- It is my great pleasure,
and not joking aside,
to introduce Elizabeth Povinelli tonight,
the Franz Boas professor of
anthropology and gender studies.
And if you're in anthropology,
you love how these things come together
at Columbia University.
And the author, most recently,
of Geontologies: A
Requiem to Late Liberalism
which came out in 2018.
That book, as well as a,
it's too far for me to read.
I'm just saying I'm--
- [Attendee] I'm fact checking them.
- Yeah, exactly.
Wouldn't it be great
if it was actually 2018
and so many of you had already read it?
Her book won the Lionel
Trilling Book Award,
but it's also the culmination of a really
helpful and intense theorizing
of what settler colonialism
does in late liberalism.
And her work has been very
influential in that way.
The talk, I'm going to give a little
10-minute introduction to her.
I'm calling it an ode to Geontologies
and a tribute to Beth Pivonelli.
But like in all honesty,
it's more like if I was at,
if this was a fanzine, this
would be entry into it,
which would a little bit cooler
than probably what I'm
actually going to do.
Try to turn the sound off.
She did it for me.
Loss seems to define our present era,
particularly losses
associated with climate
and other forms of environmental change.
Best selling books from
Elizabeth Kolbert's The Sixth Extinction
to Amitav Ghosh's The Great Derangement
framed the present as a
moment in world history
where catastrophic losses
exceed or imaginative capacities.
Each day it seems we learn
of another species lost
or another coastline
threatened by rising seas.
Roland Barthes, the
French cultural critic,
he wrote a book after his mother died
that was a memoir of loss and grief.
In one entry, he
described this loss of his
as a flat, dreary country
virtually without water, paltry.
Of course as we all know of late,
loss does not feel like
a dry and empty desert.
Instead, loss feels soggy,
a landscape of wet
clothes, of moldy drywall.
Loss is a place where
washing machines, playhouses
are washed away by the tides
of repeated hurricanes,
as well of course endangered
green parrots in Puerto Rico.
There are ripple effects
to all these losses.
Already indigenous communities
from the Bering Sea
to coastal Louisiana are in
the process of relocating.
In the Fuegian Archipelago where I work,
algal bloom smother fish and
prevent people from fishing.
As communities become
to pack up and leave,
they sacrifice much more
than houses, than schools,
that subsistent strategies.
For place-based people,
the seas are forcibly claiming the past.
They're claiming sacred sites
and the resting place of kin,
both human and non-human.
Loss is not just an event of absence
like something is now gone.
Instead, loss is ongoing.
It's a way of being in the world
that is field with grief, with anxiety,
with alarm and sorrow.
Loss transforms who we are,
how we relate to there beings and things.
And loss transforms our
hopes for the future.
In many ways, loss has become
the affective register of our time,
but is it our time?
If loss is the affective
register of our time, maybe,
what is this time and how do we know it?
For geoscientists and others,
the Anthropocene has become a way
of marking this time of loss
or of naming the present.
For me, a more interesting question
than the naming of the present
or that kind of debates about
the temporality of the present
is how do we know we are in a new time.
This is of course an
epistemological question,
because it is about
what counts as evidence.
There are many evidentiary sites
that serve as archives
of loss in the present.
For example, natural history
museums have been kind of
sort of archives of extinction.
Then in most obvious sense,
zoos has become kind of last-ditch asylums
for endangered species and their genes.
But today, the earth itself
has become the most, oopsie.
There we go, I'm sorry.
This thing is a little bit whack.
The earth itself has become
the most recognizable
archive of less and change.
Petrochemical traces are
now in the earth itself.
Plastics become another layer of strata.
The seas are now filled with
more plastics than fish,
people say.
Yet this way of understanding the earth
as the archive of the present and of loss
is I think way of,
it's a kind of a
geo-epistemological approach
to understanding loss and change.
And I think what Beth's
work has shown us is that
the geo-epistemological
reveals as much as it hides.
So in this case, we see this
image of a kind of strata
of the earth there where
it's plastics and earth,
and where plastics are a
proxy are a trace of the bios,
and of course the earth is the geos.
But it is a kind of production
that makes us not see those,
those separations of life and non-life.
The earth as archive
produces a particular history
of the present that emerges
through geological time scales
to produce a common
world saturated by loss.
As Povinelli describes in Geontologies,
the exploration of the
coal fields in Europe
reveal large stratified fossil beds
that help spur the modern
geologic chronology
or way of understanding, as she says,
the earth as stratified
levels of being and time.
She goes on to say, to quote,
"The concept of the Anthropocene
"is as much a product of the coal fields
"as an analysis of their formation
"insofar as the fossils
within the coal fields
"help produce and secure
the modern discipline
"of geology and, by contrast, biology."
To extend, the Anthropocene
is a story of geos, earth,
archiving the losses of bios,
species for the most part.
In other words, this is a
form of geo-epistemology
that instantiates the bio-ontologies,
in her words, of life and non-life.
And moreover, these kind of bio-ontologies
that are unraveling in the ruin landscapes
and cramped life world of late liberalism.
Seeing the earth and our future
as a uniform stratigraphy of bios and geos
misses important points that Povenelli's
geo-ontological work has
helped me think about.
As her work has shown
the ontological binaries
of settler late liberalism are rupturing.
And she said in a recent interview,
quote, "Something is pulsing
in the scarred division
"between life and non-life,
"an ache that makes us pay attention
"to a scar that has for a long time
"remained numb and dormant,
which does not mean unfelt."
It is this which does not mean unfelt
or her ethnographic attention
to which that is felt
makes her work so compelling to me
and to other anthropologists.
She has, by paying
attention to what is felt
in these places of rupture,
she has taught us a couple of
things I'm going to end with.
One, on the one hand,
temporalities of existence and endurance
are hardly universal.
And ignoring the ways in
which geo-ontological power
operates means ignoring the
violent experienced by people
and other beings made through and within
the butlery boundaries
of life and non-life.
And that's what happens as she describes
when those who live with glistening rocks
are easily banished to
the realm of difference
and the absurd.
I'm leaving my fandom today
with this image of lichen
on the screen for you.
This is a kind of recognition
of the ways in which you talk about
the figure of virus in your book.
Lichen, what are they?
They're some strange
of composition of fungi
and bacteria that live through
and with the crustaceans of rock,
in crustaceous rock.
Lichen live a very long time,
hundreds to thousands of years.
These very lichen on the beach
of Tierra del Fuego
that this is a video of,
that I video taped with my colleagues.
These very lichen, probably
Darwin walked across
over a hundred years
ago with Captain Yaghan,
people coming back from England
after they had been kidnapped
from the Fuegian Archipelago.
Of course, this is one
of the most probably
important moments in the
making of the present
and of present,
the making of the present ways
in which we know the world,
and yet they are invisible,
there is no trace here,
in the lichen.
Yet lichen, their slow
growth rates are so important
that their use as a way of
marking the passage of time,
literally.
Some scientists suspect
indeed that fungi and lichen
are immortal.
This is anther way of understanding
the heterogeneity of
endurance in the world.
Thank you.
(audience applauding)
- First of all, thank you.
That was gorgeous, truly, you know.
Fuck it.
Oh shit.
(audience and Elizabeth laughing)
We've been here all day.
We can be here a little longer. (laughs)
Let it out, everyone.
I always forget about that thing.
Before I begin, I want to acknowledge
the importance of my
indigenous Karrabing colleagues
and their parents and
grandparents to my thought
and to the unfolding of it
so beautifully presented by you.
It was really gorgeous.
You know, I've been with them
for over the last 35 years
and can't imagine myself without them.
But of course I also want to thank
the Art History Department
and the Hood and Lotte Museum,
the Dartmouth Centers Forum
and the Wesley Center of the Humanities
for inviting us all here,
for what's been an incredibly
productive conversation so far.
And for those of you who
haven't been here all day,
including last night, it's too bad,
because you're just going to
hear a very thin thing now,
whereas we've really gotten this thick,
complex discussion
through a set of amazing
papers and art presentations.
I also want to, everybody
in Karrabing, who, you know,
we're always on Facebook,
God bless Facebook,
so we can Messenger each other.
And also thank you for screening
Mermaids, Or Aiden In Wonderland tonight.
We all think it speaks really quite nicely
to the thematics of the program
that is futures uncertain
in the shadow of climatic
and other forms of toxicity.
So we think of climate toxicity
and environment toxicity
under a more general heading.
Mermaids, as you'll see,
is set in the near future when whites,
who are in Kriol (speaking
in a foreign language),
have so thoroughly contaminated the earth
they can't survive outside any longer.
So, like you would expect they would,
they decide, well, we'll experiment.
Indigenous people can.
They can still live outside.
So, what you think white
people would in such a future,
they decide to experiment
on indigenous men and women
and children.
And on their dreaming sites,
in order to see if they
can extra a substance
that would allow them to survive.
So it's a beautiful, beautiful film.
There's a single channel version
that we're going to show tonight
and then there's a two channel version
in which we take the
chapters that you will see
and we show a chapter and then
we show a slightly modified
piece of, of I don't know
what, promotional film.
So you see a chapter of Mermaids
and then you see a promotional
film from, say, Monsanto.
You see a chapter of the film
and then you see a promotional
video from Monsanto.
Oh, it doesn't matter, I can say letters.
So it works in different ways.
Um, but we think it's really spot on
for what we're trying to do today.
But as Will and Sammy and others
like Achille Mbembe
have said and I say too,
that if one wants to peer
into futures uncertain
or an uncertain future,
careening like Benjamin's angel toward us,
then one merely needs to
look at the cascading ongoing
uncertain past and present
in most indigenous,
brown black, island, and queer communities
as glimpsed, as you'll see
glimpsed in the Mermaid.
So these are just some slides from it.
