This two-channel video work follows a circuitous, omni-linear route via one channel of the lifecycle of the silk worm from birth, through growth, into pupae, chrysalis and metamorphosing into a moth that mates and dies once all its eggs are laid. The second channel registers, and corrupts through stop-animation, a series of key architectural spaces in my father’s life, my own life and that of my young son’s. My father – an architect – grew up in what was then Malaya (Malaysia today) in the Far East, with his Irish father and German mother. His father had spent three and a half years in a Japanese prisoner of war camp in Burma following the fall of Singapore in 1942, before my father was born. The title of this video work – Parang – is the Malaysian word for machete.

The houses featured in the work are; 106 Jervois Road, Singapore (formerly my grandparent’s house, seized by the Imperial Japanese Army in 1942); Casa di Vidro (1958) in Sao Paulo by Brasilian Modernist Lina bo Bardi; House Biermann in Durban designed by South African Modernist Barrie Biermann and lastly my current home in Johannesburg I redesigned and rebuilt myself. The second video channel further features my father, myself and my son rendered as objects on slow moving motor-driven display stands.

Running through these spaces of habitation, familial history and self-as-object are two possessions my father’s family brought with them from Malaya to South Africa in 1958. Namely; a 12-gauge shotgun and a small ivory carving of a holy man sitting with his troupe of musical baboons. The two-channel video loops endlessly and is in part an exercise in the entropy and absurdity in constructions of self and place.