by Uzma Falak for Regional Assembly

I sit by my window opening to an assembly of five old generous plane trees. Their leaves like open palms seem to say: we are here and we know. The palmate leaves, with their veins arising from a common centre, resemble the Chinar I grew up seeing. In fact, both belong to the same family but not both turn crimson. My bicycle chained to the street signpost stands under their shade. In the distance I see the Königstuhl mountain consisting of layers of coloured sandstone (Buntsandstein). Between Königstuhl and Heiligenberg mountains, the river Neckar — rising near the Black Forest — meanders through Heidelberg. Repeat after me, I am here. In other words, I am not. This is the city I have begun to call here and elsewhere simultaneously. “There are 4 ways to get from Heidelberg to Srinagar by train, plane, bus or car.” How many ways are there to arrive at a place if you are in a permanent transit? Is it possible that you reach but never arrive? What if the acts of reaching and leaving are both under siege?

Sometimes, home is an anxious tracing of topographies of violence on Google Earth—touching landscapes and neighbourhoods as if they were wounds. Sometimes, home is what you cannot call by its name [insert the forbidden word]. Sometimes, it is a punishable offence. Sometimes, an ambulance siren or the will of an immigration officer. Sometimes, home is a stammer. Or a horde of wayfaring utterances: Can’t leave. Not allowed to leave. Can’t go back. Stay away. Don’t go home. Don’t come home.

Perhaps, the definition of home depends on how you lose it.

Perhaps, home is a constant alteration of definitions. A perpetual reconfiguring.

A temporary resting place, at the intersection of the day and the night, dusk and dawn, crisscrossing seasons and time zones—Regional Assembly has been about coming to terms (or not) with these multiple valences of home and antihome. A reckoning with loss. An ache to slow down. Lugging the weight of belonging and language and its erasure. Water and its promises. Dust and its testimonies. Birthing. Rocks and their pleas. Cycads and eucalyptus. Kowhai and kawahai. Land and its abundance. Body and time. Hands and its urgent refusals. And a limitless witnessing.

*

“I am here,” visual artist Katie Breckon — born in New Zealand and working between Warrwa and Nyikina territories in the Kimberley— points on the map.

What does it mean to be ‘here’?

After an absence of more than two years, upon her arrival at the airport in New Zealand, the immigration officer looked at Katie’s passport and remarked, “welcome home”. She wonders if leaving again means not being allowed back:

“There is no guarantee to say that these borders are not going to shut again. It is a weird feeling […] like the place where you are born is somewhere that you can always return to […] I can’t imagine what it is for other people who can’t return. The feeling of being locked out and not being able to come in. This uncertainty around leaving again.”

For her, being ‘here’ meant, “looking for threads of ancestry”. Seeing the effects of colonialism in the Kimberly made her think of her own family history and reckon with the damage her family had done to “the place where they settled” (in Aotearoa, New Zealand); something she “could hold responsibility for?” Her fifth great grandfather identified an area within the Taieri which was a natural wetland and turned it into a farm:

“I remember growing up and listening to the story and thinking, how do you drain a wetland? Why would you drain a wetland? What did the local Maoris think of that? [….] What I love about the Taieri though is that it will flood […] Here are these settlers trying to control this water source and yet in some ways it is quite uncontrollable and I love that […] There is something poetic about the river claiming back.”

Perhaps, home is confronting your history.

Zoe Scoglio’s return to Australia, at the beginning of the pandemic, felt like she was “arriving for the first time”:

“[…] the first time I have lived in a regional context where there is not the same ability to be anonymous or be an anywhere person. You are very much more a somewhere person. The trauma that is visible on the surface of this land from the Gold Rush era. And these histories and ongoing extraction and violence upon the land and the First Peoples here is very much present.”

Zoe, an Australian artist of European descent living and working on the unceded lands of the Dja Dja Wurrung in Central Victoria, thinks of herself as an “uninvited guest”. And, like Katie, in some ways, is grappling with “what it is to be a settler: a non-indigenous person living on stolen lands and making work”; seeking to acknowledge her “responsibility within ongoing colonisation” and questioning “how to be an accomplice to processes of First Nations sovereignty and self-determination”.

