Abstract

This presentation is part of an ongoing dialogue between a cultural scenographer (Rachel Hann) and a performance designer (Rosie Elnile) on what decolonizing scenography entails, involves and feels like. We present the case for ‘empty space’ as a colonial idea and consider alternative models of scenographic practice built for an era of climate crisis. To afford focus to this discussion, we draw upon Elnile’s re-imagined online production of Prayer (2020) that explored themes of labour, care, and decolonial politics of space. Elnile’s practice is adopted as an example of ‘post-empty’ scenographics in action and offers a burgeoning model for a possible route towards a decolonial scenography. Drawing upon designer Tanja Beer’s production model for ecoscenography and anthropologist Kirsten Simmons’s ‘settler atmospherics’, we affirm the critical role that new models of scenographic practice will take in realizing carbon budgets and the need for a decolonial aesthetics that embraces space as full, ready and situated. Consequently, we conclude with a manifesto for decolonizing scenography as embracing climate ceilings and decolonial imaginations as a critical framework for debating, challenging, and transgressing the colonial imagination of empty space.