The encounter of culture: a shared space or out of place? (Dismantling the self in Central Australia)

© 2008 Dr. Chris BarryAccompanying DVD available in Special Collections copy, Baillieu LibraryThis doctoral project combines both written thesis and creative work—a suite of 60 large-scale photographic works entitled Encountering Culture: A Dialogue—which contextualises my on-going and sustained relationship amongst a specific group of Aboriginal families living in Alice Springs. My relationship with those families began in 1999 and has continued into the present. Encountering Culture: A Dialogue was first exhibited at The Victorian College of the Arts, Margaret Lawrence Galleries, Melbourne, in May 2006, and at The Araluen Galleries, The Araluen Arts and Entertainment Centre, Alice Springs, in November 2006. This exhibition/installation is the creative component of my doctoral work. This project draws together three main areas of research activity: a reflexive (critical) ethnographic practice, an Aboriginal pedagogy, and the creation of art. Effectually this becomes an examination of my own artistic practice; the theoretical and pedagogical frameworks that define this practice; and the conceptualisation of the analysis and representations. It charts the methodology required for an artist to step into an "unknowable" culture and produce a body of work out of the "experience". Hence, I argue, the history of ethnographic practices, and, in particular, the post 1970s re-evaluation of the discipline, is central to this project. This discourse analyses the constructed nature of identity; the structural ordering of speaking positions (enunciation); and the inter-relationship between knowledge production and power structures—all of which are filtered through an Aboriginal social code. Therefore the examination of subjectivity and representation exists within an inter-subjective and co-dependent framework, incorporating both a collaborative and conflicting arrangement between both parties. By positioning the "artist as ethnographer" I am able to draw together the central tenets of inter-cultural engagement: the acknowledgement of all subjectivities; a blending of (post)structural analysis and postcolonial discourse; the prioritising of an Aboriginal cultural schema; and the political and ethical dilemmas of cultural production. This analysis is then translated into local terms—the everyday (lived) life of Alice Springs—and articulated through an Aboriginal enunciation: verbally, through a series of informally recorded conversations, and, visually, through a suite of 60 photographic images. My methodology for translating the experience of "being there" into an appropriate representational form, albeit text or image, is achieved through "a politics of the performative", the re-enactment and re-presentation of subject identities within our culturally imbricated (and agonistic) relations the "dramaturgy" of inter-cultural and inter-subjective encounter. Performance, then, mediates the politics of identity and enables an assertive Aboriginal presencing to occur whereby a constructed and mediated environment is established for the recording and performing of selves. Performance, then, enables the critical examination of both the analytical and experiential and their points of intersection and contention—the place of vigorous negotiation and inter-cultural translations