“And look at this. This is home Country. Northeast Lutruwita. Trawlwoolway people and my mum’s people. Tebrikunna is the name of the land, the country, the place, the waters up there,” artist and writer Julie Gough remarks as we look at the screen holding images of Tebrikunna: the water, the land, the birds, the trees. Her “perpetual return” to Lutruwita, from where her ancestors were removed and exiled in the 1830s, is central to her life and practice:

“I tend to say I grew up in Melbourne in a milk bar in St Kilda. This is why I am making the kind of work that I do, it’s because I think I am in this perpetual return to Lutruwita, Tasmania. My mother, my mother’s mother…all my maternal line of my family are from Tasmania. Lutruwita. This growing up off Country, elsewhere, has created me and created this searching mode that is my way.”

Being away, is a site of readdressing belonging for community arts practitioner Lia Pa’apa’a who is from Samoa and the Luiseño nation of Southern California. “I think a big part of my practice, and just my life, really, has been about that reimagining and that permission to be a cultural person who's not living on my lands and who doesn't have their language, that permission to be strong in who I am and what I do, and to think of myself as a future ancestor,” she tells Cristian Tablazon in Conversations with the Assembly. In her essay on culturally safe spaces, Lia further traces the contours of this reimagining:

They [culturally safe spaces] are spaces where people don’t have to leave their cultures, kinships, families and ancestors at the door.[1]

For, Zoe ‘coming back’ meant coming to an impasse, as she limns in Internal (Nocturnal) Dialogues:

I am sorry I have come to an impasse and I can’t make this work. I can’t make this work. There is an obstacle in the way and I am in the dark […] I can’t make this work as I am attending to this time, to this place. On these unceded Dja Dja Wurrung lands in these times of collapse. A white settler in unsettling times. In October 2020 after 7 months of lockdown, 7 months since returning home from the other side where the night is day. Transplanted back to this Gold Rush country, where the holes still punctuate the surface. I can’t make this work. I am sleeping on the couch with my mum in the late afternoon sun. Listening to the night that’s thick with spring. It is the moment between when the clarity comes […] I’m still gestating tending to the roots to the soil in this garden I’ve inherited with the fruits of someone else’s labour […] I am learning to compost, to compose, decompose. I am learning how to let one thing end for another to begin […] And who are you listening to these words anyway? Where do you stand?[2]

Where do you stand?

Desna Whaanga-Schollum stands on water, thinking of the absurdity of passports and the lines “that somebody else has drawn”. Tracing intergenerational erasures and forging a connection with water: what used to be, what could have been, what is still possible. Having, recently, been able to buy some of her ancestral land back, she asks, “What does it mean to live on my ancestral land? How do I occupy my place?” Raised in Māhia and Wairoa on the East Coast of New Zealand, when Desna understood herself as a person of the water, she began thinking “how absurd our boundaries are, how absurd the passports are (laughs), you know these little books”:

“Somebody tells you that here is the line, this is where it goes through the sea, and this is where it goes in the land. And if you are on this side then you don’t belong to the land anymore or you don’t belong to the water anymore and unless you wave your little—blue, red or whatever colour it is—book, then you are not allowed to go over the lines that somebody else has created which may or may not have anything to do with your genealogical ties of that place, knowledge of that place, or how much you contribute to that place.”

Through genealogy, Hana Pera Aoake’s new-born daughter is connected to sixteen waterways. Their ancestors crossed several waterways to arrive in Aotearoa—“waterways that I imagine look like the veins running through my body.”[3] Based in Waikouaiti on stolen Kai Tahu, Kati Mamoe and Waitaha lands in New Zealand, Hana holds an embroidered fabric, an unfinished work, across the screen. They began working with textiles after their grandmother—who was a seamstress and taught them to sew—passed away. Pregnant with their daughter and using threads they inherited from their grandmother, they began embroidering the names of waterways and mountains, “that my daughter will belong to”.

