RITUAL, RESISTANCE, AND RECLAMATION IN THE HEART OF EMPIRE

Jack Wilke-Jans

Amala Groom’s moving image work The Lodge is a conceptual and autobiographical performance that draws together the personal, the political, and the spiritual into a single visual and ceremonial act of sovereign resistance. As the third installment in her Raised by Wolves series, the work continues Groom’s ongoing inquiry into the relationship between body, land, spirit, and the colonial state. Through a rich interplay of symbolism, lived experience, and critical theory, Groom positions herself—both literally and allegorically—within Canberra’s Parliamentary Triangle, an epicentre of Australian colonial power. At the same time, she reclaims the space as an ancient ceremonial ground charged with First Nations spiritual presence and ancestral authority.

In The Lodge, Groom reprises the figure of the Bride, a character previously featured in her work as a vessel through which to explore the burdens and resistance of Aboriginal womanhood. The Bride is not a passive archetype of purity or submission, but rather a powerful personification of both trauma and transcendence. Draped in a white wedding dress and bound with red rope, the Bride embodies the tension between spiritual sovereignty and corporeal captivity—symbolising the enduring impacts of colonisation on First Nations women’s bodies and lives. The red rope functions as both constraint and connection: it is the ‘red tape’ of bureaucratic oppression, and the umbilical cord that binds the physical and spiritual bodies. Groom weaves this rope along Anzac Parade, physically enacting a metaphysical journey across time, place, and trauma.

This journey unfolds across the Parliamentary Triangle, a landscape that is both sacred and contested. While it houses the institutions of Australian government, it also sits atop Ngunnawal Country—an ancient meeting place for corroboree and ceremonial exchange among First Nations language groups. Groom’s traversal of this space, from Mount Ainslie to the Aboriginal Tent Embassy, Old Parliament House, and finally New Parliament House, activates an alternative map—one built on songlines, kinship, and resistance. The work does not simply critique colonial structures; it ritualistically reclaims them, re-inscribing the land with spiritual geometries and Indigenous authority.

Crucially, The Lodge engages with the esoteric underpinnings of Canberra’s urban design. As detailed in Peter Proudfoot’s The Secret Plan of Canberra (1994), the city’s founding architects—Walter Burley Griffin and Marion Mahony Griffin—were deeply influenced by Theosophy and geomancy. Theosophy, an esoteric spiritual movement rooted in Eastern mysticism and Western occultism, envisioned the world as a site of cosmic struggle between higher and lower planes of existence. The Griffins sought to manifest this spiritual philosophy through urban planning, embedding sacred geometries and cosmological alignments into the layout of the capital. Their ideal city was not merely functional but aspirational: a metaphysical site capable of channeling divine energies.

Groom reactivates this latent spiritual infrastructure, exposing its contradictions. While the Griffins’ geomantic intentions were visionary, their designs were ultimately co-opted to serve the colonial state. The Triangle—symbolically powerful and geometrically precise—has become a fortress of bureaucratic dominance. In Groom’s reading, it now functions as a “Black Lodge,” a term borrowed from David Lynch’s Twin Peaks series, which she references explicitly in the work’s title. In Lynch’s mythology, the Black Lodge and White Lodge are interdimensional spaces where good and evil blur, where the metaphysical laws governing reality are inverted. Groom draws a potent parallel: Canberra, too, is a place of doubled meaning—a space where sacred ground and colonial artifice exist in constant tension, where spiritual truths have been occluded by a veneer of state power.

Through cinematic editing and visual trickery, Groom disappears and reappears across this landscape, connected always by the red rope. The Bride’s movements become a loop—ritualistic, exhausting, and unresolved. Each iteration of the journey brings her to the gates of Parliament House, but each time she is cast back to where she began. This cyclical temporality—what might be called a sovereign time—echoes Indigenous understandings of time as non-linear, as continuous presence. In this, The Lodge becomes a spiritual enactment of both repetition and transformation. The Bride is caught in a war not just of politics, but of metaphysics—a struggle between sovereign cosmologies and colonial illusions of permanence.

The work crescendos as the Bride reaches the fire at the Aboriginal Tent Embassy, a site of deep personal and political importance for Groom, who was actively involved in protest movements there between 2007 and 2011. The fire is a source of renewal, a spiritual centre where resistance is re-fuelled by ancestral presence. Groom’s ceremonial act of circling the fire three times—each turn honouring one of the cardinal directions and its associated element—grounds the work in Indigenous law and cosmology. It is here that the Bride finds momentary peace, not as escape, but as ignition. She is not retreating from struggle; she is recalibrating her power.

The final sequence sees her ascend once more—into Parliament House and ultimately beyond it. Her last act is to disappear into the bush behind the citadel, not as a victim, but as a sovereign Wiradyuri woman. This conclusion offers no resolution, no final liberation. Instead, it insists on continuity—the spiritual survival and embodied presence of First Nations peoples despite ongoing colonial violence.

Visually, The Lodge is stunning and deliberate weaving together elements of surrealism, performance art, and site-specific installation. Its aesthetics draw on sacred geometry, landscape cinematography, and ceremonial movement. Conceptually, it merges Indigenous epistemologies with speculative cosmology, presenting an ontological challenge to the dominance of Western political architecture. Groom’s work does not merely ask to be seen—it demands to be felt, metabolised, and witnessed.

In the broader context of Groom’s Raised by Wolves series, The Lodge occupies a critical middle ground. While The Union explored relational sovereignty and The Proposal delved into cultural contract, The Lodgeintensifies the spiritual stakes. It is not only a confrontation with colonial architecture but a reclamation of spiritual architecture. It prepares the ground for the final works in the series, which will fully enter the interdimensional and metaphysical, tracing a path from systemic resistance to cosmic resolution.

Through her multidisciplinary practice, Amala Groom continues to reframe First Nations experiences within the context of high contemporary art. Her works operate across registers—personal, political, historical, and speculative—making visible the ghosts of colonialism while animating the spirits of resistance. The Lodge is a ceremonial offering, a philosophical inquiry, and a sovereign act of refusal. It reclaims not just space, but time, and reminds us that the future is not predetermined. It is a fire we must keep tending.

Jack Wilkie-Jans is an Aboriginal Affairs advocate, artist, arts worker, policy theorist, and writer from Weipa and Mapoon, Cape York Peninsula. Living in Gimuy (Cairns, Queensland), Jack is a Waanyi, Teppathiggi and Tjungundji man of British, Vanuatuan and Danish heritage.