Terms such as ‘design’, ‘art’, ‘dance’ and ‘performance’ continue to hold their Euro-American connotations. As well as being central to social coherence and the wider cultural industries, the wider arts communicate and demonstrate Indigenous cultures, struggles, self-determination, and calls for sovereignty. How can we develop more culturally sensitive and ecologically sustainable cultural-creative systems with integrity, authenticity and authority? Topics include Indigenous Australian Fashion and Textiles, the development of more culturally, ecologically and economically sustainable design systems and Indigenous governed intercultural performance practice as a site for truth telling and Makarrata. New models of Indigenous Cultural and Intellectual Property Protocols implicit in these assertions will be discussed. As the absolute ownership of cultural material is repositioned with its creators, social memory is enhanced and complex social messages support diverse audiences.
Click the title of the abstract to read more.
Speakers
Dr Treena Clark
Treena Clark (PhD, BA Honours, BA PR) is a Kokatha and Wirangu emerging researcher based in Adelaide/Kaurna Yerta. Treena is a current University of Technology Sydney 2022 Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Indigenous Research Fellow within the Faculty of Design and Society. Treena completed a Bachelor of Public Relations and Bachelor of Arts (Honours) degrees from the University of South Australia and a Doctor of Philosophy degree from the University of Technology Sydney. Treena’s 2021 PhD thesis explored the field of Indigenous Australian public relations and initiated the decolonisation of Australian public relations. Specifically, the research aimed to assert Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander ways of conducting public relations and privilege the stories, roles and contributions that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander women have made within it. Treena’s Postdoctoral Research Fellow project, titled, Ad(dressing) Indigeneity: identity, healing, and social change through clothing, fashion, and style aims to unpack the stories behind First Nations fashion, art, and dress. Exploring how fashion can assist in our wellbeing and contribute to social change, this research focuses on urban areas and Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples’ ways of dressing in these environments.
Abstract: Cultural Sustainability through Fashion: First Nations Resilience, Identity, and Style in Urban Spaces
Abstract: Cultural Sustainability through Fashion: First Nations Resilience, Identity, and Style in Urban Spaces
For First Nations peoples, the enduring impacts of invasion and colonisation are deeply embedded in clothing practices, from the forced removal of cultural attire to the imposition of Western garments as tools of control and assimilation. Yet despite these disruptions, First Nations communities have continuously sustained cultural dress traditions, adapting and asserting identity through clothing as acts of resistance and resilience.
This presentation examines First Nations fashion and style as vital expressions of cultural sustainability. Whether through creating, wearing, or engaging with First Nations designs, fashion has become a powerful site for sustaining identity, protest, and healing. Practices such as cloak and jewellery-making, alongside contemporary fashion design, reflect how clothing and adornment are imbued with meanings of survival, self-determination, and cultural continuity.
Drawing on interviews with First Nations people in three urban centres, this presentation explores how fashion intersects with identity, resistance, and cultural practice. In doing so, it highlights how fashion and style contribute to the ongoing cultural sustainability of First Nations peoples, through everyday acts of creative resurgence, storytelling, and community connection.
Nathan mudyi Sentance
Nathan mudyi Sentance is a Wiradjuri librarian and writer who grew up on Darkinjung Country. He is Head of Collections, First Nations at the Powerhouse and a member of the Indigenous Archives Collective. His writing has appeared in The Guardian, History Australia, British Art Studies, and The Archival Decolonist.
Abstract: Facilitating the Indigenous right of reply to collections: creative expressions to correct the record
Abstract: Facilitating the Indigenous right of reply to collections: creative expressions to correct the record
Historically, the First Nations information held within colonial memory institutions has been recorded, collected, and interpreted by non-Indigenous people. This has resulted in the proliferation of false or distorted representations of First Nations history, culture, and people. Drawing upon the Indigenous Archives Collective’s Position Statement on the right of reply to Indigenous knowledges and information held in archives, this discussion will explore how the Powerhouse has created space for First Nations communities to critique and challenge the colonial narratives embedded in its collection. These collaborations have led to powerful and unexpected truth-telling creative projects. A selection of case studies will be presented to illustrate how these projects have unfolded in practice and what they reveal about the evolving role of cultural institutions in supporting Indigenous self-representation.
