Saying tabi tabi po on Google Earth | Rômy Pacquing McCoy

Open Edition with a Fotomoto Certificate of Authenticity.

8 x 10in Pigment Print on Hahnemuehle Photo Rag.

-

After returning to unceded Wurundjeri Country (Melbourne, Australia) from one of my final visits to my beloved Lola before she passed, I returned to Country burning. Repeat encounters with colonial land mismanagement, institutional violence and grief knocked my body’s systems out of balance. First, I was breathless. Later, confined to this place. My works are oriented towards deep play, ritual and portal-making, and mediated through climate-crisis induced disability as a vector of proximity to deathliness via settler coloniality. I took to the improvisational diasporic behaviour of photographing ancestral lands on Google Earth, weaving photographs I'd purchased at ukay-ukays when I had none of my own family, embracing baduy as praxis and making kitschy souvenirs to map world-shattering grief. Maglaya focalises breathlessness as indexing a crisis in the body-spirit’s encounter with world-ending, the digital as a (fraught) mode of engagement with the spiritual, dreaming new life worlds, and grief as a practice of simultaneous honouring and destruction.