THE DARK MATTER OF USULAL to Premiere at Arts House
Margaret J Harvey's solo work draws from a 17-year relationship with an ancestral story entrusted through her bloodline.
The Dark Matter of Usulal – The Jo Ze spArks will run 12 – 15 November 2026 at Arts House in Melbourne.
Torres Strait Islander artist Margaret J Harvey premieres The Dark Matter of Usulal at Arts House, a solo performance that grows from an ancestral story entrusted to her.
When Harvey's mother passed away, senior cultural knowledge custodian Awa Walter Waia passed to her the Ait Koedal Clan story of Usulal. With it came an instruction through her Saibai Island bloodline: “Go and interpret.”
Harvey has lived with the story for 17 years. The performance is not a retelling and it does not try to explain a story Harvey says she “cannot own, master or finish”.
“For many years, I thought interpretation meant finding the story's meaning: reading it, turning it over and arriving at an answer. The performance now begins somewhere else,” said Harvey.
At the centre of the work is WOMXN. The ground beneath her is shifting. Her child speaks of the moon, black holes and a magic tree. A black cockatoo appears at the kitchen window. Beneath the ordinary rhythms of everyday life, something begins to hum. Then WOMXN falls through the world and as the cracks begin to widen, what was always there begins to emerge.
The Dark Matter of Usulal brings together live performance, movement, sound and digital imagery. Motion capture of Harvey's body becomes a figure that can keep moving after she has stopped, so her live and recorded bodies can meet, separate and move in different times.
Family runs all through the work. Harvey's partner, Desmond Connellan, creates the digital visual design, and the voice of the child belongs to their son, Zey Harvey-Connellan. Recorded family voices sit throughout the sound design.
Awa Jeffa Aniba Waia told Harvey the story after Awa Walter Waia had entrusted it to her. Both passed away while the work was being developed. Their teachings, voices and relationships continue through it, including Awa Jeffa's song from Usulal.
For Harvey, the work is not about being lifted into a mythology larger than her life. It is about coming into deeper relation with what is already carried through her bloodline, Saibaian cosmology, the living world and connection to a sinking island.
A performance maker, writer and researcher of Ait Koedal/Samu bloodline and English heritage, Harvey has presented work at ACMI, Queensland Museum, Cairns Indigenous Art Fair and Melbourne Festival, as well as internationally. She is Co-Director of the Jo Ze spArks and author of Saibai Island Ancestral Performative Knowledge (Brill, 2024).
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