Recently, I attended a very unique opportunity: a 4-part virtual Geography, Art and Memory Workshop co-convened by Griffith’s Centre for Social and Cultural Research Dr Laura Rodriguez Castro, Dr Diti Bhattacharya, Dr Kaya Barry and Prof. Barabra Pini.
As a New Materialisms community bike researcher working in Sierra Leone, my work is embedded with post(de)coloniality, cultural dynamics, current-past experiences, gender, geography, mobility and space-time-matterings.
So I was excited about this workshop! Right up my (v)alley! (Get it? Geo joke!)
This workshop invited us to examine and experiment with the cultural and political potentials of ‘memory through art’ in geography inquiry. We looked at creative practices, collaborated and had discussions on some key and pressing issues related to our specific research. There was also the added bonus of an invitation to contribute to a Special Issue of Australian Geographer (2022).
In this session we asked:
What does art do to geographies of memories?
A workshop in 4 parts
The workshop was structured in four parts:
Part 1 – 1st February 2021 by 5:00pm: In the week leading up to the event, workshop participants submitted a 1 page (A4 portrait or landscape) response to the question: ‘What does art do to geographies of memory?’ The response could be written, creative, drawn, mapped, photos, collage, text, prose, or more. We will share these on our website, and will form a key discussion point for the interactive workshop event.
Part 2 – 4th February 2021, 3:00pm-5:00pm: We attended the keynote presentations by Libby Harward (Australia) and Virgelina Chara (Columbia). These two artists (see below) work with the current pressing issues of geographical research, treating them as a threshold point for their own creative responses and provocations that they may choose to share during parts 3 and 4. We focused on artistic interventions from Southern epistemologies as these continue to be underrepresented in Australian geography.
Part 3 – 5th February 2021, 9.30am – 12:30pm: Each participant gave an informal 5-minute talk about their creative response which they submitted prior to the workshop. (See my submission is at the end of this post).
Part 4 (optional) – 5th February 2021, 12:30pm – 1:30pm: In the final hour, we collectively discussed how to take these ideas and discussions forward as a Special Issue of Australian Geographer integrating some of the workshop themes.
Keynote speakers
Virgelina Chara
Virgelina Chará is a human rights defender, educator, embroidery artist and protest music composer from Colombia. She coordinates the ‘Association for the Integral Development of Women, Youth and Children’ (ASOMUJER y Trabajo) which works with forcibly displaced families and victims of the armed violence in Colombia. She is also the leader of the Embroidery Union at the Memory Centre for Peace and Reconciliation in Bogotá, Colombia. She is a world-renowned educator on the pedagogy and power of memory for the construction of peace.
She was born in Suárez, Cauca, which is a region where armed conflict, extractivism and neoliberal development have meant many people, including Virgelina and her family, have had to confront violence and displacement. Since 2003 Virgelina has resided in Bogotá. In 2005 she was proposed as a nominee for the Nobel Peace Prize.
You can read more on Virgelina’s work here (left click to Google Translate to English).
Libby Harward
Artist Libby Harward is a descendant of the the Ngugi people of Mulgumpin (Morton Island) in the Quandamooka (Morton Bay Area).
Known for her early work as an urban graffiti artist under the pseudonym of ‘Mz Murricod’, and her performance-based community activism, Harward’s recent series, ALREADY OCCUPIED, engages a continual process of re-calling – re-hearing – re-mapping – re-contextualising – de-colonising and re-instating on country that which colonisation has denied Australia’s First Peoples.
This political practice engages Traditional Custodians in the evolution of ephemeral installations on mainland country which has become highly urbanised and calls for an artistic response that seeks to uncover and reinstate the cultural significance of place, which always was, and remains to be there. Her current place-based sound and video work engages directly with politically charged ideas of national and international significance.
You can find on Libby’s work here and read more on her project DABILBUNG here.
Workshop foucs
During this workshop we discussed themes of memory, art, and geographical knowledge in order to motivate a creative dialogue among geographers, artists, and activists.
We talked about the key question and looked at how to move beyond methodological debates and how to use art mediums as approaches to bring to light the affective and political forces of place speaking to timely and important issues such as colonialism, climate change, migration and peace and conflict.
There was a strong focus on Indigenous and Southern epistemologies and discussions on how to decolonize feminist research involved with geography, power, labour, art, and memory.