Lia Pa’apa’a's praxis of belonging, located in the ‘everyday’, focusses on arts and cultural practices that support birthing people, their babies and families during the first 1000 days. A mother of two, herself in the first 1000 days, she explains what this practice entails:

“I tell these mums and these non-indigenous mums: this is about allyship, this is about these little babies: that they understand where they are and whose land it is, and that they walk with respect […] We want them to know where and who they are and who their own ancestors are. Connect to your own mobs, because you actually have one.”[4]

The Maori word for being pregnant is hapu. The word, according to Hana, also embodies a sense of belonging and intimate connections to a community, alive and deceased. It means “carrying the past, present and future.” No wonder Hana pushed themselves to learn Te Reo Maori (the language of the Maori) when they were hapu. Their grandparents—whose first language was Maori—were beaten at school for speaking Maori. Neither Hana nor their father ever learnt Maori at school.

“I will not speak Maori,” Tūhoe Maori activist Tame Iti—our second guest at the Regional Assembly—had to write a hundred times on the blackboard, as a punishment for speaking Maori at school. “I must have written it a thousand times, a thousand times.”[5]The language of the Maori, according to Tame, comes from the sound of the birds:

“I speak the same language as the tui, as the kiwi bird. Could the headmaster stop the bird from speaking the language too?”[6]

Most of Hana’s lineage is from Waikato which was invaded by the British. The people of Waikato, she explains, signed the Maori version of the Treaty of Waitangi which ensured them sovereignty over their lands alongside sharing resources and space with the settlers. However, translated overnight, the English translation of the treaty, as Hana points out, established that “we were ceding our sovereignty to the British Monarch. There were many land grabs after that by different settlers and the New Zealand Company.” Speaking to the farce of the treaty settlement process, Hana asserts, “It is not getting our land back because that would bankrupt the crown.”

Perhaps, home is a void sculpted, quietly but steadily, by erasure of language. Or by the violence of translations.

Hana’s baby murmurs as they read a text they brought to life at The Physics Room in Christchurch where their collaborative work focussed on dirt, body and language:

“For my seven week old child […] The baby didn’t want to leave and arrived in a sterile grey factory with twenty people in blue aprons watching […] Who can blame you though for not wanting to leave the womb? I wish I could give you the world but I was only given mud, rot and the bones of a half eaten fish. Land back but not written on earrings and sold online […] Land back as in for this tiny baby. Land back as in not just the restitution of the land, or the power to make decisions, but the water, the birds and all of our kin […] Land back as in no more mimicry [….] I wish I could give you the world but I was only given mud, rot and the bones of a half eaten fish.”

Hana’s reading summoned the story of my own birth. I was reluctant to come into the world, my mother tells me, so I was born vacuum-assisted. Who can blame me, though, for not wanting to leave the womb? I wonder if my mother—who grew up without her mother—also wanted to give me the world. But.

I am reminded of what Indigenous Chamoru poet, Craig Santos Perez wrote, in a poem dedicated to his wife in her second trimester:

“What will / our daughter / be able / to plant / in this / paradise of / fugitive dust.” [7]

“There are many dusts,” Carolyn Steedman notes. And each form is a testimony. Even though dust is an allegory of perishability, dust itself is indestructible. In other words, as she writes, “It [dust] is about circularity, the impossibility of things disappearing, or going away, or being gone.” [8]

Dust is evidence.

Mohit Shelare collects dust, measures residue and touches traces. His inquiry into dust, through body and time, comes from “the caste system and thinking about the politics of purity”. For poet Ali Cobby Eckermann, our first guest to the Assembly, dust is the connection to place: ‘See you’ I said at Murputja / and the dust from my car / as I drove away / was like a ribbon / across the desert sand / tying me to that place / forever.[9]

Perhaps, home is dust.

In a poem on the aftermath of the British government’s atomic bomb testing on the traditional lands at Maralinga in South Australia during the 1940s–60s, Ali writes:

[…] two thousand. two thousand or more

our people gone missing. did you hear it?

where’s my grandfather? you seen him?

where’s my daughter? you seen her?

