My work to date explores and plays with bringing the essence of relational Arnya Spirituality into new spaces and forms of conveyance, depiction and articulation. I do this by revisitation, re-call and re-articulation of ancient songline eldership Voice teaching. Recall and retrieval from stored memory files articulates the knowledge narrative. The amalgamation of the organic internal filing system, the collective of kinship knowledge offerings ongoing and the digital produces transmutative narratives. Lived experience as inherited bloodline descendent further contextualizes and embeds the Spirit essence of Voice. The body in which I dwell in, with all its parts in function, brings into being a new song vocabulary of Arnya through multi-modal construction and conveyance. In this process, the collective of kinship in all its parts, organic and other, remain embedded in the emergence and continuity of Voice and Flow.
This twinned bibliography and exe-genesis (a discussion of the emergence of this project) performatively claims bibliographies as powerful anticolonial tools, rather than vehicles of erasure. Taking the Nez Perce term kitkińike (in the direction of) as a theoretical grounding and gesture, I argue that bibliographies are more than just lists of sources at the end of a publication. Indigenous, Black and Queer authors have long been regulated to objects to be studied rather than academics to be cited. This work shows ways of moving in the direction of (kitkińike) a variety of voices in our citations, so disrupting presumed categories of bibliographic organisation. Bibliographies can be viewed as cultural landscapes and thus the culture we are cultivating becomes a paramount consideration. Bibliographies as cultural landscapes include various frameworks such as kitkińike of self, kitkińike of care, kitkińike of community and kitkińike of reclamation. In this radical way, bibliographies become crucial anticolonial tools as we move towards a kitkińike of recognition.
Ethnographic collections, as material repositories of historical relationships, are powerful bodies of intercultural knowledge and exchange. Indigenous people have been active and influential in the building of these collections and continue today to be critical to the ongoing interpretation and engagement of such repositories.
When faced with the tangled, overgrowth of values accumulated around collected objects over time, regenerative processes can offer new life. By applying a metaphorical ‘cool burn’ it is hoped that space can be created where new shoots of knowledge can emerge. This research takes the form of a digital article twinned with an exegetical reflection to extend the notion of Indigenous engagement and so consider some of the regenerative potentials of collection research when Indigenous philosophies and concepts drive research enquiry and more importantly, frame outcomes.
This audio-visual essay invites readers to enter a new intermedial archive of documentary paintings and stories by a celebrated and prolific multi-lingual central Australian Aboriginal woman artist. Addressing our written text to intimate family and audiences from elsewhere, in multiple voices and modes of address, we offer an opportunity to consider the dynamics of creating, keeping and caring for memory through the affordances of digital co-creativity. These include what we term ‘painting remix animation’, a form of what co-author Rosalyn Boko calls mixamilani, (‘mixing together’ of different elements).
Guided by the artist’s vibrant palette and life-expressive practice, visitors to the article can move and rest amongst a variety of standpoints through which to attune to questions of history, memory, pictorial storytelling, love, friendship and joy. We hope that in this way, everyone can sense the world-making powers and poetics of colour and understand how our style of slow research towards digital mixamilani creates a new kind of archive for holding paintings carefully, outside of the art commodity market.
Ngā taonga puoro is a Māori instrumental tradition through which one cultivates an improvisational form of playing with the world. It does not follow musical notation. ‘Instruments’ vary from rocks, to bones, wood, and other non-traditional materials, such as glass. They can be found in situ, or carefully crafted and gifted. Each performance is different, new, and responsive not only to the riffing soundings of fellow humans, but to the wider worlds of more-than-human sensuous agency with which we attune, respond, and participate. In both their materiality and their performativity, taonga puoro draw attention to points of convergence, in which histories, ancestors, human and more-than-human entities mingle as affective co-collaborators in a world already playing in co-composition.
Thinking and riffing with this idea of co-composition as a practice of attuning to how I participate in the world that I have come to know, this sound-image-text article is made to re-visit and dwell within moments of creative-critical world-making through playing with my close friend Jessica Kahukura (Te Atihaunui a Pāpārangi, Ngā Rauru, Ngāti Kahungungu and Ngāti Tūwharetoa). It focuses particularly on my own practices as a Pākehā researcher-musician by attuning to my creative-critical positionality in relation to a broader politics and ethics of participation and invention.
‘Hearing Heat: An Anthropocene acoustemology’ is an intermedia composition that meditates on the climate of history, listening to histories of listening from the Papua New Guinea rainforest to nuclear Japan to ancient and contemporary Greece. It proceeds through continual recombinations of visual and sonic media, with photographs, graphics, animation, and cinema dialoguing with ethnographic field recording of indigenous song, ambient environmental sound, cinema soundtracks, electroacoustic and radio composition, and vocally performed text.
