Short Abstract:

Indigenous artists, archivists and non-Indigenous academics, will discuss two interconnected Indigenous archive-making projects. The panel will explore ideas for supporting art/cultural practices and Indigenous knowledge as relational & ongoing via the production of a Living Archive. N.B. Please note that this roundtable will be filmed!

Long Abstract:

The Living Archive of Aboriginal Art and Knowledge is a project led by Aboriginal academics, artists and storytellers, revealing dynamic and interactive relationships between First Nations people from the urban south to the remote north, while recording and preserving stories about objects and artworks, people and places. The project is working with two separate, yet interconnected Living Archives: Mutti Mutti/Wemba Wemba/Boonwurrung/Yorta Yorta artist Maree Clarke's whose work, inclusive of art-making in her backyard/studio revitalises Ancestral material from museum collections; and the Ngukurr community (southeast Arnhem Land), which explores alternative approaches to accessing collections in museums/archives. The Living Archive coalesces around the community-making possibilities of intercultural knowledge exchange between Indigenous communities and collecting institutions/archives, focusing attention on decolonising collaborations for supporting Indigenous knowledge through archive-making.

A roundtable panel presentation is proposed as a multimodal forum. We aim to screen footage and photographs from recent art-making workshops, inclusive but not limited to Maree's backyard, at a high school in NSW and at a college in the USA. The panel will discuss access to Indigenous collections and facilitate discussion about Indigenous art/culture-making and two-way knowledge exchange/collaboration. We hope to record the conversation for inclusion in the Living Archive as part of the integrated art- and archive-making processes we're imagining and building.

Roundtable includes:

- Professors Kate Senior & Richard Chenhall

- Drs Sabra Thorner & Fran Edmonds

- Maree Clarke, Kerri Clarke, Mitch Mahoney, Karen Roger (artists)

- Lindy Allen, formerly Museums Victoria

N.B. Please note that this roundtable will be filmed!