My cruel enemy grazes on my pain and feeds herself Frances Libeau

My cruel enemy grazes on my pain and feeds herself comprises hundreds of pieces of archived moving image and sound, captured during the 1900s. Leaning into the age of the material, Frances Libeau stitches together a view of Aotearoa New Zealand’s settler colonial history which probes and confronts.

Re-purposing material from a variety of sources, including a notable amount from Aotearoa New Zealand’s National Film Unit, Libeau adopts a methodology akin to that of a scavenger. Painstakingly watching, selecting and isolating the material, the footage is resuscitated as the artist stitches the aged vignettes together piece by piece.

Licensing
My cruel enemy grazes on my pain and feeds herself features excerpts from Come With Us (dir. Garth Maxwell & Simon Marler, 1981) courtesy of the filmmakers and supplied by Ngā Taonga Sound & Vision. La cruda mia nemica (Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina, 1586), performed by Alessandro Moreschi with the Cantori della Cappella Sistina (Sistine Chapel Choir) in 1904, is in the public domain. Other visual and sonic material is drawn from Te Rua Mahara o te Kāwanatanga Archives New Zealand open access collection and adapted under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic License.