The Explorer (1999). This performance reimagines the city as a living archive of empire, power, and displacement. Beginning in Brixton, South London, UK—home to a community rooted in Caribbean heritage—the Explorer runs north then east through the City of London to Whitechapel, a neighbourhood shaped by generations of Bangladeshi migration. These two communities, though distinct, share historical ties to Britain’s colonial past. Between them lies the City of London: a global financial centre built on the wealth of imperial trade and extraction.

By traversing these geographies in a single line of movement, the work draws a conceptual thread through the social, economic, and historical layers of the city. The route is not just a path but a statement—connecting the margins through the core of power, exposing the contrast between inherited privilege and postcolonial presence. The Explorer is dressed in a deliberately absurd costume—an exaggerated echo of the colonial figure who once claimed lands, mapped borders, and enacted control. As he moves through London’s streets, he enacts not a celebration, but an absurd spectacle—echoing the delusion of past imperial glories.

The run ends in a warehouse, where the Explorer writes out his ‘agenda’—a ritual that parodies the colonial act of naming, owning, and defining space. This work interrogates who has the freedom to move, who is perceived as an authority, and how urban space bears the residue of domination. The costume, the route, and the action work together to unsettle the familiar, asking viewers to question the silent hierarchies within the city’s fabric. It is a critique of the empire’s lasting imprint and a reflection on how movement can become a method of resistance, reclaiming space not through conquest but through presence, visibility, and absurd disruption.