Presented as part of Melbourne Writers Festival, this sound and video installation in the Royal Botanic Gardens is unlike anything we've experienced before. It's part documentary, part radio play and part treasure hunt. And it's bookended by two video works.
The audience is given a map to the gardens, a small FM radio and a nip of rum, if you're lucky. As a group, you'll navigate through the gardens to different locations where parts of an audio story unfold. You'll follow a young Australian woman who travels to the Caribbean for her grandmother's funeral and is forced to ask bigger questions about colonialism and her place in the world.
Crawl Me Blood was inspired by Caribbean author Jean Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea, and has been six years in development. "Crawl me blood" is a Caribbean phrase meaning "the secrets that you sense but are not told," which might have particular resonances for Australian audiences considering their own history inside the beautifully manicured gardens.
The work was co-created by Halcyon Macleod and Willoh S. Weiland with composer Felix Cross.