But even if we do look sideways
rather than horizonally,
always you know, horizonally,
if we look just sideways for a second,
we're not going to find
our common futures.
Yeah, sure, it's getting hot and hotter
and yes, absolutely, tipping points
threaten to alter the nature
of what the ecologists
of the 1970s, white
ecologists of the 1970s,
came to describe as the
whole earth as Gaia,
as the biosphere, Bateson
was brought up here.
But until that happens and
even after that happens,
the shifts when this happens and after,
the tipping points are not
and will never be uniform
in their application.
In reality, hut zones
form like rain clouds
over specific vicinities
and clouds are part
of a global circulation of
specific forms of toxicity.
The Times, few years
back, reported that quote,
"Changing weather patterns
"linked to rising global temperatures
"have resulted in a dearth of
wind across northern China."
And this in turn is creating, quote,
"A wave of severe pollution
"that's been blamed for
millions of premature deaths."
In 2014 a Chinese official
described the pollution in Beijing
as having the contours
of a nuclear winter.
Actual nuclear events have driven out
some forms of existence already,
even as they have created spaces
for what I've called toxic sovereignty.
And these new forms of toxic sovereignty
extend way beyond the human already.
After the 2011 Fukushima
meltdown, for instance,
Japanese officials set up fences
that demarcated safe and unsafe spaces
as if contaminated
animals, fungi, and soils
would not slip through the
most barbed of barbed wires.
And these do slip through and have.
Quote, "Radioactive wild boars in Sweden
"are eating nuclear mushrooms," unquote.
And this is not a line pulled
from a Margaret Atwood novel,
but a news headline about
the long term effects
of the 1986 Chernobyl disaster
as far away as northern Sweden.
Around the immediate
vicinity of Chernobyl,
a vast human exclusion
zone has been created.
A lot of us in this room know that.
What forms of existence are emerging
and being sheltered
within it remains unclear.
I mean, people are going
in to do this work now.
And some people have gone and said,
"Look, there's all kinds of
animals and plants in here
"and oh, it's great to have
these big, nuclear events
"because then we have the exclusion sets."
And some people really are
talking about it in this way.
But celebrations of a resurgent
nature need tempering.
As one ecological
journalist put it, quote,
"Ironically, the damaging
effects of radiation
"inside the zone to
these animals and plants
"may be less than the threat
posed by humans outside of it."
So these animals are going in because
although the contamination
is quite dangerous,
their life expectancy is
better in there than outside.
Thus the invitation to think about art
in relation to toxic
landscapes, valley extraction,
and settler colonialism
works really nicely,
both in what's happening in the world
but also with two projects
that I've been working on
over the last couple million years.
The first (laughs),
the first one, I hope this is work, yeah.
The first one is a, sorry,
that's a catastrophe.
See, that's the thing
about not having notes
is that you have to remember
to click where it says slide.
Okay, so that's, that, you know,
this is the image we have, right?
But anyways, the invitation
works really nicely.
And I was, because it
forced me to really think
about the relationship between
two projects that I've been working on.
One is a, yeah, there we go.
One is a, what I call a drawing book,
and these are just some draft pictures,
which explores the question of inheritance
of dislocation, of
violence, and of melancholy,
not mourning, from the point
of view of Elizabeth, me,
who grew up in Shreveport,
Louisiana in the 1960s
through the 1970s under the
image of a lost paternal village
in what is now the Italian Alps,
but was for my grandparents,
my paternal grandparents,
first and foremost an autonomous village
within the Austrian-Hungarian empire.
We were brow-beaten into knowing
that there are five families
who come from this village, this area.
And that we were not part of a nation,
we were part of an empire.
And I'm in the south, there's like,
"What the fuck are you talking about?"
You know, what empire?
The Austrian-Hungarian
empire which didn't exist.
Okay, so the book's about a
family's violent dislocation,
of affect when sense is
irreducibly dislocated.
And of the assemblages of
race and settler-colonialism
that capture and direct these
multiple violent dislocations
at my grandparents' level
and turn them into whiteness at my level.
So it doesn't matter.
So I get the, I get the
racial boost anyway.
While around, native Americans are being,
have been dislocated, African Americans
are being disenfranchised,
et cetera et cetera, okay.
But this afternoon I'm going to begin,
although I'm going to come back to this
in ways that you'll see.
I'm going to focus on the
question of anthropologiant art
that seems to, and
anthropology I should say,
anthropology of art, anthropology
and art, contemporary art.
That seems to speak most directly
to our Karrabing films and
installations that have emerged
since we began doing this
in about 2000, I don't know,
10 or nine or eight.
We don't really know, people ask us
and we're like, we make up a number.
You'll see, it's roughly
connected to 2010.
And so, and so the, these
questions slide into
what indeed I'm calling toxic sovereignty.
And when I talk about toxic sovereignty,
what I mean by that is
not merely the toxicity
of a western form of sovereignty, right?
So we now give you sovereignty
and you take on sovereignty
and don't you want sovereignty
and nationalism, et cetera,
that a host of critical
indigenous theorists
are trying to work against,
how to belong to country
but not have to take on
settler colonial notions of sovereignty
which undermine their mode of belonging.
But also, not only that, certainly that,
but also that the spaces that whites
or (speaking in a foreign language)
have so contaminated actually are a place
for a new form of refuge
and sovereignty, indigenous sovereignty.
That idea, this toxic sovereignty idea
comes not however from the
wild boars in Chernobyl
who find that it's meant,
probably less dangerous
to be in a radiation field
than to be outside of it.
But from Kelvin Bigfoot
who is a Karrabing member,
from his ad lib lined,
ad libed line, whoo,
in Windjarrameru, The Stealing C*nt$,
which is, was our second film.
Now Windjarrameru tells the story
of four young indigenous
men falsely accused
of stealing two cartons of beer
they found in the bush near a sacred site
that was being illegally mined
by the Windjarra Mining Corps.
And I should say,
windjarra means stealing,
so it's like ha, ha, yeah, whatever.
So they're chased
through a toxic landscape
and end up in a standoff
outside of a toxic swamp.
So they're, the four guys,
young guys are in there.
And the police, their family,
and then some social services
are outside of the swamp
and they're in a standoff.
The line came, because
everything's ad libbed in film
and we can talk about it later.
But the, the line came, we were shooting
and Kelvin's supposed
to, Reggie, his nephew
is supposed to be worried that
the police are going to come in.
And Kelvin's supposed to, like,
reassure him that they won't or something.
And so Kelvin was saying,
"Wait, wait, I got to figure
out what I'm going to say."
So we wait, "Okay, I'm ready."
And we shoot and Reggie says,
(speaking in a foreign language).
And Kelvin says, which means, sorry,
"Look over there, they're all over there."
And Kelvin says, "Don't
worry, they won't come here.
"It's a radiation swamp.
"We're safe, they won't come inside."
It's with that paradox in mind
I want to make some simple points
about the orientation in ends
of an anthropology of art,
which for me widens out and will widen out
through the orientations
of any progressive western discipline
and any practice, for instance,
practice of art that
we're talking about today.
So what I'm going to do is I'm
simply going to start with,
okay, what's the contemporary
anthropology of art.
What, how do we think about it.
Why, what is it, what, is it
different than something else?
It was before, then I'm going to move into
contemporary curatorial practices
that a lot of people in this audience
and, that have presented
already are a part of,
that is, what contemporary
curatorial practices
and artistic practices
are in and around ecology
are trying to do with their art, okay?
And then I'm going to move to the, the,
a reunderstanding perhaps
from a Karrabing understanding
of what, what's the end of art?
Where is it, where is the art?
Okay, so that's what I'm going
to do, I'll try to get through,
am I talking too fast?
Oh, good, all right.
All of this is to the question of,
how do, of course, do we
decolonize disciplines in art?
That's it, when we say we're
decolonizing disciplines
or decolonizing art, art as a discipline,
anthropology as a discipline
and English, whatever.
What, where do we stop?
Where, what's the object
that we're, we're,
we're ultimately caring about?
Hopefully you'll see what I mean by that.
Did I skip a thing, no.
All good in the hood, okay.
Now, I want to, what I want to,
no, I won't do that, fuck it.
Oh God.
Okay, let me just start,
I can talk about it.
Yeah, let me just start.
Bad, someone's, someone, do you mind
if I just have some asides?
Someone once said in the nicest,
like I just thought,
wow, I'm a rotten person.
I would never do this.
But they said, "I, to prepare for this
"I looked at every one of
Elizabeth's online videos."
I was like (gasps).
"And there's always a part
"in which A, she laughs
and B, she swears."
I was like, (gasps), shit. (laughs)
Eh, okay, sorry.
Things are so bad, some of us come,
well, if you come from
a very violent context
I think we just, I don't know, anyways.
Okay, anthropology.
Anthropology's relation to
art is of course longstanding,
as is its relationship to
the museum, to the museum.
One merely says the name Franz Boas,
which you know, I now bear
like a scar or I don't know.
And remembers the Chicago
World's Fair Columbia Exposition
and, and this long fraught
historical relationship
between the discipline, art
and the museum as conjured.
By the early 20th Century,
the anthropology of art,
though, when in this period,
was part and parcel of a
broader disciplinary emergence
hell-bent on battling social Darwinism
by demonstrating the unity of humanity
as grounded in the diversity of cultures.
And it's still a really, a
mind-bending kind of innovation.
What made us all the same
was how we all differed.
I mean, truly, it's at,
like the heart of it is a weird paradox.
The self and the other,
the other and the self
are each defined by enclosed within
and in need of translation between
our language and cultures that differed.
Thus the major conceptual
touchstone during this time
and encompassing the discipline's approach
to art in society were
the science of difference,
self other, translation, culture.
What distinguishes the
contemporary, though,
discipline's approach to
art pertains exact, whoops,
oh, approach to art, it contains exactly
to a new relationship, perhaps,
to these conceptual touchstones.