Mummy! you seen my mum? Dad!

two thousand. two thousand or more

times I asked for truth. do you know where they are?

two thousand. two thousand or more

trees dead with arms to the sky. all the birds missing. no birdsong here

just stillness. like a funeral. two thousand or more

a whisper arrives. did you hear it?

two thousand. two thousand or more

it sounds like glass. our hearts breaking. but we are stronger than that

we always rise us mob. two thousand. two thousand or more

you can’t break us. we not glass. we are people!

two thousand. two thousand or more […][10]

A Yankunytjatjara/Kokatha poet and a Stolen Generations survivor, Ali grew up with an adoptive family and met her biological mother only when she was 34 years old. Her mother had also been taken from her mother. Ali met her own son four years after she met her biological mother. Like Ali, Karen Mills too is a Stolen Generations survivor. A descendant of the Balanggarra People of the Oombulgurri and Forrest River Aboriginal reserves, in the East Kimberley, she paints abstract landscapes from memory and limns layers “hidden beneath the ground”— exploring her connection to place as well as the displacement. This complexity, in some sense, is evident in her process as well:

“There is always a struggle and a difficult patch within the process of the painting because I might love a particular area but to resolve the whole work I have to be prepared to erase it and that is a big struggle at times.”[11]

She thinks of landscapes she walks as survivors and her work too reflects the powerful aesthetic of survival:

“Cycads, I just think they are beautiful. They are an ancient plant that survived for millions of years I think, since before the dinosaurs. I think they represent the resilience that First Peoples have. Even after fire and the blackened landscape, their beautiful flushing green leaves of the cycads regenerating and keep going. I think part of the message of survival is in my artwork as myself as a survivor.”[12]

For Julie Gough, our last guest at the assembly, landscapes are evidences of settler colonial violence. Her training as an archaeologist and experience as a librarian aids her working as a detective. She treats everything as a “crime scene…colonial Australia especially” and is committed to find the gaps and uncover “miscarriages of justice”. Her work, Missing or Dead—a memorial to more than 180 Tasmanian Aboriginal children stolen, lost or dead in the early decades of colonialism—consists of missing posters affixed to trees. Her video work, Witness, explores 35 eucalyptus trees as witnesses of violence:

“They are living beings in Tasmania witnesses to what’s happened here…whenever I walk or drive Lutruwita, I see big trees, dead trees or living trees […] They seem to look across the land and they have absorbed what’s happened here and even around them the younger trees are still growing up out of that earth […] the trees seem to be overlooked in what they hold.”[13]

Resonant with Karen and Julie’s thinking, in Notes on Assembling, Tristen Harwood writes about the endless repetition of plantation pine, as sites of violence, in Perth’s outer suburbs:

“I heard things about the pine forest, it was where nasty things happened. It was here where I felt infrastructural violence more than anywhere else.”[14]

Perhaps, home is a perpetual haunting.

Perhaps, a ceaseless witnessing.

Like Julie, Amar Kanwar surveys a crime scene, finding gaps and looking for alternate forms of evidence. Our third guest at the Assembly, he urged us to rethink what witnessing entails and reimagine the evidence and the archive. Driven by this urge to reimagine and in order to come to terms with a sense of inadequacy, his work often morphs into several iterations. For instance, The Sovereign Forest, brings home the bare truth of what extraction, by the government and corporations, means in Odisha; the landscapes it has scarred, the communities it has displaced, all in the name of ‘progress’ and ‘development’. Central to this work—emerging into a dense forest of evidence, sovereign—is Amar’s filmic work, The Scene of Crime. Recording landscapes in the process of corporate acquisition (read annexation), it is “an experience of a landscape just prior to erasure”[15]. The Sovereign Forest also contains other forms of evidence: eighty photographs, three handmade books, 272 varieties of rice seeds, and ‘accumulated evidence’ in the form of personal contributions from people within Odisha.

