I coined the concept of the colonial debtscape while working to understand the relation between debt and sovereignty in the wake of the 2007 Global Financial crisis. Despite the referendum held in Greece in 2015 where the people voted against austerity, austerity as punishment, was imposed anyway. As this was a colonising move, that is, the imposition of an external and foreign law on local populations against their will, it was to Aboriginal scholars here that I turned to begin to put the pieces together.

Eaten Fish is the pen name of 25-year-old Iranian Ali, who has been imprisoned on Manus Island, Papua New Guinea for three years. He documents the conditions of his incarceration through intricate artworks that tell the story of a place created by Australian law, surveilled by Australian law and yet full of trauma, abuse and violence.