Bury me in Hi-Vis.
Under lawn clippings
And washinglines.
White dog turd tombstone,
Birdbath memorial.
It’s here I will be resting,
Pink.
Until the skinks make home in my corpse.
Bury me in Hi-Vis is an emotionally charged live performance work exploring gentrification and its relation to residual haunting in the context of inner city suburbia. In this work, the artist, dressed in futuristic Hi-Vis work wear, buries a roadkill house cat in the backyard of a West End dwelling. Connecting in with the central concept behind Stone Tape Theory, the artist’s current body of studio work, Bury me in Hi-Vis expresses the idea that mental, physical, emotional and/or traumatic impressions from the past can become imprinted onto an entity and locked forever into a place to be then replayed on a continuous loop (haunting).
A morbid suburban ritual, the performance investigates domestic tragedy and attempts to physically imprint the accumulated but unidentified memories of an anonymous beloved pet into the soil. The burial procedure itself becomes reflective of the nature of development and the cycle of excavation, renovation, construction, and demolition apparent in the ever changing landscape surrounding the performance site.
Drawing together the strings of past, present and future Bury Me in Hi-Vis asks the questions: Do your emotions and experiences within a home or place leave a lasting imprint on the land itself? Can we feel residual energy? Can you consciously create a haunting?
- Adrienne Kenafake 2018