In Hungry Listening, Dylan Robinson, interrogates the settler epistemic violence that has rendered “silent the epistemic foundations of Indigenous song as history, law, and medicine.” Delineating the Indigenous ontologies of song, he discusses the land claim trial of Delgamuukw versus The Queen in which the Gitxsan and Wet’suwet’en peoples sought jurisdiction over their territories in northern British Columbia in Canada. During the court proceedings, he notes, the inclusion of an Indigenous dirge song conceived by the community as a primary historical document and legal order was not acknowledged “let alone as the equivalent documentation of law as upheld by the Gitxsan people.”[16] Echoing Dylan, Amar seeks to displace the conception of poetry as a mere aesthetic object and rethink the evidence. He asks, “can the murder be recalled as a ballad and the ballad then become an argument?”[17] In other words, his own, he urges us to consider “poetry as evidence in a trial”[18]

But what if the evidence is weaponised to displace and dispossess people?

Mohit Shelare stands on an unspecified street in Amravati (Maharashtra), hands up, holding a sketch book, against the sky. A face, confined by the limits of the page, stares at us. The book’s spine cuts through the face. The text reads in bold:

NO ADDRESS NO BIRTHDATE NO FIXED WAGE I HAVE A MEMORY I BELONG HERE ON THIS LAND I DON’T KNOW HOW TO CONVERT MEMORY INTO A DOCUMENT.

The video work, called Hands Up, shows Mohit standing at several public spaces—each location revealing a new leaf from his sketch book. The sound of birds, traffic, dogs reinforce as well as complicate the silence of the still sketches. The book, meant for everyday notes, sketching ideas and to-do lists now holds sketches of media images from India circulated on the internet in 2020: Muslim women standing together, raised fists, rejecting state’s monopoly on belonging during the Shaheen Bagh protest against the Citizenship (Amendment) Act (CAA) and National Register of Citizens (NRC); migrant workers in Delhi wanting to return to their villages, carrying their belongings on their shoulders; remnants of burnt homes and belongings at the site of the anti-Muslim violence in Jahangirpuri. Seeking to shorten “the distance between the screens and bodies”, Mohit drew these images materialising them into colours and textures.[19]

Sometimes, the only way to convert memory into a document is through your body, by putting your body on the line.

Alana Hunt, our facilitator at the Assembly, speaks to Mohit’s engagement with the body through his drawing practice:
“And I keep thinking of the link to the body—drawing as a bodily act too. Seeing coming through hands. And the body as the subject through which he was “trained” to draw at art school.”

Perhaps, home is the shape of your hands.

For Elisa Jane Carmichael, a Quandamooka woman, hands are the conduits of resistance. She articulates her connection to Country through weaving:

“Weaving is something that my hands have always known how to do. Within the works that I weave I’m using the same materials that our ancestors wove with and also the same techniques.”[20]

Through her practice and collaboration, she is invested in “waking up” the weaving practice, bringing it to life, ending years of sleep induced by colonisation. In one of the poems accompanying a body of her work, she writes:


We see your hands weave with us

We see your hands guiding us to bring our weaving alive

So it’s no longer sleeping from colonisation

From the past into the future

Will we see your footprints under ours yesterday and tomorrow?

We see you walk beside us

We see you carrying Country

We see your hands gathering across the sands
[…]

We are the people of the sand and sea Yoolooburrabee

We see you…

We weave with you…[21]

“I wrote it reflecting on home, dreaming about being back on Country on Minjerribah. Walking through the landscape in the footsteps of our ancestors, weaving with our precious reeds with Mum, connecting with our ancestors’ hands and watching the spirit of Country dance through the salt-water waves. My practice is inspired by the abundance of Country,” she explains in an interview.[22]

At the assembly, Justy Phillips and Margaret Woodward draw our attention to abundance through absences. A discarded rock board with forty of its fifty Tasmanian rock specimens missing found by them, brought to world the Lost Rocks—a library of more than forty books—seeking to “recompose the absence” of these missing rocks through experimental writing. Collaborating together as The Published Event which explores the possibilities of slow publishing, their libraries “of stone and wood”, urge us to listen to rocks and feel humbled.