Dalisa Pigram FAHA and Dr Rachael Swain FAHA
A Yawuru/Bardi woman born and raised in Broome, Dalisa Pigram also has Malay and Filipino heritage. A co devising movement artist of Marrugeku since their first production Mimi (1996), Dalisa joined Rachael Swain in 2008 as Co-Artistic Director. Dalisa’s solo work Gudirr Gudirr (2013) earned an Australian Dance Award (Outstanding Achievement in Independent Dance 2014) and a Green Room Award (Best Female Performer 2014). Dalisa co-conceived Marrugeku’s Burning Daylight (2006) and Cut the Sky (2015) with Swain, co-choreographing both works as well as Marrugeku’s Le Dernier Appel (2018) with Serge Aimé Coulibaly receiving a second Green Room Award for Best Performance (2020). Together with Swain she co- directed Buru (2010), Ngalimpa (2018) and co-curated Marrugeku’s four International Indigenous Choreographic Labs and Burrbgaja Yalirra [Dancing Forwards]. Dalisa co-conceived with Swain and Patrick Dodson Marrugeku’s award winning Jurrungu Ngan- ga (2021), choreographing the work with the performers. Dalisa co-choreographed and performed in Marrugeku’s digital work, Gudirr Gudirr video and sound installation and for Marrugeku’s Mutiara which premiered in Broome for Shinju Matsuri (2023) followed by Sydney and Perth Festivals (2024). Dalisa co choreographed Nyuju as part of Burrbgaja Yalirra 2 (2023) and received Creative Australia’s 2023 Dance Award. In her community, Dalisa is committed to the maintenance of Indigenous language and culture through arts and education working closely with and for her community. Dalisa is co-editor of Marrugeku: Telling That Story—25 years of trans-Indigenous and intercultural exchange (Performance Research 2021).
Rachael Swain is a director, dramaturg and performance researcher of Scottish/Irish/English descent. She was born on the land of the Ngāi Tahu, Aotearoa and works between the lands of the Gadigal (Sydney) and the lands of the Yawuru (Broome). She is Co-Artistic Director of Marrugeku with Yawuru/ Bardi/Malay/Filipina movement artist Dalisa Pigram and an ARC Future Fellow (UNSW). She is motivated by the power of collaborative intercultural performance, co-created by diverse Indigenous and settler artists to investigate, rehearse and reflect processes of Makarrata, more-than-human relationality and truth-telling. She was a co-devising performer and Co-Artistic Director of Stalker theatre (1989-2014) where she began directing and co-choreographing the companies large scale outdoor intermedial projects. As a director and dramaturg with Marrugeku, working in close collaboration with Pigram, she supports collaborative concept development and intercultural and intermedial methodologies to create the company’s award winning live and digital performance works. The 12 productions she has directed have received 19 national and 9 international commissions and have been presented by over 155 top tier festivals and venues worldwide. Together with Pigram she extends the performance research outcomes back into industry development initiatives, co-curating four Australian-Pacific Indigenous & Intercultural Choreographic Labs (2009-2015) and two research laboratories in ‘Dance and Cultural Dramaturgies in Contested Lands’ (2022-23).
