Early notes for the Wrapped Trees Project, 2023.
Good afternoon Everyone! Welcome to your Friday afternoon Wrapped Trees Project blog! Get a drink of something nice, we’re just going to continue to roll through some of the things that 2023 has given to our project framework. Starting with:
- more co-care thoughts and allowing space for learning and mistakes,
- a few undeveloped questions I have about a thing I’m starting to call, cultural cannibalism,
- a little seed of time travel.
Formal or Casual?
I don’t have the answers to all the questions I bring up but it seems to me that I have to continue asking them, telling you my thoughts and hopefully planting seeds! One of the most important privileges I have been given since the start of the Wrapped Trees is all the support I get from all of you as well as people outside the project. Now, what has dawned on me is, how necessary ongoing, formal or casual, regular connections are not just to the project’s success but to the success and strength of our Tree community here, the environment and society. So, there are questions like… How does the project not only map out how and why these connections and care are so important to the framework and our project community but how do we enact these care relationships within our community? How might this care network look and function? Of course we need to meet each other at some point but in the meantime, before person to person?
The obvious extension is, how does co-care support work in communities now? What examples can we find? What can we learn from community support mechanisms in our bid for a better way of being together? How might we make this work as a proposed social element of the project? What traditional Aboriginal social protocols might be revitalised to help us here? How might co-care support already look and function within an institution or its policies? And in my head, the web has led me back to asking again, how do we embed co-care within the policies and practices of our keeping places and art institutions?
To err or not to err?
The next question I think is important to ask is, an idea I have about how we make space for one another to learn and to even fuck up badly sometimes? You know when we go into a training day or start a class for the first time and we create the ‘group rules’ or group agreement? I can’t help but think that these days it may have gone a bit stale, a bit assumed that everyone knows what the basic elements are… I don’t have anything but anecdotal evidence but if social change is what we’re proposing this seems a logical place to turn, yes? There have been a lot of social protocol changes in the last twenty years and a few of them are, our use of pronouns with our names as a means of self identification, using the Aboriginal names of places while perhaps not being able to pronounce them properly, knowing all the Aboriginal nations in our regions… the list goes on. In all the groups I’ve been fortunate enough to be part of, I have been consistently drawn to think about co-care principles behind these group agreements. So, what happens when we make mistakes in a group? Have we welcomed learning and mistakes within the group processes? How are these mistakes or learning curves supported or addressed… facilitators?… peers?… or part C, all of the above?
What if, the mistake is a biggy? What if conflicting core beliefs come to conflict? Or even, hurt or harm actually intended? How do our families, communities, classes or even our country deal with these situations? And around we go again – how do a set of agreed forms of expected behaviour translate and function within our project? How do we embed an agreement within the framework? What examples, policies, practices or knowledge can we draw upon from outside the project? What Aboriginal learning, problem solving and conflict resolution protocols might help here? What does this stuff look in an organisation’s policies and procedures? What might our project contribute to these, to conflict resolution and how would co-care function in this context?
Cultural Cannibalism, anyone hungry?
This is probably the stickiest, ickiest, most culturally and socially sensitive item on our list for 2024, even bearing in mind the sensitivity around deaccessioning our Trees from the Art Gallery of NSW, stolen artefacts and the need for decolonisation all together… The questions are loaded with concern and I want to move gently and carefully as I can, especially given they’re just seeds. Let’s get to it though.
Non-Aboriginal art appropriation is easy to call out and ask for accountability, we’re probably experts at it. What about appropriation of Aboriginal art by Aboriginal people? Using the traditional dots used in Aboriginal art as our example – Who owns dots as in the traditional dots in cultural paintings? What does it mean if most people identify dots as representing all of Aboriginal Australia? When we think about the repatriation of Aboriginal cultural knowledge and practices, what does it mean for modern Aboriginal Australia if the traditional design formats have been wiped out? What does it mean if Aboriginal people often align their cultural identity with the dots, though they may not come from ‘dot Country’? The implications are so complex and convoluted that I barely know where to start. There are so very many different angles to look at this from. However, following on from the previous ideas of making space for mistakes, demonstrating social accountability… Yes, I’m going to go there.
How does all this come about? How do contemporary Aboriginal artists in this area know what is or isn’t culturally appropriate or correct protocol? Who and how are we accountable to our own people? If an artist, designer or public art business uses dots in their work how do we demonstrate our cultural accountability to our own people and the rest of the community, that we are behaving ethically? Or has the Aboriginal cultural art protocol been so melted in the pot that there’s some kind of free for all, on our example of the dots? Yes, I’m bringing it up…What do we do if and when we as Aboriginal people, artists etc, come across cultural art misappropriation by other Aboriginal people? How are we accountable to each other? How do we even know what it is? Like… Who and where are the ‘dot-art’ police and should they even exist? How can we expect a people stripped of culture not try to cling onto culture as near enough as they can find it? Some might even argue that this all takes place in Australia underneath, an undeclared war zone… Attached to this, somewhere down the track I’d also like us to have discussions about culture for sale and how do we support and protect culture from the capitalist culture vultures? I still have to ask however… are we eating our own?
One of my concerns here is legacy. What legacy are we leaving behind for the future to learn from? Terry Janke’s book, 2022, True Tracks has been a great help in trying to learn about these questions I have. So too, various writings by Uncle Bruce Pascoe, Tyson Yunkaporta, Aunty Marcia Langton and many others. Please note that I write in, Aunty and Uncle although I’ve never met them, as my mark of respect for these people as cultural and academic Aunties and Uncles. I don’t know if this is a right protocol but I don’t know any other more appropriate way of signalling how much they’ve taught me and my respect for them. If it’s not a right way to do things, feel free to tell me.
Legacy Time Travel
It must seem I have a lot of space in my head to have all these thoughts and questions floating around in it – maybe I do and here’s our last seed for the week. With questions of what legacies do we want to leave for the future, my love for time travel and the opportunity to work with Dr. Jodi Edwards again and Gondwana, Aboriginal Children’s Choir with the Sydney Children’s Choir at Bundanon Art Museum this weekend, an idea came to me. Why wouldn’t we time travel our project to the future, invite it here, to the present and find out if the future would like to work with us? I have not formulated any specific plans for this excursion but the younger ones of our Tree Guardians have been on my mind since we began and wanting to know what they need from the project has been turning over for a while. The questions I’m starting to have include, ‘what do the next generations need from us?’, ‘how will they know what and who to trust when they have to take on the huge environmental and socio-political challenges?’ How will we know if we’ve left them strong, ethical, enviro-social, cultural protocols, policies and practices that will be of grounding or help to them? So many more ideas and thoughts come to into my head and hope this week’s blog has allowed you to see some more of my spider webs but much more importantly planted some thoughts for the future of our project, possibly ideas for iterations and reiterated how important co-care is becoming to everything of our project framework.
I look forward to our intersections and outlining some of the threads we can follow during 2024, next Friday. In the meantime I hope you all have a weekend with a dash of deep joy in it, Tree Guardians!
So many thanx for stopping in!
Juundaal & The Trees
The Wrapped Trees Project 