Critical practices of place : decolonisation & reinhabitation

The exegesis and exhibition illustrate a sense-making process of understanding who I am - in time/place - through an embodied process of becoming more critically entangled or attendant with my relationships. These relationships are principally with the storied colonial past of the Eastern Riverina and my own family (human and other-than-human). This critical process of enacting decolonisation and reinhabitation provides insider-knowledge to a point-in-time in the Australian national dialogue on the intergenerational effects of colonialism through a personal account of that interface. This is particularly important as the work co-emerges with a deepening understanding of the catastrophic impacts of anthropogenic climate change, Australia’s worst bushfire season on record, prolonged drought, increasing political partisanship, growing race tensions, rising income inequality and a global pandemic. The exegesis foregrounds the recounting of personal experiences through troubled-times presented through a predominantly chronological suite of relational narratives. These narratives illustrate a sense-making process on the central thematic question ‘how do I live well with my total environments’, or, ‘how to live well in a world worth living in’. This unfolding takes place in the exegesis through hyperlinks backwards and forwards in time mirroring the exhibition works eminent exploration of relationships outside colonial-chronological time/place understanding. This exploration of time operates as a critical-reflective/reflexive process of enactment/embodiment that centres around my own emerging cultural understandings of intergenerational thinking, belonging and identity. This is explored as recovering the knowledge of my ancestors, making kin, and engaging with critical questions of what kind of ancestor I want to be – and setting that path meaningfully in motion. Both the exegesis and exhibition components utilise a methodological weave. Four strands are woven into each other to hold each other meaningfully in tension to strengthen the rope through the relationship of each. These strands are (1) Creative-practice research, (2) Autoethnography, (3) Indigenist Standpoint Theory, and, (4) Critical Pedagogy. Understanding the use of a multi-method research paradigm, but also the visual of the weave provides useful visual allegory for a new researcher method, a Critical Practice of Place. The research offers a series of findings of ways others might manifest their own deepening connections to place/time located in an exploration of their own belonging, identity, and relationships. This is through a new methodological weave, through a complex definition of Care, and through creative practice - iteration. It also presents a series of findings that illustrate the central premise that carries through the research, that there is always more to know, but there is always limits to knowing - and in reflection on this presents a series of future research opportunities