The Screen Room shows Romaine Moreton’s Ragtag (2014) film which documents a demonstration by Moreton and fellow artists/activists at the (then) new fountain sculpture at Echo Point, Katoomba, at the ‘Three Sisters’ Blue Mountains tourist site (NSW). While the demonstration is relatively simple and clear in its intention, the resulting film, as a mediated performance, makes for a raw, compelling and somewhat less clear-cut portrayal of the collision and very performance of culture(s): Aboriginal, tourist, art-activist, national, and communal. Since the artist’s Ragtag experiment/intervention, the sculpture has been removed from public display.
Romaine Moreton is a celebrated writer, filmmaker and performance poet with a PhD in Philosophy. She hails from the Goernpil people of Stradbroke Island and the Bundjulung people of northern New South Wales. She has directed two award-winning short films (The Farm, 2011), and The Oysterman (2013), and is currently developing a new feature film. She has shown her work at the Cannes Film Festival (1999), and she was represented at the last documenta (13), Germany (2011), through the publication of her anthology Poems from a Homeland. Moreton is currently a Research Fellow/Filmmaker in Residence in the School of Media, Film, and Journalism at Monash University, Melbourne.
Romaine Moreton, ‘Ragtag’, 2014, still from High Definition video: 8min:14sec; image courtesy the artist; photo © Amanda James