Rachel O'Reilly Drawing Rights

The first moving image work from Rachel O'Reilly's project The Gas Imaginary (2013-ongoing), composed from original drawings, graphics (collaborated with Pa.LaC.E), corporate plans, and activist drone footage, Drawing Rights (2018) narrates the racial and ecocidal logic of Australian property laws that precede the ease of mining approvals on stolen land. The Torrens Title property registration system invented to colonise 'Australia' was the first fully fungible capitalist model of landed property in the world. Credited to Robert Richard Torrens in 1858, a former shipping officer with no legal training whatsoever, it based land on the model of autonomous shipped property. It also removed the common law requirement to survey past histories of ownership at land sales. Today, the settler’s 'inalienable' estate merges with sacrifice zones. The model spread rapidly across the British Empire, and is now the dominant logic of land management globally. The film draws on recent research on Torrens Title by Brenna Bhandar, Sarah Keenan, Renisa Mawani, dialogues with Gooreng Gooreng elders (esp. Juliri Ingra and Jackie Johnson), women environmentalists and Aboriginal activists (esp. Roxley Foley, Gumbaynggirr).

Dir/Research: Rachel O'Reilly

Visuals: Pa.LaC.e (Valle Medina and Benjamin Reynolds) 

Editing: Sebastian Bodirsky 

Sound: Tyler Friedman

Advisory: Juliri Ingra (Gooreng Gooreng), Roxley Foley (Gumbaynggirr)

HD Video, colour, stereo, 17.09mins.  

Edition of 5 + 2 AP

Commissioned by Frontier Imaginaries and the Van Abbemuseum.

Research text: O'Reilly, R. 'Dematerialization of the Land/Water object' E-flux #90, April 2018