Self other, the science
of difference, self other,
translation, and culture,
and et cetera, all right?
The general agreement that
anthropology was a science
equal to other more quantitative sciences
was shattered in the 1980s.
Now, I think the
anthropology department here
is still four fields, so
that's amazing, right?
Because, you know, if you guys don't know
but anthropology in the 80s was like, eh,
and just like freaked out.
Which is good, a lot
of it, like, what the,
what, you know, what,
how are we part of a colonial apparatus?
How have we been part
of a colonial apparatus
that was one, we are not
a science, for instance.
That was part of it.
But also in the wake of this shattering
a large section of the discipline became,
began to explore its function,
not merely as not a science but as a,
not a descriptive project at all.
That is, it considered itself
more an evocatorial practice
and evocatorial is not a word.
Just in case you're wondering.
But I think it's a right non-word,
because what a lot of anthropologists
post like those 80 wars
thought the discipline
was and should be was
something that used ethnography
or re-functioned ethnography
or changed ethnography
to rather a describing
of the self or the other
to something that evoked a
place, a condition, a thought.
And this was very
different they, they said
than documenting or analyzing
that place, a condition, or that thought.
We can think here, what I'm getting at,
of, of the line that runs,
that leads from Clifford Geertz
in Tangled Web of Meaning
and Multiple Interpretations,
to the various anthropology
of writing schools
like James Clifford, who's
technically, you know,
he's not an anthropologist
and George Marcus.
All of them, as Katie Stewart
has made more explicit,
turned away from anthropology
as an epistomological science
and toward anthropology
as an affective art.
My own department is replete
with such examples and endeavors,
and not merely Mick
Taussig's ethnofictions
and weird ass theater
performances, all right?
There, actually if you look,
everybody in my department,
like Partha Chatterjee,
who knew he writes theater?
Okay, by affective art,
when I say they switch from
at least this big wing,
switch from thinking
the discipline was about
an epistomological science
and said, "No, it's an affective art,"
what I mean by that,
by an affective art, when I
say it's, by affective art,
sorry, the deceased Deluz might accuse me
of it being a bit redundant,
like how can you say affective art?
Art already is, like, that's,
its concept is an affect.
This is here just because
I love his pictures.
I mean, honestly, anyways just imagine.
When I'm talking just imagine
that it's drawn there.
Anthropology has simply
shifted to an activity
that crafts works oriented maximally
to the production of percepts,
affects, and dispositions
meant to send a block of sensations
about a place and people and time
through readers, viewers, and listeners.
We heard some of this
and that's, you know,
a lot of just, creates some of the energy,
just sends sensation through there.
We can of course insist
that Deluz's three infamous
modes of concept or thought
can never be so clearly
differentiated in fact as in theory.
So for instance, some
anthropologists produce
affectively-oriented
work in and for itself.
They just, they, they like it.
They want to produce art, that
art as this block of sensations
that you, you, you, you
read it, you see it,
you hear it, and you're affected.
But many make art, make these object,
these sensation objects in
order to produce something
that we've heard a lot
about today and last night,
to produce a set of differential affects
and thus, uh, you have the,
"What just happened to me?" thoughts
about the worlds that
different forms of power
create for poor brown, indigenous,
sexual, and gender minorities.
So it adds politics that once
you send that block through
you, uh, so you can't do your
politics in the same way.
That is, these works say,
feel the cramped, toxic spaces
of existence that are the
condition of your healthy,
clean, well-mannered being.
The point of producing
a block of sensation
is not merely to demand
readers, listeners, viewers
be affected by the sensation.
But to reorganize their
sensorium, percepts,
and dispositions to change themselves
into something that will
be less toxic and invasive.
The pivot then, from an older
to a newer anthropology of art
comes not merely from the shift
from description to sensation
but also from a focus on
difference in translation
to a focus on difference, alterity,
on difference in alterity, oh sorry,
not simply a focus on
difference and translation
or a focus on difference and, but rather
a, a shift to a focus on
alterity and transfiguration.
A shift from understanding
to potentiality.
This wobbling, I mean,
it's still difference
but it's wobbling between
a focus on the other,
all right, what is actually in the world,
how it creates this and
that, self and other,
regions of cleanliness
and regions of toxicity.
And a practice of the otherwise, i.e.,
I'm going to send this block
of sensation through you
(groans) so you can feel the otherwise
that would be necessary to change it.
It is about trying to assemble something
that might force an unjust differential
into something more just.
The anthropologist writes
the book for people to read,
makes video installations or
films for people to sample,
and crafts a sculptural or painting
for people to look at or move around
with the hope that they'll
experience difference,
"Oh, that's different than me,"
but in a different modality.
Not experience that's different from me
but as we heard this
morning, be disturbed.
And then we hope to channel
that disturbance, right?
Because you can be disturbed
and nothing happens.
So you try and channel it somehow.
Thus the wobble wobbles around a focus
on the thing you're producing,
the object, the book, the
film, the video, the whatever,
the, the sound, the audio sound system
and the world the object is evoking.
For some, care is lavished
on the surface and depth of the thing
and for many in anthropology,
thus it's not surprising
that aesthetics remains
their primary focus.
How do we fashion the thing, and
in art we're going to see too,
how do we fashion the thing
that can do this, right?
Because it's got to do it.
You can put it up but if it doesn't do it,
it's just a thing on the
wall or in the middle
or wherever it is.
And for some, this remains a
disciplinary-focused battle.
That is, this is about the object,
about what it does to people
and about what anthropology
is, should, could be, right?
So here, and I just want you to hold this
as I move to the next section.
The object for many remains the focus.
All right, either the object,
the art or the discipline
that's, you're like,
"Who are we if we're making this
"versus doing something else?"
Okay, all right, all right.
Insofar as we witness such, you know,
I don't know, I call them wobbles
because it's still difference
but now it's, or knowledge
but now it's sensation and it's,
it's for the world
but we keep on being focused on the object
and we always come back to
the discipline or something.
Insofar as you see that in anthropology,
anthropology finds and departs
company with contemporary,
curatorial, and artistic practices
that understand their work as research,
which a lot of us in this
room do as a form of research.
Among the progressive pathway,
passageways of the art world,
it's hard to hear, for instance,
of a more exhausted
question than what is art?
What is the aesthetic?
Maybe what is art?
But what is the aesthetic?
What makes an art object
an aesthetic object?
The query over whether
the aesthetic object
is a form of intuition, of
judgment, of value or value,
seems worse than dilettantish
in the face of pressing questions
about artistic censorship, labor markets,
curatorial freedom, financing,
private and public access,
and capital speculation, much less
other questions about
anthropogenic climate change,
toxicity, the neo-liberal
concentration of wealth,
wealth, the rise of what appears
to be a new form of fascism
and the proliferation of new,
unseen but now quite
expected modes of racism.
In the shadow of these past
and ongoing catastrophes,
what does it matter what art is?
Who cares?
Who cares what anthropology is?
Who cares what aesthetics is?
What their essences are, who cares?
We now ask, what can art do?
We ask what it does.
What can we do together
socially and politically
through the practice,
collective practice of art?
Oh, this, yeah, we'll get, oh yeah, okay.
The critical theorist and
poet Edouard Glissant,
for instance, observed
something about thought
equally poetic, sorry, about poetics
equally applicable to our
current attitude toward the arts
and it, and I think what we're struggling
in this room about.
He wrote, quote, "Thinking thought,"
or thinking about thought,
"usually amounts to withdrawing
into a dimensionless place
"in which the idea of
thought alone persists."
You know, like the
anthropology, art, whatever.
"But thought in reality spaces
itself out into the world.
"It informs the imaginary of
peoples, their varied poetics,
"which it then transforms, meaning,
"in them it risks, it
risks becomes realized."
This spacing out of thought in the world
includes not merely the products
of progressive artists and poets
in their singular and
collective practices,
but the thought and arts of
all the wretched of the earth
and the swamp dwellers, colonized,
subaltern, black and brown,
and the intersections, of
course, among these identities.
Today we're surrounded
by numerous contemporary
critical curatorial and
artistic explorations
that press the limits of
what art is doing, becoming,
and building in specific formations
and in specific distributions
of internationally
entangled capital and power.
And these contemporary explorations
have long socially and
geographically diverse histories
in radical black cinema such
as the work of Charles Burnett,
clips of which we saw in the Jaffa film.
Boalian Theater, Variety's Third Cinema,
The People's Theater Movement in India,
The Nigerian Cinema, to
mention merely just a few.
If any truism captures the broad if varied
inclinations of contemporary
progressive artistic
museological and curatorial worlds,
it pivots on a trial set of intentions
of those people in power.
These intentions can be
summarized I think as,
one, an intention to exhibit a globally
and socially diverse set
of artistic practices
that speak to the
entanglement of global worlds.
Two, to exposit an
equally socially diverse
set of artistic concepts
emerging from those spaces.
And third, to expose vis-a-vis
these artistic practices and concepts
the contemporary structure
and assemblage of power
that circulates through worlds
including museums et cetera
that keep in place one set of values
by withdrawing the creative
energies from another.
Ideally, the question is not,
what is the aesthetic or
even, who is the artist?
It is, what are the
various imminent concepts
emerging from artistic works
that investigate and intervene
in the contemporary,
organizational entanglement
of aesthetic power, which
are art institutions.
Thus while anthropology,
at least a big hunk of it,
is replacing understanding
with affect or art,
that is what we do is not
understand but sensate,
arts are elevating research
and thus that aesthetics
perhaps should give way to understanding.
Now, we'll come back to that.
Now again, don't worry.
Curators, artists, critical
theorists, they're not naive.
They know that the, that
this movement is facing
a whole set of infrastructural powers.
They know that, and again,
I'll just quick say this.
