Advance

Advance considers the persistence of colonial systems in the face of ecological depletion. The single-channel video asks what happens when a nation built upon extraction reaches the limits of what its environment can provide, yet remains committed to the imperative of growth.
Australia’s colonial project has been sustained through the transformation of land into resource: something to be occupied, measured, extracted and converted into wealth. Advance considers the consequences of this logic as resources diminish and the conditions of continued expansion become increasingly untenable.
Rather than imagining collapse as an endpoint, the work considers the mechanisms through which systems attempt to defer it. Technological progress, adaptation and innovation become strategies for extending a system beyond its material limits—a means of preserving the structures of power and accumulation that produced its own crisis.