) can work outside the processes of appropriation and assimilation to co-author a new work, the artists have merged the cinematic with the choreographic, creating a supernatural horror film which acts as a trailer to a live performance that will take place at Carriageworks.
The performative element of The Unsettling comprises two live solo performances, separated spatially but presented simultaneously, as they meet on screen. Samples of pre-recorded video material with live-feed video of each performance is combined and looped together with live musical accompaniment – a supernatural horror film made in real time before the audience. It proposes a fiction set in reality; an analysis of how fictions function philosophically and politically as an invention and/or as a temporal or spatial augmentation of the present. Presented by Carriageworks.