Sole Surviving Human Series
Sole Surviving Human Series
2021 - 2026
Sites and ecological challenges:
2021 - 2026
Sites and ecological challenges:
- Murray River at Merbein Common (Mondellimin, Nyeri Nyeri Country), Victoria: where disconnected floodplain ecologies are in decline;
- Lake Tyrrell (Direl, Boorong Country), Victoria: where ancient hydrological memory is commercially extracted and repurposed for tourism;
- Shoalhaven River, Bundanon (Dharawal and Dhurga Country) New South Wales: where erosion, flooding, salinity, and toxic runoff impact riverine systems;
- Dubai Creek and Canal, UAE: shaped by pollution, desalination and energy-intensive water infrastructures;
- Venice Lagoon, Italy: where over-tourism and engineered barriers fragment ecological and social systems;
- Arctic Circle, Svalbard: where melting ice, thawing permafrost, and habitat loss render climate change materially immediate;
- Deer Island, Wastewater Treatment Plant, Boston: struggling with emerging contaminants and sea-level rise;
- Brouq Nature Reserve, Doha, Qatar: where water scarcity is intensified by human activity.
Within wet, entangled ontologies my sole surviving human performances emerge as a necessary method of surviving our climate challenges. Performance has become an emerging method of my practice-led research. A
site-responsive and durational form which has allowed me to engage directly with place, time, and embodiment in ways that conventional research did not permit.
By embodying the persona of a Sole Survivor Human, I rendered my body as both a witness and archive, subject to environmental conditions, open to affect, and exposed to relational entanglements. This methodological positioning is grounded in a lineage of feminist performance practices that understand endurance as ecological inquiry rather than spectacle.
A feminist politics of humour underpins this positioning. In visual and performance art, absurdity often combines humour with discomfort, activating audiences through repulsion, exaggeration, and the incongruous. Within the lineage of artists such as Bonita Ely and Martha Rosler, humour operates as both method and critique, destabilising authority, domesticity, and the gendered hierarchies that shape social and ecological narratives. A feminist politics of humour underpins this positioning. In visual and performance art, absurdity often combines humour with discomfort, activating audiences through repulsion, exaggeration, and the incongruous. Within the lineage of artists such as Bonita Ely and Martha Rosler, humour operates as both method and critique, destabilising authority, domesticity, and the gendered hierarchies that shape social and ecological narratives.
Donna Haraway’s proposition that “we become with each other or not at all” (Haraway 2016) reframes survival as an entangled, ethical condition rather than an individual achievement. Rejecting narratives of mastery or transcendence, Haraway argues that life persists through relational accountability across human and more-than-human worlds. This orientation is extended through Rosi Braidotti’s articulation of posthuman subjectivity, in which the human is understood not as a sovereign entity but as “fully immersed in and immanent to a network of nonhuman relations” (Braidotti 2013). Within this research, these feminist frameworks ground the sole surviving human not as a triumphant endpoint, but as a compromised, collective proxy through which ethical proximity to water, ecology, and exhaustion can be performed rather than resolved.Donna Haraway’s proposition that “we become with each other or not at all” (Haraway 2016) reframes survival as an entangled, ethical condition rather than an individual achievement. Rejecting narratives of mastery or transcendence, Haraway argues that life persists through relational accountability across human and more-than-human worlds. This orientation is extended through Rosi Braidotti’s articulation of posthuman subjectivity, in which the human is understood not as a sovereign entity but as “fully immersed in and immanent to a network of nonhuman relations” (Braidotti 2013). Within this research, these feminist frameworks ground the sole surviving human not as a triumphant endpoint, but as a compromised, collective proxy through which ethical proximity to water, ecology, and exhaustion can be performed rather than resolved.