From Zoe Scoglio’s centring exercise:

“It is a moment to notice your feet on the ground, the touch of your feet on the ground and how the ground is supporting your feet […] Acknowledge what land you are on and the history and the knowledge of the land beneath your feet[…]”

Some remnants of a storm linger on my windowsill. I see leaves from the plane trees—perhaps too early this year—scattering, falling to the ground, scattered. An antonym of the verb assemble is disperse. Dispersing means to distribute, or spread over, to scatter and diffuse—like dust or home. In response to Justy Phillips’ and Margaret Woodward’s prompt, Where are you trying from? (A question first posed by the dance artist Wendy Morrow), the Assembly responded, quietly tracing the shapes of ‘where’, ‘from’, ‘?’ along their lacerating edges and listening to the cadences of labour. I leave you with these ‘scattered’ fragments, which I think of as a collective polyphonic poem,

because, one day if you do reach home, you must learn to pass the mic

*

13:40:40 - 13:55:08

Where are you trying from?

From Justy Phillips to Everyone

Where is a body with no outline. Organs open to the elements. I’m trying to hold it all back and carry it forward. I’m trying from a place of love. The artist Ross Gibson taught me this. There’s no point in doing anything if it’s not from a place of love. I like that. And I think I get it.

From Alana Hunt to Everyone

Sometimes I am trying from a wedge, like a crevice, or a valley I feel the pressures of. Sometimes an encounter, usually not too beautiful, usually difficult or violent, but hoping for or moving towards something beautiful, and kinder. There is also, a sense of trying as a means of survival. Often I wonder, when my work feels too dark, what would it feel like to start from a place of beauty or joy?

From Lia Pa'apa'a to Everyone
I am trying from the space of motherhood—in its ever changing landscape of
developmental needs, triggers, mundane housework to heart open and full spaces. I
am trying to be present with myself and my boys while considering my seven
generations of ancestors and descendants. I am trying from sleepless nights of
breastfeeding, thanking my body for all that it has done for my family while also
feeling more exhausted and sore than I ever have.

From Justy Phillips to Everyone
I’m trying from a pool of limited time. And trying to work out each day, each hour,
what is important, what is valuable, what is worth the energy.

From Hana Pera to Everyone

In between a sleeping child and hands wringing dirty nappies

From Margaret Woodward to Everyone

Trying from a place of understanding how to live on this land that is not that of my
ancestors, and trying to make sense of the ruptures that brought them here and how
I feel the reverberations of this rupture

From Desna Whaanga-Schollum to Everyone

Trying from a desire to slow down, to change the sense of temporality, to relate
more genuinely, to listen more deeply to place and to people. To connect via our
essences, to understand that places make us.

From Justy Phillips to Everyone
Trying to feel what it really means to slow down, and how it is to remove the
distractions.

From Desna Whaanga-Schollum to Everyone

To connect to our ancestral lines and remove ourselves from the trap of urgency and
chronic short-termism, that is so pushy and consuming

From Margaret Woodward to Everyone

To slow down, and be attentive while wondering ‘how much time have we got?’

From Tristen Harwood to Everyone
I’m trying from a place, a space more so, of recoverance (obsolete) without recovery,
searching without the object of finding

From Justy Phillips to Everyone

Can you sense anything of the edges of this place of your trying? Do you have a sense
of its porousness? Its ways of leaking?

From Cristian Tablazon to Everyone

I am trying from a position of stuttering and uncertainty, and the hope of recasting
these gaps and intervals as potent and productive sites of possibility and
recuperation

From Mohit Shelare to Everyone
The ‘where’ is always in the complex for me and not able to define itself, it changes
and disagrees with its own time presence. The ‘where’ becomes displacement of
trying

From Katie Breckon to Everyone

I am not a writer. I trip over words. Visual language is perhaps the only way I can
effectively communicate with others. Like most transformations, the cathartic
process of filtering experiences into an expressive, sharable form can be full of
tension.

Justy Phillips to Everyone

Sometimes I wish there were more edges. A more solid way of saying this is this and
that is that.

From Margaret Woodward to Everyone
I often think the edges will declare themselves, then I realise that I am already
centred in the thing I am trying for

From Karen Mills to Everyone
I am trying from a place of uncertainty, then when I look deeply at how paint settles
on the surface and becomes part of the canvas I feel the beauty and mystery, it calms
my mind

From Uzma Falak to Everyone
trying from a (non) place of impermanence / trying from a (non) place of pleading
with time to stop, move slowly / trying from a (non) place of finding my way back
home (but where is home?) trying from a (non) place of mourning for everything
I haven’t lost. Anticipatory grief? Pre-mourning?

