7 mins 15 sec
Video production: Jazz Money
Music production: Corin Ileto
Poem: Jazz Money
Commissioned by ACMI for Unfinished Camp, 2021, presented at: The Shed, New York; Art Basel, Switzerland; ACMI, Melbourne.
We have stories for all the dark spaces inbetween considers the interrelation of data networks and Indigenous ways of knowing land and relation. The title comes comes from Aboriginal astronomy, where both the darkness and light of the night sky tell stories and inform our world. The expression invites us to consider networks of care, and how all things, not just the visible, need to be known and maintained to sustain us all.
These complex data networks are reflected in the management of communities and the land for which they are relation. Embedded within these knowledges are systems of care that reveal solutions to many of the worlds most urgent problems. These ancient data systems that have been perfected over millennia give a glimpse of the ways that Indigenous knowledges globally can lead a radical rethinking of responsibility and relation centred on sovereignty, respect and interconnection.
Indigenous knowledge systems on the continent now referred to as 'Australia' have been maintained through oral histories that trace back to the time when the world began, the oldest living continuous culture in the world that has been maintained through story, song, ceremony, land and people for over 100,000 years. Yet these systems of care have been violently degraded and disrespected in the centuries since colonial invasion brought capitalism and exploitation to our shores. Decentralising from the colonial violence wrought upon the land is the only way to restore our world.