The Colony

‘The Colony’ is a book about books, and what happens when their authority is quietly and actively undone. Liss Fenwick’s project enlists an unlikely team of co-authors: a termite colony living beneath their childhood home. Gathering books inherited from schoolrooms and family shelves – texts steeped in frontier myths, one-sided histories, and the erasure of First Nations cultures – Fenwick fed the selection to the termites and then photographed the remains: a dense, sculptural language of tunnels, voids, and clay scaffolds. It offers a reflection on the book as a dominant form of knowledge and its role in a long, often destructive relationship with other forms of intelligence and history.