Wash
The Performance Arcade Festival ended on March 2nd, almost exactly one year to the day after a terrorist attack in a mosque in Christchurch killed fifty-one Muslims and injured forty-nine others. The unthinkable had happened. This virulent racism that broke out in New Zealand (and throughout the world) is one type of pandemic for which, sadly, no vaccine has been created. Sam Trubridge, the director and founder of the festival and the other organizers, while aware of racial hatred affecting New Zealand and the globe, hadn’t anticipated the Corona Virus pandemic when they invited Wash to be part of the 2020 Performance Arcade Festival. But with the Corona Virus pandemic beginning to spread, the initial guidelines of scrubbing one’s hands of the virus added another layer of meaning to my installation there, as it will in future installations of Wash.