They know that Duchamp's Readymade
is now often, often meets Hirst's
readymade for the market, right?
Or readymade for maximal
investment and profitability.
Thus, people are not naive enough
not to already know
that any theory of art,
the artist, and the spectator, right?
Must be, must add the speculator, right?
It's, it's, we, we know that,
it's already inside that.
But many artistic projects,
and we saw some today,
are, have really pushed the limits
of what any aesthetic
theory has been able,
has, was fashioned to take account of.
And we've heard many today,
Sammy last night, I
mean throughout the day.
There's also Otobong
Nkanga, Susanne Winterling,
Maria Teresa Alvarez, and others, right?
Who are engaged in this new eco-art
that TJ was a little pushing against
in order to on the one
hand probe and intervene,
on the one hand probe and
the other hand intervene,
not, not merely or not even initially
or not even ultimately
intervene in art or in art institutions
but instead intervene in places, right?
Use art to terraform a place
to a progressive, progressively.
That is the art object in many
of these eco artistic spaces
which are seeing the practice of art
as definitely a sensation,
a block to, going through
but really about a form,
a new form of research
which is a probative research.
Like if we do this, what happens?
Have decisively shifted from
the problem of aesthetics
which I think still really
increasingly obsesses anthropology.
Like how do we make a
beautiful aesthetic object?
Have left that behind and
instead move to aesthesis
in a kind of Michel Foucault sense,
that is, not what is the
aesthetics of the object
but how do we change the self and society?
Now so we have, we have anthropology,
there's a meeting with
contemporary curatorial arts,
there's a divergence, it's
all really super interesting
and it's marvelous on
the one hand, marvelous.
We have these arts of affect, of percepts,
of dispositives that
are aiming or aimed at
pointing to the unjust
assemblage of difference
and trying to evoke an otherwise
that can be felt if you
do your project right
coursing through this assemblage, right?
So it's not just the giving, think,
we're always saying
it's not just the given
organization of self and other,
but if you do the block
of sensation right,
you can feel this
otherwise, this other way
in which something might happen.
But we still I think
have a pretty big problem
that needs addressing,
and it's kind of come up
in the edges of discussion I think here.
Why, we produce some of the stuff.
We produce writing, we produce video,
we produce sculpture, we
produce art, you know, whatever.
But why does anyone care to
stare, to read, or to listen?
Why do they come in,
stay in, look, listen,
and make themselves
available for that affect?
That's really, that is, that is,
we come back in some crucial way
to the question of aesthetics
even if we're interested in aesthesis.
See what's at stake here?
Let's just do a really quick,
you know those guys, right?
You know, they've lent themselves,
Adorno is like more of a, he's over there.
I love this one.
But the two of them, so have dominated
kind of left critical
western theory of aesthetics.
But and we all know that
there's similarities
and differences between their approaches,
both on the topic of art and aesthetics
including, sorry, their different takes
on artistic autonomy, on the aura,
on the potential to functionalize art
for a specific politic.
For example, Bejamin, you
know, more functionalist
and Adorno more critical insofar as
he's looking at this Stalinist
functionalization of art
and he's not into it.
And as many of you would know, for Adorno,
the true work of art is not
what it does in the world,
but rather how in trying
to make it seal itself up
into its own autonomy, that
is to, such that two things,
in order to be in and for itself,
and he's talking about modern art,
be in for itself and to be
other than a given order, right?
He's, you can do, how in trying to do that
it reveals the very social condition,
the contradictions in
the social conditions
that condition it and
it's trying to escape.
So the, what's great about
modern art, Adorno says,
is that it reveals the
condition we're living in.
But for all that, all the differences
between Adorno and Benjamin,
we could go on and on,
there's one thing they really share.
And what they share is an argument
that an art as such emerges
from its separation,
so the art, art image as such can only be
when it separates itself
from the cultic image.
And you know, this, this has been sitting
in plain view all the time, I mean
it's just their, their
stuff is replete with this
in which there's that
hierarchy of those things,
those people often, I mean
the ur-cultish image would be
indigenous, African, native American,
but it could also be
Catholic or Russian Orthodox.
That is, those people who don't have art
because they, the image is
still stuck in the cultic
or those people who refuse to agree
to a geontological separation
of life and non-life.
And thus think that if
they touch or manipulate
or use or relate to objects in the earth,
as things that are part of you
and thus you need to be part of,
as having confused the hierarchy
in agencies of intentionality, right?
So, so the very artistic,
what aesthetic theory was,
I mean, who wants to go to
aesthetic theory, right?
Screw that, I mean, it's this like replete
with this horror of colonial domination
that sits on a geontological division.
And what it reveals is that art theory
is itself an intentionally
revealing an original division
that situates itself,
that reveals insofar as
it's trying to seal itself up
as being part and parcel of an
ongoing colonial catastrophe,
that is, separating out people
for whom the being in relation to
other forms of existence
is a crucial analytic of existence.
And these are just some
slides from some of our work.
This is, well, this is from,
this is from The Jealous One
in which, in which we use the image
in overlays and to try and
show the inside and outside
of, as the story goes,
of humans and non-humans.
Thus trying to show and convey
that if you, if you want to stay in place
in your form of existence
then you have to keep in place
that which keeps you in place.
If you want to stay in place,
then you have to keep in place
that creek that is keeping you in place
or that fish that keeps
you in place, right?
So it's showing that indeed, all images
must participate in this
new way of thinking about
the non-difference between
this hierarchy of images.
So let's say for instance that you know,
Adorno and all these
people, they're just wrong.
(laughing)
Right, there's no, this separation,
this is part of that western, you know,
self aggrandizement.
And but let's also say that all images,
the ones that we're interested in here
work by capturing and fixing the senses,
that you know, apropos
Ranciere a little bit.
Although I can go on and
on about why not too much.
That is, all images that
we want to work with
take aesthetics as
irreducibly an aesthesis.
The image must hold the attention
in such a way that it stuns understanding
in order to flood an order
or a region of existence
with a disorienting and then somehow
re-orienting sensorium, all right?
How do we figure this
capture of the senses
such that the figure moves away from,
the point moves away
from the object itself
into this activity of capturing, turning
so that it's not about the art itself,
not about the work of art itself.
And again, I think we're
comfortable saying this.
It's like we're using this
thing to do this thing.
But is that enough?
What, or what is this
thing that we're doing?
Is there just some way of just like,
getting, saying it somehow more clearly?
Well in Karrabing we have a term
for things that we do like that,
in which we use an object to turn people
the way we want to turn them.
That concept is called bait.
Bait the hook, right?
So they bite it.
Now, more sophisticated,
it's actually not more sophisticated
but in film theory, a
different way of bait
or lure, we do it all the time.
We do it so much we know it, you know.
It's like, "I'm not going to bite that."
And it's like, "Oh, well
I thought you would."
You want somebody to do
something so you're like,
put little thing on there and you know,
and then we say, "Don't bite the hook.
"Why are you going to bite this,
you're going to bite this?"
But in film theory this
was called a MacGuffin.
I'm not sure if you
guys, I'll say it anyway.
A MacGuffin is a term
that Alfred Hitchcock
famously borrowed from his
screen writer, Agnes Macphail.
And as, at least some of
us know, a MacGuffin is
the mysterious object that sets in motion
and keeps in motion the chain of events
until the film winds down
and ends, like their thing.
Hitchcock famously described
the MacGuffin as, quote,
"The thing that the characters
on the screen worry about
"but the audience doesn't care."
Why, because what the
audience cares about as,
is seeing how insofar as
the actors chase this thing,
they reveal who they are
psychologically or socially, right?
So that's what the audience
is actually looking for.
Now you can cut out the
psychological depth, right?
So you can actually cut
it, the Borne Conspiracies,
for instances, so they, a lot
of contemporary Hollywood film
it's like you just chase,
you just (roaring),
chased along, right?
But the point is they need something
that pulls the viewer along
so that the viewer comes,
stays, hopefully comes back
or tells their friend
to come and stay, right?
And then maximally, it gets
more theaters to show that
so more will come and stay, and maximally
so that maybe that film
will go into a museum
where it would be more maximally seen
and then the museum keeps the film alive
by keeping like, with an archive
so that more can maximally see it, right?
So the MacGuffin, the real
MacGuffin is the film itself
or anything that goes round and round
keeping people chasing
it, chasing it, chasing it
so that money emerges and
goes into producer's pocket.
That's actually what the MacGuffin is.
And I would suggest like
the MacGuffin in the film,
the film as MacGuffin, all of our art,
especially Karrabing art, is
oriented toward doing that
but in a way that redirects
the motion of accumulation.
We produce art
in order to
redirect resources
from where they have been accumulated
back into where they
have been extracted from.
No one actually cares about the art.
We do, and we will talk
about it at the film, right?
But no one actually cares so much about,
we were at a customs border once.
We were going to Europe,
or coming to New York,
that's another thing, then
we were going to Europe.
And we're trying to get out and of course
everyone in the collective,
there's about 30 people.
We grew up together, we can
talk about more after the film
but we grew up together.
It was formed at a
particularly precarious moment
in around 2007
when the culmination of a state,
the Australian conservative
federal government
fanned a sex panic, like,
we can talk about it more.
But it was just like, the
Northern Territory government
where Karrabing live did a
report on the health condition
of children in remote
indigenous communities.
And then it didn't release the report.
And the federal government
was up for re-election.
It was a very conservative government
and they knew what was in the report.
And so they forced the release
right before the election.
And in the report was a
little section that said,
"In the worst cases,
"there's child sexual abuse
in these communities."
It didn't say how much,
it didn't say where,
it didn't even prove that there was.
It just said it and so
the federal government
used this to say, "See,
traditional culture is wrong.
"Anthropologists supporting it are wrong.
"We need to get these
people off their land
"into real jobs so they
can be entrepreneur."
Literally this,
"Entrepreneurial subjects."
