wearing Whiteness III: Enter Without Knocking (2023)

Wearing Whiteness III: Enter Without Knocking is a participatory workshop and performance, inviting participants to customise their own white Hard Yakka coveralls with their chosen, Anglicised, or ethnic names. Using accessible materials such as fabric, thread, and markers, participants created personalised interventions while reflecting on their relationships to their names.

Through this process, the work shifts from a prescribed uniform to a site of individual and collective expression. The once-standardised coveralls become layered with personal narratives, disrupting the assumed neutrality of Anglicised norms and foregrounding the complexities of identity shaped by migration, assimilation, and exclusion.

This negotiation continues in the subsequent performance at the State Library of Victoria, where participants move quietly through the space wearing their customised garments. Referencing the phrase “Enter Without Knocking,” the work highlights the conditional nature of belonging within public institutions that claim openness while maintaining invisible thresholds.