Suburban birdlife and border patrols were employed to monitor and destroy suspected birds before they could cross into Western Australia. Fremantle, as a historical port city with ships coming from across the globe, was a significant focus of these campaigns, and a historical site for many ‘sparrow incursions’ and mass culls.

Argentinean-Australian artist Fernando do Campo often addresses the history of nonhuman species in his projects. Through anthropomorphism, speculative fiction, autobiography, fieldwork, and archival research, he produces multidisciplinary exhibitions that critically narrate human history via animal and plant histories. The Global South and the legacies of colonialism, nationalism, modernism, and migration, which host these stories, are the focus of his experimental practice. Unlike recent projects in Mar del Plata, New York and regional Victoria, where do Campo approaches the history of house sparrows through the species’s successful establishment, in Western Australia the enquiry is through the cultural and political meanings generated by attempts to keep it out. The exhibition asks what exactly Western Australia imagined it was excluding. Was the sparrow perceived as an agricultural pest, a carrier of disease, a symbol of colonial disorder, or a proxy for anxieties associated with the eastern states? Equally significant is the fact that the sparrow was never truly kept out. Even where it was physically excluded, it entered the Western Australian imagination through language, policy, folklore, archives, literature, film, and public discourse. It is an absence rather than a presence that produces a particular form of coloniality.

Drawing sparrow references from Western Australian archives, poetry, government documents, and popular culture, these materials reveal the anthropomorphic, derogatory, racialized, gendered, and often contradictory language attached to the sparrow. We carry word and shadow is a large-scale exhibition of textile works that weaves through the historical spaces of Walyalup Fremantle Arts Centre, releasing a typographic treatment and producing new language and readings across its surfaces. Employing grids, translucent membranes and temporality, the artworks foreground absence, trace, and inscription, do Campo explores how excluded species continue to leave cultural residue. Rather than narrating a history of absence, the exhibition considers how place is shaped by what it seeks to exclude. Here, the sparrow persists as a spectral presence, a figure whose imagined arrival continues to inform the cultural identity of Western Australia.

ABOUT THE ARTIST

Fernando do Campo (b. Mar del Plata, Argentina 1987) is an Argentinean-Australian artist and academic based between Brisbane and Sydney. Do Campo’s practice engages the histories of non-human species via anthropomorphism, speculative fiction, autobiography, fieldwork and archival research to produce multi-disciplinary exhibitions and projects. The global south and the legacies of colonialism, nationalism, modernism and migration that hold animal and plant narratives are a focus for his research and material studio explorations.