They send in the military
and they manditorially
acquired indigenous land.
And it was at the same time
that there was a violent riot
on the community where
everybody lived and had grown up
and where I've been going back from 1984
connected to the way in which
the state divided indigenous people
in order to give them back their land.
So it was through these land rights.
So the state said, "Oh yes,
"we want to give you back your
land but you have to prove
"to us that you fit an
anthropological model,"
which ended up dividing
communities against.
And so they were, they left Belyuen
and it was in between 2007 and 2010
that Karrabing as a concept emerged.
And it's a concept in which,
karrabing in Emmiyengal
means when the tide is at its lowest.
So the big tide's up north.
And so when the tide is at
it's lowest it's karrabing
and then when it's at
its highest it's karakal.
And the tides are what
connects the diverse groups
within Karrabing, so there are about 10,
I think there are 10
of what you people call
clan groups, right?
10 different dreaming groups.
And as Linda says, and you can look it up.
It's a great, we had a great conversation
that we did for a specimen.
It's in English, too,
in which members of Karrabing talk about
the vision behind the
concept of Karrabing,
which is everybody has their own land
but they're connected by the water,
they're connected by these dreamings
that move through the landscape,
and they're connected
by the kinds of assaults
that settler-colonialism presents to them,
fracking, mining, et cetera.
Karrabing, the idea to start
making films and installations
were explicitly about pushing back against
state understandings of indigeneity
and instead, try and take
what was a dislocation,
generational, in generation dislocation
with a new reorientation
toward their own land.
So I want to just end by,
because we can talk about this more,
by saying what are Karrabing
film and installations for?
That is, how are they MacGuffins?
If, because I think a lot
of people in this room,
the presentation's been amazing,
what are, if we're really making this art
in order to produce these
blocks of sensation,
that disorient power
and those who see it who are in power
are disoriented, right?
And then try and channel, what we say is
we want to channel their disorientation
toward a more progressive future,
maybe not for the ones we disorient.
They might have to go
down a little bit, right?
They're not going to
have the same good future
and that's why we have
a lot of white people
voting for Trump because actually,
they're right, they're losing, right?
So we want to somehow reorient them
so that they agree to have less
so other people don't
have to have so much shit.
And by shit I mean toxicity.
But Karrabing are doing something
just a little different.
It might have to do with
because we're a collective
and because it might have to do
with how we, why we're
doing it, et cetera.
It's still a MacGuffin
but slightly different.
So on the one hand we make films
not to hold y'alls attention initially,
but to hold each others' attention,
to care about and belong to each other,
which is always also about
belonging to a place,
that is, in the first instance,
the production of art film installations
isn't about capturing,
fixing y'alls senses,
about capturing, fixing
each others' senses
so we don't disperse and die
without the belonging,
holding each other together.
The second reason we make
and why it's a different
kind of MacGuffin perhaps
is we use this form of
fixing our own senses
through the practice of making
them and then, you know,
and then moving around the world.
That was some of us just moving around
and giving talks and stuff
is that this form of belonging together
is also a mode of survivance
in that critical indigenous sense
of the survivance of
knowledge and attachment
to a particular kind
of knowledge practice.
Keeping in place, that is,
as we make these films,
all the films, and you'll see today,
all the films, they're you know,
people come up with an
idea and then, you know,
it gets pushed around and stuff
and then we do it and but
there's a general agreement
that if we're just looking at it as,
looking at the film and filming,
that all of them, anybody
come up with the film
but all of them have to pull together,
the survivance of the
presence with the continuation
of generations of knowledge.
So in the practice of making them,
everybody learns
something about their land
or what happened in the past, et cetera.
That is, these films are explicitly about
keeping in place the cultic.
It's art against art.
Third, we try and create
images like the ones you saw
with Rex and his dreaming,
which is a barramundi dreaming.
And the brother whose passed
away with the crab inside,
it's better if you see them in motion
because you can see it
jumping a little better
or another brother with
his sea monster web thing.
The idea is to create an image
that flows in two
directions, outward, against,
and to do that thing which we talk about,
outward, to say to block
a sensation outward,
to affect you all but also inward
as a mode of analysis, right?
So for instance, and it'll
just be a quick anecdote,
when we were making Windjarrameru,
the one where four young guys accused
of stealing two cartons of
beer get chased by cops,
they end up in a contaminated swamp,
and Kelvin comes up with
this brilliant concept
of toxic sovereignty.
We came out of one piece of shooting,
we came out and we had been shooting
the fictional police chasing the four men
and then the four men go under
this old barbed wire fence.
We've always gone under
it because we go hunting
every which way and camping
under it and past it.
And we had painted on this
piece of wood, stop poison.
So the whole scene pivots
around the young guys
go under the fence and keep running
and the cops stop, right?
Whoa, poison, right?
And then this whole thing about
how they're not going to go
and then they go around and find them
in the contaminated swamp.
So we were all, it was really fun.
We have a great film, we
were running, it's so funny
and we're coming out of this shot
onto the bitumen road, where
real policemen were standing.
And one of, Gavin a nephew of
mine, who actually did have,
he wasn't allowed to be there
because he was supposed to be
locked up in Darwin, not locked up
but under house arrest in Darwin.
We were like, "Gavin, run."
So he was actually running
through the bush now.
Now we had, and we had two, the police,
and we were like, "Hi, policemen,"
to try and like deflect them
from seeing Gavin running.
And the police come over here and say,
"Are you guys filming,
what are you guys doing?"
We were like, "Oh, we're filming.
"Hey, meet your fictional policemen."
And they were like, "Hey, hey, hey."
And because we don't like these two cops.
But anyways, the, and so, so he,
the two policemen said, "Were you filming
"in the contaminated area?"
Now we said, "No, no, no, no, we weren't.
"We know where that is,
it's right over there, see?
"We were filming over there."
And they said, "That's part of it."
We said, "What do you
mean it's part of it?"
He said, "This whole area's contaminated."
And we were like, "We've
hunted and eaten and sat."
It's like, sat, you know,
played in the radiated stuff
our entire life.
And he said, "Well yes, you know,
"but we're being cleaned up now
"because this land claim that happened
"is going to give all
this back to white people
"so now they're trying to clean it up."
Ah, what would white people
do at the end of the world
if they couldn't go outside
but indigenous people could?
They would experiment on them, right?
So what we see here is that the,
our filming is trying
to go in two directions,
give you guys something
to captivate your senses
but we always use it to probe,
what the hell is happening in our world?
That is never being told to people, right?
But you can start seeing, when you start
trying to make something in it.
And insofar as that's the case,
the, what I started up
with the, oh yeah, wait.
That's another one,
but when I started out,
oh, it doesn't matter.
When I started out with this drawing book,
the point of our films are to say,
you know, people can be
together and entangled
and we're all in this common problem
but we're not commonly treated.
I grew up, we grew up together.
We love each other, we're like family.
But I am always treated
white and thus I'm elevated
and they are not, right?
So that is part and parcel
what we're trying to analyze.
The fourth and most important thing
that we think we're doing
and what we want to do
with the art is to re-direct
concrete resources.
And this comes down to like
how things are funded, right?
So we don't, we don't do a lot of,
so we've gotten grants
but we don't get grants
that, like we got a great
language and arts grant
but we put in to make an arts shed
because we knew we weren't
going to use it as an art shed.
We're going to use it as housing, right?
So we, we, I've, whatever
we make, I pay for it.
Whatever comes in, which you know,
it's some good stuff have
come in, like, you know,
we re-direct it towards solar power.
That's us, the shed we made
and then that's a grandson of mine.
We're putting on solar power.
Or you know, getting trucks
and here we're recycling,
this is down in a community
in which we were just taking old cars
and re-functioning them.
So that we never forget
that this image practice,
this image that's trying to create,
keep us in place
so that we can keep the world
that they want to keep in place in place.
That when we do this, it really has
nothing to do with art.
It's really about each other,
the lands that are part of each other,
and with making a less uncertain world
for those whose worlds have
been uncertain and toxic
since Captain Cook arrived
in 1788, thank you.
(audience applauding)
- Do you want to sit by me?
(laughing)
Thank you, I was going to start out
with a couple little questions for you
and then we can open it up
if that works for everyone.
One of the things that I, I have to say
about reading Geontologies and knowing
a little bit about your work is that
for people who aren't here,
maybe you can talk a little bit
about how you first went
to the Northern Territories
and that, I mean, it's just a life story
that has changed as the community and the,
has changed too.
- Yeah, I had this, whoops.
I had it in the talk
but then I thought for,
I would just say it now, so
(microphone crackling)
I first went to Australia when,
right after I got a BA in philosophy.
And it was at St. John's College,
which is this ultra canonical
school, and I was in Santa Fe.
So it had incredible indigenous politics
you know, circulating.
This was 1984 so it was
before Santa Fe became,
like the art deco or art Mecca, right?
Which itself is a whole
other story to talk about.
So there were really
intense and interesting
you know, native politics going on
and Hispanic politics going on.
And this still more scrappy,
kind of alternative like the,
the whole thing was just like
this really interesting space.
And I was up on the mountain,
I was working down and living downtown
but St. John's is on the mountain.
And they had to lease their lands.
But it's like the Great Books program,
you start with the,
everybody takes the same,
reads the same books, they take the same.
You don't make, you just get assigned.
And you all go through the same thing.
You start with the Greeks
in language, in philosophy,
in science, and I forget
what, to be honest,
music or something.
And then you go to the Western
enlightenment in Europe
where you read all
their crack ass theories
of how existence works.
And then you go, all of
the junior year is like
Kant and the ramifications.
And then Hegel and then
they say history ended.
So it's really super narrow.
The irony, I must say, just as an aside
is that I could read post
colonial theory really well
because it just, if you know all that
you just could, that high
econ post colonial theory
was just all that at the time.
