Melanie Bonajo
2021Night Soil – Nocturnal Gardening
Melanie Bonajo
The nearly-complete Nocturnal Gardening considers how communities come together through alternative and pre-colonial uses of land. Structured around four central storylines, the video explores indigenous land rights, off-the-grid subsistence, racism and injustice in the food system and the consequences of consumer behaviour on farm animals. —Tate Modern
Night Soil – Nocturnal Gardening
Night Soil - Fake Paradise
Melanie Bonajo
Can ayahuasca have the same significance for our day as LSD had for the 1960s? Exploring this question Night Soil / Fake Paradise presents an amalgama of personal accounts on the spiritual and bodily experiences with the Amazonian substance, giving particular weight to the feminine voice and point of view, traditionally neglected in psychedelic research.
Night Soil - Fake Paradise
Night Soil - Economy of Love
Melanie Bonajo
Economy of Love centres on a Brooklyn-based women’s activist movement that approaches sex work as a way for women to reclaim their power in a male-dominated pleasure zone. Their emphasis is on nurturing, educating and empowering both sexes around the power that lays within the female orgasm, advocating for a shifting vocabulary around sex work and gender roles and moving toward mutual respect and understanding of the body and spirit. —Tate Modern
Night Soil - Economy of Love
Progress vs Sunsets: Reformulating the Nature Documentary
Melanie Bonajo
Melanie Bonajo’s video installation Progress vs Sunsets: Reformulating the Nature Documentary is the second work in a trilogy focusing on the effects of technological advances on vulnerable, marginalized groups. While the first installation in the series concentrates on the elderly, Progress vs Sunsets invites children to consider the ways that viral animal photos and videos have redefined the relationships between humans, wildlife, and the environments they share. Bonajo asks which voices are ignored during processes of growth and development, and draws attention to the extinctions and casualties that are the inevitable side effects of innovation. She approaches her work from an intuitive, feminist point of view, emphasizing the importance of process over product, and casting doubt on narratives of progress.
Progress vs Sunsets: Reformulating the Nature Documentary