Fresh Blood Washings

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• Elijah Cristiano ›

• Fresh Blood Washings uses moving image, photography, field recording and the practice of writing to reveal the violence inflicted upon the Maribyrnong River by settler-colonial expansion and industrialisation. After the Yarra River Pollution Act was passed in 1855 to clean up Melbourne's inner eastern waterways, tanneries, abattoirs, and other noxious trades were relocated to the banks of the Maribyrnong River. The river was then used as both a route for transportation and a drain for industrial waste discarded from abattoirs and factories. Employing a methodology of ‘making with’ rather than ‘making of’ the river using methods such as underwater videography and embodied field recording, the work aims to subvert colonial understandings of land and waterways as resources for economic advancement by reframing the Maribyrnong River as a living body with agency, language and voice.