So but anyways, running
through St. Johns at the time
was, not MacArthur, fucking hell, shit.
(microphone whirring)
Microphone.
A Watson Fellowship.
I'm tired like you guys are tired.
A Watson Fellowship so,
and they just wanted
people to get out of the
country and I was like,
"I would like to get out."
So I had seen a, I'd seen
a bunch of contemporary
films, I mean they were like
Australian Hollywood films.
They were the tune of Jimmy Blacksmith,
who's actually the dad,
the star is the dad
of a couple members and
grandfather of a couple members
of the Karrabing Collective.
And others and I just wrote something
about going to Australia
and studying how the dispossession of land
has affected women's political relations.
I mean, I don't even know
where I came up with this to be honest.
So I went over and was kind of just,
I think there was just a little much.
I was camping on a beach
and then the woman who ran
the indigenous women's center
who was Mardred Billville, who's deceased.
Sorry about saying her name.
But she was like, she
brought some women down.
They were like, "Who are you?"
I was like, "I'm Elizabeth Povinelli
"and I'm from America
and I got this grant."
And she said, "So you
know how to get money?"
And I said, "Yeah."
She said, "Do you know
anything about childcare?"
And I was like, "Absolutely."
So anyways, so I started
working for Billville.
And then you know,
because it was absorptive
insofar as like, you know,
what kind of resources do you have
that we can get out of
you, which is a good thing.
And plus I grew up, we, my white family
grew up in the south,
though we're not from there.
The kids, my siblings and I,
it was so incredibly
violent, my household.
Being outdoors, and we were
at the edge of this forest,
being outdoors was this
incredibly, like, safe area.
So we grew up like, you know,
we knew, my sister was way into biology.
She taught us everything we could eat
or how to boil a frog in a Dixie cup,
all that kind of stuff.
And so I just was like, it was like,
and I should say, the resonances between
the way we were brow beaten
into, not brow beaten
but like, "Elizabeth, don't you forget,
"you're from Carisolo or Carisol."
I was like, "How can I
forget, I don't even know.
"I mean, what are you talking about?"
That there are five families
and it's our village
and our mountains and it's
got nothing to do with Italy.
And it's like yeah, the
emperor can do things to you
but it's like, itself
resonated so profoundly
with their way of belonging
and relating to country
through particular families,
et cetera et cetera.
So that we had, we weren't,
we didn't affectively connect
through identity or whatever
but rather through modes of
being in relation to land
and things and existence.
And we were absolutely
continually separated
by issues of race in which, unevenly so.
So you know, resources always flowing
like you know, this biggest
canal into white people, right?
And you could really see it, right?
You could love and you
could be a member of family
and still, it's going to
flow and flow and flow.
So after a year the older men and women
were like, I'd said, "I have to go back."
And they said, "You know, why don't you,
"are you going to come back,
"are you going to be like normal people?"
And they were like, get their like, yeah,
get their cultural
experience and then they go.
And I was like, "No, I would like to."
And they said, "Will you
come back and be our lawyer?"
Because in Australia under
land rights legislation,
this is a federal law, indigenous people
can't represent themselves
to claim their own land.
They have to be represented
by a lawyer and an anthropologist.
And they said, "Would you be our lawyer?"
And I was like, "God, no,
please, anything else?"
And they said, "Anthropologist,
you can do that."
And I was like, "What the hell is that?"
- [Laura] What is that?
- I don't know what that is.
And they're like, "You
don't seem totally stupid.
"Go and figure it out.
"I mean, that's white people studying us,
"that's what an anthropologist is."
I was like, "That's so fucked up."
- [Laura] Viola.
- Viola.
So but it's important because like,
I don't study my colleagues,
we study how liberalism
appears when it is appearing
as a mode of governing them,
that's what we study, that's what,
and I don't have, I've never
had a research project.
It's just like, what are we doing?
We built out stations, we,
you know, we do everything.
We're like, I don't know, we go hunting.
And then we look at,
"What the hell is this?"
Right, what are the constant disruptions
that are presented as
forms of recognition,
forms of care, all those,
we're here to care for you
and here they come again.
So as a result, I'm not,
I don't have a big drama
about the discipline.
And it provides through me, us money
to do as much as we can do
with how much money flows.
So like with the film
making, we have a rule.
This can't cost, Karrabing cannot cost
any of the indigenous members one cent.
They are poor, right?
This is a settler racism that is grinding.
So it cannot cost them one cent and more,
anything we make.
- [Laura] Goes back.
- Yeah, it's not like you
know, this is not like,
this is like let's have
Columbia who pays me,
you guys pay me, that's
great, thank you very much.
Got the check, going to Karrabing.
So it's a, it really
is a, it's a MacGuffin.
It's like a, which is fun.
But it's a way of saying like,
if we say we are together but
we are treated differently
then how do you actually practice that?
How do you practice it?
- And the Karrabing corporation
and also film collective
comes a couple decades after, or well.
- 25 years.
- After you began working there
and it seemed like reading about it,
out of a really disruptive moment--
- Yeah.
- Of de-territorialization,
among other things.
- That's right.
- Really, really rough.
- That's right.
- And I, and it's, correct me if I'm wrong
but in many ways the center
of the Karrabing corporation
is the film, is the film work?
Or how does that work?
- Well, yeah, yeah, go ahead.
- And I also want to ask you
two things about the film collective.
Like I'd love to hear more
about how that kind of operates,
whatever, but how, how
concepts about territory
and de-territorialization in
general are, like how does it--
- What was the question?
- Just, blah blah blah.
- No, so it was good, how did it form?
- Yeah, I just wondered though.
Because it seemed like it
formed a couple of decades
after you started working
there out of this like,
incredibly rough--
- Yeah, yeah, yeah.
- Practice and experience.
- Oh yeah, and was the film--
- So I'd like to hear more of that.
- No, the corporation and film.
- Yeah, like how does it work?
- We, they were, so because
of the way in which the state,
back up, back up, 1979,
the Australian state, through
a series of, you know,
indigenous struggles
like, that were barring
from the black power moment in the US
and the anti-colonial movements really,
and through a walk out of workers
at this place called Wave Hill
forced the government to,
and it was labor government,
so that means left, forced the government
to acknowledge, to legislate land rights
because the court said,
the courts wouldn't do it.
They wouldn't acknowledge
title, indigenous title.
So the government said,
"Okay, we need to do this."
And they sent around a
commissioner to interview
all the different communities
and see what they wanted.
And they went to Belyuen, which
was Delissaville at the time
because it was an internment camp first.
And everybody, all the old people said,
"We don't want to be divided
on the basis of clan.
"We want to have this
land claimed together.
"We've re-territorialized ourselves.
"You guys rounded us up, stuck us,
"we've used our own way of
re-territorializing ourselves
"to this place through this water hole
"where you'll see in the thing with,
"that generates kids and
stuff and through ceremony,
"we don't want anthropologists
dividing us up."
And initially the labor
government was going to write
a kind of more open land claim legislation
but they were sacked.
It was the first time the governor general
or whoever sacked the government
and it was related to land rights.
And then the conservatives
came in and said,
"Nope, you've got to conform
to this anthropological model
"of a clan in a site on the land."
And then it just went
into all the communities
that colonialism had de-territorialized,
communities that are
re-territorialized themselves
according to their own logics
and then it started dividing them in.
And resources were at stake.
And so it was this, they
had de-territorialized
like I said, by colony,
re-territorialized themselves
and then the politics of
liberal recognition went in
and de-territorialized them again, right?
Which led to enormous problems.
And so there's this huge, like, riot
in which one side that had been recognized
kind of decided, well, we want everything.
And this is all family,
like, we're all family.
So, so they, they were like, you know,
"You know, I come from
violence, it's violent.
"We have machetes, my family
in the Alps, please God."
Anyways, it was all bad, it was very bad.
But then they were
homeless and what do you do
when you're poor,
indigenous, and homeless?
And you have kids, you have all your kids.
They were just little kids.
So, so everybody's living
in tents by the sea
much for about 300 kilometers south.
And I would always go back and forth.
So when I was there I'd be there.
And we were coming up to,
first it was like, we
came up with an idea,
the kids were always on their phones
and we were like, "We should have tourism,
"like cultural tourism."
And then it was like, it
was just like oh my God.
Who can stand being on a boat
every day with white people
asking about your country?
People were like, "I just can't do it."
And one of the kids said,
"We should use cell phones
"and just give them a cell phone."
- [Laura] Brilliant.
- Well yeah, and so it's
going to be a GPS-based--
- [Laura] That was the first project.
- Yeah, that was the first project.
And we thought that would
get the kids focused
and they wouldn't just go
off and start doing meth.
But no, seriously, that's
what we care about.
So but they weren't interested.
- [Laura] In doing this
geo-mapping or whatever?
- Not so much, no, they really weren't.
I mean it was like, no.
Like school, no.
And then but because, because
there was this bad thing
going on with the intervention,
which was sex panic,
the ABC, which is the PBS
of Australia, let's say,
they wanted to do a little segment on us.
People had been driven out but
were still doing good things.
And then another part
of the family blocked it
and that's when Linda
came up with the idea
of, "Let's just make our
own little TV thing."
And the reason we do it,
to be honest, and keep doing it,
is because A, it's fun, B, the
younger people love doing it,
they love it, especially
the way we do it now.
And that means it itself is bait.
It's like, "Oh, look, young people bite."
- [Laura] Bait to kids.
- Bait to, well, who now are adults.
I mean, we've been
little, and so you know.
And thus, they have now
learned about their country.
- [Laura] Through this.
- Through this, as we make
it, not only are they doing
what they should be doing,
which is doing these things
that are in these things that
you're supposed to keep doing.
That you'll see that we kind
of but we don't tell you.