Ethical resistance is sharpened when water is understood as part of the global commons. A. C. Grayling defines the commons as planetary resources that exceed national or private ownership, noting that rivers, aquifers, and oceans have long been sites of territorial conflict, coercion, and power (Grayling 2024). From this perspective, water scarcity is not a future technical problem but a historically embedded political condition. Read alongside Haraway’s insistence on the Capitalocene, water governance emerges not as a neutral managerial task but as a contested field shaped by extractive systems that intensify ecological and social instability.This ethical resistance is sharpened when water is understood as part of the global commons. A. C. Grayling defines the commons as planetary resources that exceed national or private ownership, noting that rivers, aquifers, and oceans have long been sites of territorial conflict, coercion, and power (Grayling 2024). From this perspective, water scarcity is not a future technical problem but a historically embedded political condition. Read alongside Haraway’s insistence on the Capitalocene, water governance emerges not as a neutral managerial task but as a contested field shaped by extractive systems that intensify ecological and social instability.
By embodying the persona of a Sole Survivor Human, I rendered my body as both a witness and archive, subject to environmental conditions, open to affect, and exposed to relational entanglements. This methodological positioning is grounded in a lineage of feminist performance practices that understand endurance as ecological inquiry rather than spectacle.
A feminist politics of humour underpins this positioning. In visual and performance art, absurdity often combines humour with discomfort, activating audiences through repulsion, exaggeration, and the incongruous. Within the lineage of artists such as Bonita Ely and Martha Rosler, humour operates as both method and critique, destabilising authority, domesticity, and the gendered hierarchies that shape social and ecological narratives. A feminist politics of humour underpins this positioning. In visual and performance art, absurdity often combines humour with discomfort, activating audiences through repulsion, exaggeration, and the incongruous. Within the lineage of artists such as Bonita Ely and Martha Rosler, humour operates as both method and critique, destabilising authority, domesticity, and the gendered hierarchies that shape social and ecological narratives.
Donna Haraway’s proposition that “we become with each other or not at all” (Haraway 2016) reframes survival as an entangled, ethical condition rather than an individual achievement. Rejecting narratives of mastery or transcendence, Haraway argues that life persists through relational accountability across human and more-than-human worlds. This orientation is extended through Rosi Braidotti’s articulation of posthuman subjectivity, in which the human is understood not as a sovereign entity but as “fully immersed in and immanent to a network of nonhuman relations” (Braidotti 2013). Within this research, these feminist frameworks ground the sole surviving human not as a triumphant endpoint, but as a compromised, collective proxy through which ethical proximity to water, ecology, and exhaustion can be performed rather than resolved.Donna Haraway’s proposition that “we become with each other or not at all” (Haraway 2016) reframes survival as an entangled, ethical condition rather than an individual achievement. Rejecting narratives of mastery or transcendence, Haraway argues that life persists through relational accountability across human and more-than-human worlds. This orientation is extended through Rosi Braidotti’s articulation of posthuman subjectivity, in which the human is understood not as a sovereign entity but as “fully immersed in and immanent to a network of nonhuman relations” (Braidotti 2013). Within this research, these feminist frameworks ground the sole surviving human not as a triumphant endpoint, but as a compromised, collective proxy through which ethical proximity to water, ecology, and exhaustion can be performed rather than resolved.
Ethical resistance is sharpened when water is understood as part of the global commons. A. C. Grayling defines the commons as planetary resources that exceed national or private ownership, noting that rivers, aquifers, and oceans have long been sites of territorial conflict, coercion, and power (Grayling 2024). From this perspective, water scarcity is not a future technical problem but a historically embedded political condition. Read alongside Haraway’s insistence on the Capitalocene, water governance emerges not as a neutral managerial task but as a contested field shaped by extractive systems that intensify ecological and social instability.This ethical resistance is sharpened when water is understood as part of the global commons. A. C. Grayling defines the commons as planetary resources that exceed national or private ownership, noting that rivers, aquifers, and oceans have long been sites of territorial conflict, coercion, and power (Grayling 2024). From this perspective, water scarcity is not a future technical problem but a historically embedded political condition. Read alongside Haraway’s insistence on the Capitalocene, water governance emerges not as a neutral managerial task but as a contested field shaped by extractive systems that intensify ecological and social instability.