Workshop convergences, notes, artifacts and ideas
I was heavily invested in the discussions, which were provocative, rich and challenging. Out of respect for the content and participants present, I have chosen to deliberately deviate from the traditional blog ‘reportage’ style of summarising the workshop. Instead, I am using a non-linear, fragmented, messy, (in)process(un)complete, more New Materialist approach to ‘throw up’ a few random snippets, thoughts and connections I noted during these sessions. The below content is a deliberate post-human shift from presenting content as if it is ‘right’, ‘accurate’ or ‘makes sense’ to humans-participants-knowers. While some content may make sense – some may not. There are no mistakes or errors in these notes. So for the below notes, you dear reader, are implicated in the reiteration and (re)co-creation of the workshop ‘matters’ ….. here we go!
This story is ‘sew’ important …memory, history and life for so many, but new information for others (like me) elsewhere..truthtelling, invasion, pollution, academic violence and extractivism…The ‘Justice ‘ dept, The Memory Centre, the Power of Memory, parent-teacher-adult time with student-children-learner, ‘education is so square now’, pedagogy of memory, to the teachers: ‘do you realise you are the useless ones here?’… we don’t do it through writing, we do it through sewing and food, they have had massacres in every country, ‘ (Duque) he’ is just the model..creative outputs that help us think about these issues…
Some participants linked Virgelina‘s keynote to other textile protests, work and exhibitions, such as:
- Haute Culture Fashion: The Vietnamese Women’s Museum (Hanoi).
- Royal Ontario Museum: The cloth that changed the world (Canada)
Libby shares with us her visionary bloodletting, deadstream and saltwater reflections. Flow. Sand Crunch. Lying in grass. Forms and textures. Listen (more) carefully. Birds-eye views. Film as experiential documentation. Art that moves and breathes. Unexpected. Tasmanian salvaged timber. Art(work)s. lying – lying. Post-colonisation – Decolonisation.
Mike is a chairmaker and researcher. Listening to Mike makes me think about how the ideological state apparatus presents a ‘version of collective memory-truth’ (ie statues & iconoclasts) – that is literally set in concrete (or other material) and associated forms of patriarchal, colonistic (tee-hee..get it?! not now, stay focus(ed), be serious!), political issues that go along with that kind of art …and that the artist is rarely? clearly? identified or acknowledged….after all it is their output/work/….
Mike shares this…… Mae’s Lullaby.
Amelia shares that…………..A millennia of seepage.
A Janet Cardiff work in Sydney…..the city of forking paths.
Eva links to Bangala’s most recent site-specific commission, but there is also The Distance From Your Heart.
The importance of having smaller groups and being able to share our ideas as opposed to the large groups and conferences.
I share Janis Hanley’s blog Local Yarns which looks at critical heritage and textiles in Qld..memory artifacts.
Started with a basket that reps KP and her thinking of the time – enfolding life.
Katie is inspired by John Wolseley – an artist who moves through the ecology to make art.
BI re(views) the memory artifacts produced: Proserpine Ambulance Depot (1990), Proserpine Hospital Outpatients Department (1939-1999), Proserpine RSL Club (1950-1990), and the Eldorado Picture Theatre (1927-1985).
Janis literary maps and remaps the Queensland Wollen Manufacturing Company floorplan(s) with mill(field)work, mill(i)visits, millscapes and milieus. Overlaying Coral’s draft interpretations of Mud Maps. Ron’s List across the ages – staff payroll (50?) years on.
Embodiment -moving through time-space-places
Public art
Art, bike, memory and geography
Institualization of memory – academic violences – uni mapping vs uni tracing
Watch the film: Painting country
Mapping the way? Maps, Emotions, Gender by Mike Esbester ……… WTF!!! THIS WAS ME IN DEC! The link! TConvergence with my thought-bridge(s) as I navigate-share-move with my own Bikes, Maps and Emotions! Woah! That’s a little spooky! I knew this session had cross-overs!
Daphne Backer (Suriname) architectural Twitter conversation
Centraling forms of memory – institutionalizing memory (through art)
It is the official institutions that get the money/funding – not the collectives
Didactic vs dialectic institutional
By the end, I am tired and about to implode.
I might have lost it in the final 5 mins.
Some Emerging Themes:
- Contaminated materials and lives + (de)contamination and the materiality of life
- Decolonising memory
- More-than-human memory (not-human and not-human time scale)
- Extractivism and memory
Parts of this post taken from the Memory Through Art homepage.