Paper short abstract:

The Living Archive of Aboriginal Art radically reimagines what archives are and do, from Indigenous perspectives. In our work, photographs-as-documentary-practice and photographs-as-high-art are inextricable from each other and integral to Indigenous sovereignty in Australia’s southeast.

Paper long abstract:

In spring 2022, we co-led an experimental course and artists’ residency at a small liberal arts college in the United States called “Decolonizing Museums.” The major outcomes were a possum-skin cloak (the first of its kind made in the U.S.) and a series of high-art photographs of project participants wearing the cloak. This project is part of an ongoing, multi-year initiative to imagine and forge a Living Archive of Aboriginal Art, based in Australia. Our objective: to radically reimagine what archives are and what they do, from the perspective of Indigenous ways of knowing, being, and doing.

In a collaborative paper, we use this example to make an argument that photography-as-documentary practice (artists reflexively take photographs to document every aspect of their work) and photography-as-high-art-practice (a way of insisting on Indigenous forms of knowledge-transmission and aesthetic expression) are inextricable from each other. These understandings of photography are also inextricable from cloak-making: all of the making is all part of the story. The making IS the story.

As we build the Living Archive, we’ve come to understand photographs as an invitation to be in-relation, and an urging – to all who may see them – to join in the work of amplifying Indigenous sovereignty. We emphasize matriarchal knowledge-transmission – women are leading efforts to reclaim autonomy over bodies and lands – and intercultural collaboration as a source of innovation in contemporary culture-making. Photography is simultaneously a method and a theoretical intervention, and photographs are storytelling, performance, and exchange.