From Elisa Carmichael to Everyone

I’m trying from a grounded place of care and respect to be gentle with myself, the
work I make and share. I am trying to take my time and move slowly so I can really
connect and feel through ways of being and living. I am trying to keep my space
clear so I don’t get distracted. I am trying to be mindful of others and focus on what’s
important.

From Zoe Scoglio to Everyone
Right now I’m trying from a place of exhaustion. My own exhaustion, the exhaustion
I witness in the lives of others, the exhaustion upon these damaged lands, the
exhaustion these colonial, capitalist, patriarchal, imperial systems have inflicted
upon the planet’s lifeworlds. I’m trying from a place of resistance—to resist the
deeply ingrained habituations to be busy, productive, to keep up with the flow
capitalist relations and value. I’m trying from a place that is deeply desiring a space
to be held—within myself, with others, and with spacetime—to rest and let go. To
feel safe enough to deeply reflect upon our differentiated complicity within shadowy
power relations, to tend to the rifts, to open to change.


Where are you trying from?

----

Featured Image: Word frequency analysis using a word cloud generator ©Uzma Falak

[1] Lia Pa'apa'a in conversation with Cristian Tablazon, Conversations with the Assembly (Regional Assembly)

[2] Zoe Scoglio in conversation with Cristian Tablazon, Conversations with the Assembly (Regional Assembly)

[3] Hana Pera Aoake, “To be Birthed in Water”, Wasafiri, July 13, 2021,

https://www.wasafiri.org/artic...

[4] Lia Pa'apa'a in conversation with Cristian Tablazon, Conversations with the Assembly( Regional Assembly),

https://regionalarts.com.au/pr...

[5] Tame Iti, “Mana: The power in knowing who you are”, TEDxAuckland (Youtube), June 17, 2015,

[6] Ibid.

[7] Craig Santos Perez, “From “understory”,” Poetry Magazine, July/August 2016,
https://www.poetryfoundation.o...

[8] Carolyn Steedman, Dust (Manchester University Press, 2001).

[9] Ali Cobby Eckermann, “Ribbons”, Poetry International, 2009,

https://www.poetryinternationa...

[10] Ali Cobby Eckermann, “Thunder raining poison”, Poetry Magazine, May 2016,

https://www.poetryfoundation.o...

[11] “Some day we will walk together [on Country]”, The Art Gallery of South Australia, https://www.agsa.sa.gov.au/wha...

[12] Ibid.

[13] “Gum trees as witnesses of centuries of life around them”, Australian Broadcasting Corporation, 30 Jul 2021,

https://www.abc.net.au/hobart/...

[14] Tristen Hardwood, “Each one carries its origins into its designated future. One produces dirt, one water”, Notes on Assembling (Regional Assembly),

[15] “Amar Kanwar: The Sovereign Forest”, e-flux,
https://www.e-flux.com/announc...

[16] Dylan Robinson, Hungry Listening: Resonant Theory for Indigenous Sound Studies (University of Minnesota Press, 2020)

[17] Niranjan Kunwar, “Bearing witness”, The Kathmandu Post, September 2, 2022,
https://kathmandupost.com/misc...

[18] “Amar Kanwar: The Sovereign Forest”, e-flux,
https://www.e-flux.com/announc...

[19] Mohit Shelare, “Action No. – 24: Hands Up”, www.mohitshelare.com,
https://www.mohitshelare.com/i...

[20] “Weaving with Elisa Jane Carmichael”, ABC Indigenous (Facebook),
https://m.facebook.com/story.p...

[21] Elisa Jane Carmichael, “Ngayigany, Ngayiganya, Ngayigawa (Saw, seeing, will see)”, Onespace, https://onespacegallery.com.au...

[22] “Q&A with Quandamooka artist Leecee Carmichael”, Seljak Brand, July 2, 2020,
https://www.seljakbrand.com.au...