Bait

Monday 18 March 21:11

by Alisa Blakeney Art is a trap. In her lecture on the final day of Sonic Acts, Elizabeth Povinelli introduced the metaphor of collective artistic practice as a baited hook, with which to catch a fish. The practice she described in particular is that of Karrabing Film Collective: a group of whom she is a member, and whose films make a tantalisingly brief appearance in the Sonic Acts film program. When the Dogs Talked and The Mermaids, or Aiden in Wonderland are two short films that reveal much about Karrabing, but also speak of our mutual entanglement within a greater world.

When the Dogs Talked, Karrabing Film Collective, film still. Courtesy of the artists.
In his 1996 essay, “Vogel’s Net”, Alfred Gell wrote of traps as a kind of weaponised empathy: from careful study of their form, you can learn a great deal about their intended prey. One kind of fish Karrabing’s films seek to hook, according to Povinelli, is an institution such as Sonic Acts, through which resources can flow to Karrabing. Sonic Acts is in some sense the ideal environment to encounter the films of Karrabing Film Collective. The festival presents a joyous clash of the aural, visual and discursive through its side-by-side film, exhibition, conference and performance programs. This in turn produces a gregarious mood amongst speakers, reflected in lively question and answer sessions. It is also this productive informality that means I am able to meet with Elizabeth Povinelli shortly after the closing of the conference programme for a friendly conversation. During this, she elaborates further on the genesis of Karrabing, the practices of the film collective, and what can be gleaned about collective practice in general. At the moment of Karrabing’s coming into being, she tells me, the fundamental question facing them was, “how do you literally stay in existence” in the face of numerous “different, non-corresponding, incommensurate forces of abandonment”. Those fifty people or so who would become Karrabing, had been living in the small Indigenous community of Belyuen in Australia’s Northern Territory when, in 2007, disagreements subsequent to a land claim led to a riot, and they were driven from their homes. In the wake of this came “the intervention”: a series of coercive and discriminatory measures introduced by the Australian government on the pretext of protecting children from sexual abuse. Add to this the global financial crisis in 2008, and filmmaking became for Karrabing not only a potential source of income (one of a number of alternatives considered alongside, for example, an idea for an augmented reality app that was eventually discarded), but also a way of reinforcing who they were as a group and resisting those forces that sought to deform them. It is from this wider Karrabing community that the members of the film collective are drawn. Its composition fluctuates, with Povinelli guessing its number as between thirty to seventy people, with ages ranging from two to sixty years old. They not only make films together but also collectively build outstations, repair cars, and indeed hunt. We have already seen that the films of Karrabing can be understood through the metaphor of a trap, as descriptive of an intended target, but they are also interpretable as a model of their creator: the hunter. Through their collective methods of art-making, the members of Karrabing Film Collective reinforce ties of kinship, and strengthen their own identities while acknowledging that in order to be individuals, they must also be connected. In practice, their process involves collective plot development and an improvisational style of production that progresses moment-to-moment according to each person’s desire, and the contingencies of the moment.
When the Dogs Talked, Karrabing Film Collective, film still. Courtesy of the artists.
In addition to seeking institutional interest, the trap of Karrabing’s films is self-reflexive. A film like When the Dogs Talked is framed around a particular “Dreaming” or ongoing ancestral presence on the land. The film follows young children who through the process of making the film are encouraged to learn and care about this knowledge through questioning and engaging in the narrative. Povinelli describes trying to transfix their senses and practice so that while they’re doing something else (i.e. making a film), they’re nevertheless compelled by these ancestral presences. “The ancestral presence archive isn’t in a library”, she says. “It’s not in a museum; it’s in their bodies”. The film The Mermaids, or Aiden in Wonderland, on the other hand, focuses on a near future in which the world has been made toxic by white people. Karrabing’s conception of connectivity says that you cannot be an individual without already being obligated outside yourself; however, there is an attitude within Western capitalism that believes one can continually extract from the world that which one is actually dependent on, without being affected. The argument of Mermaids is that at some point you will suck out so much that there will no longer remain anything left to constitute yourself. We can see a trap as a model of its creator, the hunter, or a portrait of its prey, but more than this, the trap is the embodiment of the dramatic nexus, which binds the two together in time and space. In the language of Elizabeth Povinelli, we might talk about the form of connectivity (and collectivity) that Karrabing embodies as a knot, or a particular knotting within a series of knots. The title of Povinelli’s lecture session was “Collective Practices”, but collectivity cannot be generalised. It must always stem from one's own particular set of conditions and circumstances, and this entails a step into the unknown. “We just don’t know” Povinelli tells me, “We didn’t see so many things making film was connected to until we started making films”. The only way to discover the myriad connections is to begin doing.

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