But they know it so now when
they go into land claims,
say, everyone was just in a
land claim the other, last week
and while we're talking to everybody,
and they stand up for their country.
And it's really powerful.
It's not a bunch of old people.
It's like young and old
standing up and saying,
"Screw that, no, you cannot take this
"because we know if you take it
"you're going to frack the shit out of it.
"So, and we know our country, we know it."
- [Laura] I have one more.
- And that's what it was for.
- I have one more question
if you guys don't mind
before I open it up.
When you're talking, I'm
so interested in the ways
in which concepts are getting made
through this practice of
collective film making.
- Right.
- Like this idea of toxic sovereignty
and you talked about another thing.
- Yeah, Karrabing is
itself a concept, right.
- Right, and new forms
of territory is a concept
that's getting made through this.
And I wonder, like, how is that practice
of this collaborative
film making in terms of
the concept work that it's
doing different than it was
when you were doing, you
know, collaborative thinking
for your writing earlier?
Like is there something
different about the logic
that is practiced that's helped,
that makes concepts differently?
- Well one of the things I love is that,
there are a couple things I love.
One, I think when you see the films
you can see that my concepts weren't mine.
- That's right.
- Which I say in all my books,
these concepts are not mine.
And one of the things we say in Karrabing,
you don't have to do what
you don't want to do.
So you know, you don't
have to write books,
you don't have to, you
know, we should all try
and test out things, like
just taste the broccoli,
see if it's good.
But one of the things I
really, so I love that.
It's like, okay, now it's
clear what I've been saying.
I'm not lying, these concepts
are coming from a particular
place and you know.
But I also love that, that it's not,
they're not, it's not my
film, it's not Jojo's film,
it's not Gigi's film,
it's not Arthur's film,
it's not Gavin's, it
really is a collective.
It's collective in the, the eye
because there are some of us
who are more likely to be shooting.
But if they're not there
somebody else has to shoot.
They're collective in the sense of
how the stories come into being.
So that, so that the concepts
that emerge from Karrabing are,
truly all of us in our difference.
- Right, right.
- You know, which I
really thoroughly love.
- Yeah.
- It's like, and I get a little like your,
I was saying earlier,
people say, "Your film,"
and I say, and I you know,
grew up in the south.
So you all is our plural.
And so I hear, me, I hear a big difference
between you, yours and y'alls
or you and you all, right?
And I'm always like, "It's not my film."
Not because I don't love it, I love,
I mean I love this one in particular.
I like this one and, anyways,
we all like different ones
most or best or whatever but,
but because it's like it's not mine.
I am not mine, right?
The whole reason that we do this financing
is because I know I'm not me, right?
And it is wrong that,
that a collective can be such a collective
and yet because I'm white,
I always win, you know?
So it's like, also that's really great.
It's like we get around
the shoot, you know,
depending, like three people
are going down to Melbourne.
Eight are going over
to Brisbane next week.
We're all going to re-meet in Europe.
So we, we, depending on who's where,
we, you know do things together
or different kind of groups
but you know, we're all really,
it's like, it's all of our stories.
So I ended up being Jack the Racist
in one of them, hopefully not
because I am Jack the Racist
but because we don't have
a lot of white people
other than me so I have
to do that shitty work.
And you know, but it's like okay,
well how do we, how do we
get all of this together
and the structures that
separate and denude
and contaminate and, yeah.
Anyways, time to show the movie, huh?
Are you guys tired yet?
What about those of us who
have been here forever?
Are we tired yet?
Yeah, any other questions?
- Well definitely the
movie will wake you up.
(audience laughing)
It's great, it's a great one.
- Are we going to, should I
talk about the movie beforehand
or after or are we just,
don't worry about it?
- Maybe just some questions.
We can, I think we could talk
about the film afterwards.
- Okay.
- People got questions.
- Okay, anybody?
- Just coming out of the talk.
I wanted to ask you about,
there's a chapter in
your book Geontologies
about fascinating, a fascinating
court case in Australia.
- Yes.
- The chapter is called Can Rocks Die?
- Yeah, two women sitting down.
- Two women sitting down.
- Yeah.
- So a manganese company, a mining company
is being brought to court
and the question is,
did this mining company
intentionally damage these rocks?
- Right.
- Which are sacred to particular
aboriginal communities.
Is it Northern Territory?
- Yeah, yeah, yeah.
- But the, the fascinating thing I found
was that the, the court
actually brings in an
anthropological report,
folds it into the case,
and is not disputing
that in fact in another belief system
these rocks have a different
ontological status.
- Yeah.
- That's not even up for dispute.
- No.
- And yet you also talk about how
from the geological point of view
of a scientist and a mining company,
those rocks also have a vitalism.
Not the same type of vitalism or ontology
but are nonetheless given a value
that, for instance, a
humanist framework would not.
- Right, well, you know, in geontology
I always say though we
have these three figures,
they're not, they're always,
they'll always be entwined.
If capitalism or capitalists or settlers
need to entwine them in a
certain way for them to win,
they will entwine them such.
And capitalism could say that,
capitalists say we're
the original animists.
We see vitalism in everything, right?
For those of you who don't know,
it was a case, two women sitting down.
It's a place in which
a bandicoot and a rat,
two women, they each had baby, a kid
and they were jealous,
one was jealous of what
the other baby looked like
and so they fought.
And the blood that was spilled
is the manganese, right?
And they're, that, they
are there, that is them,
and that is their blood.
And so sacred, there's
legislation against,
state legislation that says that
indigenous caretakers can
protect their dreaming sites
by putting a boundary around them.
And you have to put a
boundary and there's a lot of
argument about how far the boundary can go
because as, like, Rex Edmunds says, like,
my dreaming is barramundi
and it's in the water
but the water goes, I mean, right?
Or if you're, your site's
on land, the wind blows.
I mean, we saw that beautiful picture.
It's like, where is, where is it?
But you know, it's
like, under property law
you have to have a boundary.
So what this mining
corporation did was this like,
"Okay, screw you guys,
we want that manganese,"
really pure manganese.
So they went up to the
boundary and just dug down,
straight down, all around.
Incredible, horrible pictures of this,
until they, they, we
don't, the group down there
in our opinion is, they
didn't kill the bandicoot
but they definitely like fractured her.
So you can't kill them but you can,
you can hurt them and then
that hurt spreads, right?
You can't just hurt that thing
without hurting where it spreads.
So, so sacred sites under
very progressive director
who did his dissertation on mining,
the way in which mining in Australia
uses royalties to bait indigenous people
into giving over their land, right?
But however much royalties
they give out per year,
they're always accumulating so much more.
So he really, so he, like screw this.
He used the, his agency to
take the miners to court
which had never happened.
And he took them to court
under desecration law.
You desecrated a religious site.
And not only did he take them
to court for the first time,
they won, he won, right?
Now, so what happened?
Well then the government
started passing law that says,
a religious site is only something
that you go to every Sunday.
I kid you not, you go to every Sunday
and they had all these
things that was just,
religious site is Christian.
Everything else can be destroyed.
The point of the, the
point of the chapter though
is that they didn't take him
to court, nor could they,
for murder or even, what's assault?
Like bodily assault, why not?
That's what happened.
They, they assaulted
two women sitting down.
They did grievous bodily
harm to this thing.
But you can't take them to court for that
because, well, you can't murder,
well you can't grievously harm in the,
or murder a rock and that for me
reveals this governing structure.
- [Laura] Of life and non-life.
- Yeah, right?
Now it's a good story and you know,
and Ben is a friend of the collective.
He's come with us, he helps us.
He's, you know, he's great.
And he's like, "Yeah,
no, that's totally right.
"I couldn't do that."
So that's, even as extractive
capitalists saying,
"We're the real vitalists
"because we see the
potentiality in anything."
But they're also the ones that
will always draw that line
and say, "Yeah, we're animists
"but that doesn't mean you can hold us
"to account for these
other kind of ontologies."
Right, so it's always this maneuver
in which that division or separation
is being organized relative to who,
how it can help those who
already have everything.
So how do we use, and for us,
how do we use art as a MacGuffin to say,
"Okay, well how do we intervene in this
"to redirect all that energy
"in a way that it doesn't want to flow?"
Right, it really doesn't
want to flow that way.
- Yeah.
- Right, doesn't want
to empower the groups,
it doesn't want to empower
the land, doesn't, doesn't.
- Amelia, I think Jesse
has a question in the back.
If you have the microphone
just swear into it.
- Hey, can you hear me?
Thanks, I was really
interested in your genealogy
of art and anthropology.
I just wondered if you
can reflect a little,
like more on that in relation to,
because you start, your
genealogy is about art objects.
And you're doing a lot of
work around the object.
And then kind of moving away
from the idea of the object.
And then in fact your
actual material's about
the process of making art, not the object.
- [Elizabeth] Exactly.
- And the object kind of participates.
- [Elizabeth] Yeah.
- But I'm wondering if, I
was, so I was thinking about
different genealogies of that.
- [Elizabeth] I'm also
interested in how nevertheless
we keep on being captured by the object.
Right, as if the object was the thing.
- [Jesse] Right.
- It's like everything we're doing
is trying to use the object
to get away from the object,
yeah, sorry, right.
- [Jesse] Yeah, and that's where the,
so the version of convoys.
- Yep, yeah.
- [Jesse] But I'm just curious,
I'm just thinking about
several other genealogies of that.
And then I'm also just
thinking, like I think I saw
in one of your drawings genre ontology.
Or maybe I was just seeing--
- Oh no, it might have just
corrected itself into
gerontology, which it does a lot.
- [Jesse] Well, I was, (laughs)
I couldn't tell if it was geo- or--
- Elizabeth A. Povinelli's.
- [Jesse] Geol- or geon-.
- Area of gerontology. (laughs)
- [Jesse] But I was
thinking, I wanted to think
a little bit about genre.
