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The Duty Roster
Core Themes
Covert institutional coercion, surveillance, the weaponisation of employment to suppress political participation.
Artist Statement
They never ask you to step away. If anything, they urge you forward. Beneath that encouragement lies a quieter constraint. Your time is stretched. Your labour multiplied. They entangle your ambition with obligations, ensuring the two can never be separated. Withdrawal is simply the final movement in a structure designed to lead you there.
“We’re not stopping you from doing politics. We’re just asking you to do your job.”
Concept Breakdown
A detective-style immersive experience built around a cork board belonging to a woman with a dual identity, a politician in the opposition party and a teacher at a government school. After announcing her candidacy, she notices that school meetings increasingly coincide with her party gatherings and rallies. What she first dismisses as paranoia she gradually recognises as a deliberate, quiet, untraceable campaign to divide her attention and undermine her political commitment. Without proof, it remains deniable; on paper, coincidence.
The cork board maps her life across both roles through colour-coded visual elements, with a central calendar marking key dates colour-coded to distinguish her two identities. Viewers are invited to piece the pattern together themselves, slowly realising how her school was used as an instrument of control, and how this eventually forced her to abandon her political career. Viewed from a distance, the arrangement of elements on the board spells out the word CTRL.