District One

My melodrama hides from the brutality that the notion of the end of the world brings. At the same moment I use my linen spray and do my skincare routine, the world, for most, seems to be ending.

I find myself constantly drawn back to a pubescent favourite, the fictional world of Suzanne Collins’ 2009 novel, The Hunger Games; her dystopian creation holding up a mirror to our modern world. I played the film adaptations on repeat as I arranged dialectic images of aesthetic destruction, drawn to the premise of The Hunger Games, where districts endure starvation and slavery to provide resources for the wealthy Capitol. 

This series reflects a fear of facing global issues. The luxuries of my world here in Sydney depend on the work of someone else's hands, and then I make collages, from a shallow pool of helpless empathy. For the privileged, the plight of the world through our phone screens can be deliciously, addictively, dramatic. 

As the people of the Global South face, firsthand, the destruction of climate change and profiteering corporations, I walk safely through my city which sells me happiness packaged in verdant matcha lattes and a pilates princess title. My District One brain can’t comprehend the 28 countries whose natural resources were extracted to manufacture my phone.