This one has been hard to write. Deleted it about ten times already. But that’s part of this whole thing isn't it? Asking whole earth questions and being confronted with the not knowing, stumbling around those places of censorship and avoidances that take us to the edges of thought, to see our limits of understanding. Knowing there are parts here that need to be hidden from me, the parts I can't know yet or ever and be ok with that.
There’s a definite weight to navigating the processes and boundaries around these relational places of trading, especially when you’re moving through spaces where the longest continuing ways of knowing have been disrupted, devalued and sterilised and then spun out as inheritance and gain for others in massively abstracted and often painful ways. But here I am, ready to help share the weight as best I can and find pathways to help guide others through some of the learnings within Indigenous knowledge that are here for sharing. I know one of the things we need to do now is help each other find ways home to these rich knowledge landscapes where our non human kin design for us and with us.
So to stop the deleting spirals and move this energy out of me, I've made a decision!
Sometimes I’ll write in research-mode, tracking these patterns, translating images into processes and being disciplined. Other times, I need to write like this, loose, open, letting the flow move where it needs to move and allowing the art to hold that energy with me, with us, sitting here together in a kind of dialogue, sense making space.
Sitting at the edge of what we understand, crossing the boundaries of knowing and unknowing, navigating my responsibilities to share back while keeping my own health intact.
I’ve been thinking about imagination as philosophy, as processes, as a force multiplier for solving big, whole world problems that so many of us hold with complete disregard.
Embassy flows in action also keep finding their way back to the front of my mind, looking again at the boundaries, the fresh erosions, the old composting heap of knowledge that requires tending and turning, the permissions to share knowledge, the gifts that hold old stories that take you back into deep time. I've been thinking about the shaping of the health of whole systems, about finding the limits of those relations and responsibilities and the deeper I go into reorganising and re-patterning my own ways of making art and making sense, the more I feel the pull of the complexity, the dizzying design of systems so vast they dissolve the mind if you hold them too tightly and think you can hold them all and isolated.
These questions have been burning through me lately and generating a slow internal scream, growing the quiet rage that comes from seeing the cycle repeat and repeat and repeat and feeling helpless to stop it.
So into the books we go!
I've been art-ing from and for my heart, looking at these design problems, the ones that keep getting run through transactional cycles until they disappear into a spreadsheet, existing only as imaginary numbers that someone somewhere can sign into infinity.
The kind of problems that trick people into thinking they can be solved without ceremony, without relational intelligence, without the gravity of Indigenous knowledge.
I see the traps, the gaps designed to be there, the flow of power being funnelled into the same old places under different names.
Take Closing the Gap policy in Australia - started in 2008 as a framework, that ever-renewing, ever-funded mission to solve Aboriginal issues. What’s the dollar amount funded here across time? Who’s actually closing what? Every youth detention center in Australia sits at 90-98% Indigenous children. That’s not a gap, it’s an entire industry. An infrastructure built on the back of an inheritance no one wants to map. But tell me where the problem originated. Show me that network of extraction, policy, research, misinterpretation, and the laws that make it all so neat and official but in reality is a landscape of failure.
And that’s just one area of one of the seven targets identified in Closing the Gap, you also have...
Wellbeing
Education
Employment
Justice
Safety
Housing
Land and Waters
Languages and
Digital inclusion
Fuck, I’m dizzy just thinking about this and all the places the transactions take place.
Within all of these mega structures of design, these whole earth questions I’m wondering…
Where is the ceremony? Where is the knowledge from non-human designers who help upkeep the health of these systems too, the health of land? The health of the waters? How do you even define and measure that?
One of the most valuable thing I'm personaly finding within Indigenous knowledge landscapes is being able to have access to different ways of learning and unlearning and relearning in spaces of deep relation. I keep coming back to so many different moment but one most recent one is during a sunrise ceremony at Sea the Weed in Sydney recently.
Uncle Dean Kelly was here today, Yiun, Walbunja, Dhurga, Gurung, Wailwin, Nypampi, man. This the first time I've met him, he led a group of us from the back up to a cliff face. We walked in silence for about 10 mins, timing it just right so we'd meet the sunrise. We stood in three lines, listening to Uncles stories of being in right relation, cautionary lessons of taking too much and forgetting your place in the systems, the words below hitting me the hardest, moving through his knowledge bank into us, and I feel it... boom, boom, boom in my brain and through my body.
“If that sun don’t come up for you, then you’re not here. This is about waking up the right way.”
Something fused in my understanding spheres when I heard that. A pattern locking into place. It linked back to something I was told in Uganda almost a year ago now... from a new Nipmuc relation and their connection to the sunrise ceremony and how "for a long time that sun didn’t want to rise for us, now we welcome it every morning and send it over the land"
Wow... Mad yarns.
Uganda stories coming soon, I promise!
The gravity of that truth about grandfather sun, patterns across continents, across time, across language, but still arriving here like magic.
Ultimately, I think this is about governance. Not the governance of humans over humans, but the governance of place, of relational law's and universal truths and rules on who can connect to who and for what? Its all embassy right? Of mainataining and facilitating the movement of flows between spaces that allow intelligence to move beyond the white knuckle, death grip of individuals.
I know I'm governed by a platypus, by the sun. When the platypus is in the water, the water is healthy. When the sun rises, everything turns to it. That is a governance I trust.
But then I think how do we sever from self serving governance systems deigned by humans in isolation? How do we compost these calcified ideas it into something that moves like water, creating and destroying as she goes bringing more diversity, more life? Maybe that’s the question this mini scrapbook tour is really asking?
How do we sever from this system we are so entangled in?
How do we design with death?
And who gets to decide what dies and what needs to stay?
Maybe grandfather sun could show us... teach us? He is giving, taking and governing all life on this place we call home every moment of every day...
I'm grateful for that.
Here is some more art, something else I'm grateful for.
Thanks for diving into the imagaintion bath with me!!
See you soon x
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