Materiel World draws audiences into a provocative ceremony of colonial violence, labour, and complicity. Created by artist Loren Kronemyer from regional Lutruwita, Tasmania, in collaboration with meta technician @hosting.aiff, and Toi Whakaari graduate Batanai Mashingaidze, the premise of the work is the attempt to mine copper from the community to shoot back into the earth.

Framed as a meditation on extraction, militarisation, and ecological crisis, the performance is set around a lush banquet table adorned with breads, flowers, and nuts. The work unfolds into an act of collective e-waste mining under a time constraint — untangling cords, stripping copper, weighing and preparing the salvaged material to be melted and cast into a single bullet.

This single copper bullet, we are informed, is destined to be shot back into what is the oldest continually operating copper mine in Australia, now unused, near to where the key artist lives on Palawa country. Mixing metallurgy and dramaturgy, the performance interrogates the life cycles of electronics — from raw resource to waste — and implicates us in their transformation, suggesting the environmental benefits of recycling e-waste.

But it’s more complex than what is immediately apparent. Let us not forget that poverty and desperation lead people to steal copper. This unstated twist in the plot, is navigated by Kronemyer with a calm demeanour, clad in a formal black gown to signal their position in the hierarchy of extractive wealth and privilege.

Kronemyer guides the audience through shifting registers: from stories of Annie Oakley, a world-renowned American sharpshooter and performer, to military firearms, to the hands-on disassembly of our wires and gadgets.

We enthusiastically take up the direct call to learn the processes and participate in the conjuring, lured by the intriguing use of cuttlefish casting to pour the copper to make the bullet. There is urgency, ceremony, and a quietly seductive theatricality. The performance builds a striking tension between our intimacy and alienation, as the division of wealth and class becomes evident without ever being directly pointed out.

What emerges is a burning commentary on the extractive logic of colonialism — a system that once mined copper from Indigenous lands and continues, in new guises, to enlist bodies and labour in its ongoing operations. In Materiel World, this logic is mirrored in the very act of participation: audience members become unwitting labourers in a painfully poetic cycle of deconstruction and weapon-making. It’s a confrontation masked in hospitality — the cunning cover of a colonial banquet.

Rather than offering a simple critique, the work re-stages colonial extractive patterns within the theatrical frame, making their repetition palpable and undeniable. The symbolic bullet becomes a potent focal point — not only of destruction, but of return and reckoning. Are we complicit copper miners in a symbolic act of eco-ritual? The bitter tastes of environmental grief, ethical responsibility, and material agency are present yet passed over, highlighting the workings of white entitlement and the colonial enfoldment of violence as entertainment.

Materiel World is bold, unsettling, and timely. Somehow, also, the cracks of vulnerability and instability are seen as we witness the embodied tension of the performers’ time constraints and technological glitches and complexities. It doesn’t just tell us something about colonial capitalist systems of violence and consumption — it implicates us, drawing us into the theatre of extraction where complicity is not a hypothetical, but a living gesture.

This provocation reverberates long after the final strand of copper is stripped, beyond our curious close-up inspections of the bullet itself once complete, and still at play as we exit the theatre into the night. Something haunting remains of the felt experience. An ambiguous bothering. A reminder to us settler-colonisers not to forget how we have acquired materials at hand.

Copyright © in the review belongs to the reviewer