Travelling Colony is a major site-specific experience from Brook Andrew, whose multidisciplinary work is now held by every major collection across Australia. For two decades this celebrated artist has been creating astonishing multi-media monuments, playfully seducing audiences into new ways of seeing compelling issues of race, consumerism and history.

Inspired by the circus, pop culture, and his Wiradjuri heritage, Andrew will create a cavalcade of dazzling hand-painted caravans. Produced in partnership with Sydney Festival and Carriageworks, Travelling Colony comprises customized caravans, each painted with a unique design and in a different colour, based on a Wiradjuri pattern.

Travelling Colony will be a major part of Festival First Night with seven caravans parked along Macquarie Street, activated by live performers appearing from within. Also at Festival First Night, Andrew will bring the buildings and streets around Hyde Park to life with his hypnotic large-scale projections on Hyde Park Barracks Museum, the canopy of The Domain stage, and the eastern side of St Mary’s Cathedral.

Once Festival First Night is over, the caravans will be installed in the foyer of Carriageworks, where they will form the centrepiece of Black Capital, a major programming initiative of Sydney Festival and Carriageworks, that considers Redfern’s place as the capital of Indigenous urban experience in Australia and responds to the shifting demographics and social change in the area.

Photos by Susannah Wimberley