Through sKIN we breathe began as a two-channel video originally created as the fifth dance for the show Same but Different (Dance Massive 2019), the show was exploring colonial myths of Aboriginality – sameness and skin colour. The work was collaborative in its conceptual design and created through multiple sessions of yarning with four Aboriginal choreographers.

Together we explored and unpacked the myths, sameness and skin colour, looked at identity politics, visual representation and personal narratives.

Collectively, we designed the approach to making the stills included, which referenced the historic scientific and ethnographic approach taken to documenting Aboriginal people, these images appeared in the left-hand channel of the work. The right-hand channel referenced a connection to Country, both channels overlapped at points. The reference to Country was established by inserting video, images and sound recordings of my home Country as an additional layer to the work therefore inserting myself. The final work produced a starting point for consideration on myth and truth.

The second iteration of the work was as an attempt at an immersive experience for Channel’s festival 2019 shown at Blakdot Gallery. Blakdot gallery, is a first nations and people of colour run and operated space, in Brunswick, Vic. that caters to our stories rather than the mainstream.

For the set-up, under the projection, I created a rainforest-type environment and a riverbed from sand, dirt, moss and river stones, multiple ferns, gums and river reed plated in soil. The sound filled the room and danced on the hairs of my skin, and the scent from the ferns and gum took me home. The work for me became more sensory based. It was no longer a dance, but an embodied experience. The set up shifted the way the work was perceived and experienced. 

The next two Iterations were outdoors, and print based rather than video – One in a lane way adjacent to Blakdot Gallery in Brunswick and the second, on the waterfront at Darling Harbour Sydney, both very Public spaces. Each privileged our stories, where not constructed from an Imperial approach, and repositioned the gaze through public placement.

Public space or non-traditional space is is a large part of my research. In regard to the idea of Public, I’d like to add, the term “public” is not fixed or static, nor only concerned with what is an open or common area, as opposed to a ‘privately’ owned space.

Also, there is no one ‘public’, as Feminist political thinker Nancy Fraser emphasises there are ‘multiple publics and public spaces’ and consequently ‘multiple public spheres’ (Fraser 1990).

Feminist geographer Doreen Massey (1944-2016) described public space as “the arena where we have the possibility of constructing a public. Constructing democratic subjects, political subjects…” (2012) Massey also highlights public space is

“important in the construction of gender relations and in struggles to change them. From the symbolic meaning of spaces/places and the clearly gendered messages which they transmit, to straightforward exclusion by violence, spaces and places are not only themselves gendered but, in their being so, they both reflect and affect the ways in which gender is constructed and understood.” (1994, p. 179)

Massey also states that “space and power are intimately related. Space is permanently governed by a certain form of power, while power always has a particular cartography…and that has huge effect on the way society is organised”(2012).

Both presentations were interesting to me from the perspective of exclusion. Exclusion through lack of visibility and the threat of potential violence a dark laneway of harbour can hold. This exclusion is true for both Indigenous women and women collectively.