- Yeah, yeah.
- [Jesse] Partly because I'm just.
- Yeah.
- [Jesse] I mean, I think anthropology
is always just not that good with art.
- I agree with you.
- [Jesse] Not good with people
making interesting art, as you know.
- Yeah.
- [Jesse] So I'm just thinking
about the idea of performance
and genre at the center
of that a little bit.
And the two genealogies I'm thinking about
which have a sort of longer history
of kind of moving the object,
like the Fluxus folks,
on the one hand and
then like Chinua Achebe
and the kind of genealogy of
pan-African negritude artists.
And particularly Achebe's idea of Mbari
where he's taking this ego concept
and Chinua's using it then to say,
okay, this is actually an idea of art
which is about both the kind of,
linking the world to the human
but also about ephemerality of art.
But for those guys it's also about,
I mean, sort of saying the
same thing about storytelling.
- Right.
- [Jesse] So what's
the, how does the story
and a character or something in the story
kind of create a space for
political conversations
that's also evading things?
- Yeah, totally, totally.
That's why in the beginning, although I,
or somewhere in there,
though I don't elaborate it
I say that there, that
there are this long history
of groups and it's not surprising
where this is coming from,
which is, which are using,
trying to develop an art against,
and see, I would say an
art against art, right?
In which, in which the
practice of producing
is to produce, it's as if, it's as if
another part of the art
world is only belatedly,
as per usual, coming to understand
something that if you
were in a specific place
you understood a long time ago, right?
That the practices of
storytelling, of producing,
it's exactly that the
terror of the cultic, right?
Which was always about
producing this sensation,
it kept in place modes of belonging.
That was its, that is what it is, right?
And even western art and
through aesthetic theory
and art is doing that,
it's just keeping in place a mode
of racial and western power, right?
So I think those are great examples.
And I, I think that what we're doing
is just another iteration of that.
Right, yeah, yeah.
Yeah, but can I also say just,
but you know, but what happens,
what often happens is
that we look at their work
as that thing and then all these resources
kind of came up and, where
are the resources going
and for what, for TJ's work.
Going to preserving that thing, right?
So we preserve that film,
meanwhile Nigeria is being like,
like destroyed by capitalism.
We don't take, we don't go and,
who, what would happen if the,
someone in here said it, who said it?
If we cared, oh, it was
TJ's film, it was that film.
If we cared about black people
as much as we cared about
black culture, yeah.
What if we cared about, you know,
the Agani as much as we cared about, yeah?
- [Jesse] Well I mean, that's part of why
I'm thinking about the
anthropological piece.
Because it's, because
anthropology is still obsessed
with the idea of preserving
or capturing or showing
in some kind of way.
- Yeah.
- [Jesse] And just in
the institutional spaces.
Like literally, you can't
have an installation
at the Anthropology Association meetings.
- Yeah.
- [Jesse] Like, they don't have--
- Yeah, they don't..
- [Jesse] Because just, but
that's, I mean on the one hand--
- I'm just talking about
a kind of avant-garde
side of the discipline that's
trying to do this thing.
- [Jesse] But I feel like
anthropologists have been
trying to do that like for awhile.
- They are trying, yeah.
- [Jesse] But I'm just,
I'm agreeing with you.
I'm just saying like, the ways in which
it's always encompassed as an object
is continually sort of
going on, just agreeing.
- That's what I, that's what
I'm, yeah, yeah, absolutely.
And I, and or if it's not the object
then, like let's say in this
discipline that I am a part of
that I have been called
into being, but it's,
yeah, I know.
It's also really, sometimes I'm just like,
"Oh my God, it's always
about the discipline."
It's like, seriously?
That's what this is about,
this is about the discipline?
That we're keeping in place the discipline
or trying to keep, make the
discipline into another place?
And it's art history,
it's anthropology, it's,
whatever it is, and the,
what all of us are saying
in this room that just
needs to kept on being said
is like what are the
levels of MacGuffin-ness?
What are the extensions of the MacGuffin
that we're willing to care about
and participate in redirecting stuff to?
For me, that's it, that's a whole,
you know, and depending on how your life,
my life, I commute between
the means I have like no,
you know, I have a, I have a way of living
that most people don't want.
You know, there's like, you
can't have a partner who,
you say, "Okay, I'm going again.
"Have fun in wherever you are."
Because it just, it's, or
maybe you could, I don't know.
But I, you know, I do what I do.
But it's, I'm not trying to
say you have to do it my way.
But everyone has to decide,
how far are we going to
follow that MacGuffin?
And what of the resources that,
that these structures
of class and whiteness
and global capital and all that,
which are always distributing one way,
how much are we going to really,
really try and use whatever
this practice is to redirect?
And not in like, "I'll give you my money."
Not like that, like really,
like how do we use this to,
to have that survivance kind
of be the, yep, anyways, sorry.
You had a question.
- [Attendee] I'm just interested in
if you could say a bit more
about the drawing project
that you talked about at the beginning?
- Oh, yeah.
- [Attendee] And if it has
an aspect in Australia?
- Yeah, you know, there's,
again, that was kind of in here
but I didn't know where we were
so I kind of cut that out.
In one way, there's multiple
reasons for this drawing book
and it's really, it's like,
the first section is,
here is this image.
Because we all have this, have this,
if you're a Povinelli
in my extended family,
you had this framed thing on the wall.
And it just looked like
wiggly lines and stuff.
And we, you look at it and it's like,
"What is that?"
And you know, the grandfather would say,
"That's your country."
And you're like, "I don't
see anything there."
And they say, "That's your village."
And I say, "I still don't
see anything, where is it?"
And that would start a fight, okay?
So it starts a fight.
So the, so on the one hand
we had real indexicality.
Like, I can tell you where
I'm from, generation.
My mother is the first
new blood since Hannibal.
You know, like that kind of stuff.
And the reason we went over was
the vicious wars in the Alps
during World War I, so you know,
trench warfare, they massacred
all my grandmother's side
and all the, and her brothers died.
But and they were knife grinders.
I mean, this kind of thing.
So the first part is simply like,
Here I am, we go down south.
The south in 1964 was
rabidly anti-Catholic,
it was rabidly racist, it
was rabidly everything.
And the Civil Rights Act
and the Voting Rights
Act had just been passed.
And on the one hand all around us were
these forms of oppression and
displacement and dislocation
in the US and we affectively
were being, like,
formed under a whole other
regime of displacement, right?
That, that for, and
it's trying to get out,
what is it to be a subject
under that first part?
It's like, well, my
grandmother would talk about
seeing masked men
with hoods shooting into the village.
And I would say, you know, I'd be a kid,
and I said, "I saw them, too.
"I saw them in the woods
outside of Heine's farm."
And Heine was my friend,
Heine, Tootie, anyways.
But I was talking about the KKK
and she was talking about
people in gas masks.
So the first part is like,
the second part kind of
does the grandparents.
And you get the sense that
you can't close these stories
because this topological
logic has been displaced.
It's like you cannot go back and say.
But the third part is very much check off.
It's like, if there's a
gun on the mantle place
it's got to go off in the third act.
If it was there in the first act,
got to go off in the third act.
So what's the gun here?
And the gun is, yeah, my
family was one of a history of
dislocation in a deep
sense, affective, semantic,
territorially, that had, and with violence
as, you know, part and
parcel of our substance.
But not all dislocations and violences
and all that are treated equally.
And when we got to the US, even
by the time I was in the 70s
in the south that were
rabidly anti-Catholic,
they didn't like, and like anti-science,
anti-everything, so here we were,
these northerner, like from the Alps
who were all a little too like into,
how does the universe work, right?
By the time, still very easily
absorbed into whiteness.
And if you're absorbed
into that, (lips buzzing).
So there's the axle, axis of elevation,
the axis of depression that
we saw as we went along.
And so its, its attempt to make real
these different histories
as we say they're not comparable.
It's not about comparison.
It's a pre-, for me it's
also saying to people
who may know me, they would
also understand why it is
that I have lived with my colleagues
and family in Australia for so long
and why it is that all these
resonances we have together
nevertheless are driven, they're,
running through that are structures
of settler colonialism and racism, right?
But I don't think I'm going to mention it.
You just get up to the
third and I'm still a kid.
As an installation, if I
ever did an installation
what I really want to do, because this,
it's more like a book where you,
like it's a beginning
and then you have an end.
And I can flip, flip, flip and
it's 190 pages of drawings.
I can't stand it anymore.
Would be to put it on a wall but also
to put it in relation to
things that are happening.
Like so you see how, like, though,
this devastation coming from the Alps
and going over here, it's
part of the dislocation
of those people as we come here.
And what's happening in
Australia at the same time
to my, to the great grandparents
of the Karrabing family.
So that you really see graphically
those modes of elevation, of some people
to the depression of others.
But that, that, I don't
know if that'll ever happen.
That's just in my brain.
Yeah, does that?
- [Attendee] Because it's
also my drawing instead of--
- Oh, because the idea was that the,
there's a very simple
narrative that goes through it.
It's like I was, you know,
where I grew up it was hot, la la la.
It's not expletive, it's
just like going along
and like we had these things
in our house we didn't understand.
But in the drawings, you,
I don't have to say certain
things, you see them.
So the idea of the kind
of affective register
of these montages and collages
in some ways were and are,
were always in the background.
So we had our little family
narrative, blah blah blah blah
but in the background, all
this other shit was happening
that we could see but not, we
should have, we could have,
we did see it but how these
other family stories just,
if you're in a certain kind of racial form
it can blot out these other things
until they wind themselves back.
So it's trying to get different
kinds of concept registers
into the same frame, that was the idea.
Whether it works or not I have not a clue.
Shall we watch the film?
- Yes, thank you so much.
- You're welcome.
- It was a great talk.
(audience applauding)
Do you want some water?
- Yeah.
