Anamorphic Ecology, or the Return of the Possum

Abstract

This article examines how Alison Maclean’s short black and white film Kitchen Sink (1989) works to move the ground of public understanding about the large-scale makeovers of ecology, people and place on which a settler colonial society is founded. Reading Maclean’s film in light of the New Zealand government’s recently-unveiled world-first Predator Free 2050 campaign, the article attends to the intertwined genealogies and topographies shared by invasive animals and invasive settlers. In so doing, it develops an expanded conception of anamorphosis, taking this term to refer to distorted projections which require viewers to reconstitute – from an oblique perspective – the images they encounter. Through its concentrated slippages, the article argues, Maclean’s film anticipates not only the full-scale obliteration called forth by Predator Free 2050, but alterative responses to place which acknowledge prior and ongoing Indigenous presences. Indeed, Kitchen Sink itself emerges in this view as an anamorphic or “hallucinatory” element in the settler colonial image-scape.