Rachael was awarded the first ARC early career DECRA fellowship in Theatre and Performance, (University of Melbourne, 2013-17). Her current research investigating the theory and practice of multi modal visual dramaturgies and their potential as international cultural diplomacy was awarded the first practice led Future Fellowship in her field. She is the author of Dance in Contested Land— new intercultural dramaturgies (2020) and co-editor with Helen Gilbert and Dalisa Pigram of Marrugeku: Telling That Story—25 years of trans-Indigenous and intercultural exchange (2021). Together with Pigram she was awarded the inaugural Peta Tait Prize for ‘Excellence in Creative Projects and Scholarship Achievement over time’ (ADSA, 2020) and won the 2022 Sidney Myer Performing Arts Award for Outstanding achievement in the performing arts and potential contribution to Australian society into the future. Their multi-awarded production Jurrungu Ngan-ga was the first Australian dance work presented by Venice Biennale and was awarded Outstanding Work on Critical Race Performance Studies by Performance Studies International 2023.
Abstract: Performing the Midden—artistic research, truth telling and shared responsibility
Abstract: Performing the Midden—artistic research, truth telling and shared responsibility
Marrugeku’s trans-Indigenous and intercultural performances, collaboratively created by diverse Indigenous and diverse settler artists, are responses to the shared responsibility of meeting each other on the lands of First Peoples within ongoing colonial aftermaths. Each live performance created across the company’s three decades long body of work, is ‘that which remains’ following multi-modal research encounters between artists and artistic practices, Country, and custodians.
Marrugeku’s co-artistic directors Dalisa Pigram and Rachael Swain will discuss the emergence of their performance research practices to investigate, embody and visualise intersecting personal, political, historical, cultural and ancestral events accumulating in a location. This invisible archive of forces that are felt, remembered, dreamt or documented by individuals and intersecting communities can be understood as a ‘great midden’ of experience that can be reactivated through artistic practice. Working from their distinct positions Dalisa and Rachael will describe how they create the conditions to interpret such dispersed fragments of past/future times through a curated meeting of artists and art movements, communities and experimental processes that are navigated in dialogue with local cultural custodians and visitor interlocuters.
The intermedial productions resulting from these processes stage and share performative truth telling, presented from remote Kimberley communities to venues and festivals around the world. These embodiments of Country as choreo-political relationscapes produce insurgent aesthetics and Indigenise creative processes to re-mobilise the purpose and priorities of contemporary performance and dance.
Chair
Professor Brenda L Croft
Brenda L Croft is from the Gurindji/Malngin/Mudburra Peoples, Victoria River region of the Northern Territory of Australia, and has Anglo-Australian/Chinese/German/Irish/Scottish heritage.
For four decades Brenda has undertaken a leading role in national and international First Nations and broader contemporary arts/cultural sectors as a multi-disciplinary creative practitioner (academic, administrator, artist, curator, educator, researcher, scholar). Brenda’s creative work is represented in major national and international public and private collections, and she has being the recipient of numerous prestigious awards, commissions and grants for academic and creative-led research.
Since 2021 she has been Professor of Indigenous Art History & Curatorship at the Australian National University, and states she is privileged to live and work on unceded sovereign
Kamberri/Ngambri/Ngunawal homelands. Brenda’s creative-led academic research encompasses Critical Indigenous Performative Collaborative Autoethnography and Storywork methodologies and theoretical frameworks.
In her ANU role Brenda co-leads an ANU Indigenous Health and Wellbeing Grand Challenge, ‘Murrudha; Sovereign Walks – tracking cultural actions through art, Country, language and music’, with colleagues from SOAD and Fenner School of Environment and Society, working closely with and guided by First Nations communities, including Dhurga-Yuin/Ngambri/Ngunawal/Monaro-Ngarigo/Walgalu-Wiradyuri Peoples.
In 2024 Brenda was the Gough Whitlam and Malcolm Fraser Visiting Chair of Australian Studies, Harvard University. During her tenure Brenda organised Ancestral Futures: Indigenous Cardinal Relations, a three-day gathering/symposium comprising keynote and respondent, film screening, panel discussions by, from and with international Indigenous critical thinkers and creative-led researchers: academics, creative practitioners, collection stewards, curators, educators, researchers and scholars.
