This week, Film Notes publishes a collective conversation with Elizabeth Povinelli of the Karrabing Film Collective, organized in Brussels by Fireplace Cinema, Blue Screen, and Caillou Film Festival and introduced here by Gawan Fagard. Povinelli describes how making films brings generations together to sustain their relations to country, keeping ancestral knowledge active amid the ongoing violence of settler colonialism.
From Gawan Fagard’s introduction:
Why did the Karrabing Collective turn to film, this medium deeply complicit in the politics of hypervisibility? Why project their weirdly erratic videos widely in the art world? To satisfy the art world’s hunger for the authentic, the untouched, the ancestral, something pure to extract and capitalize on? Instead, they show us hilarious fabulations on neocolonial forms of oppression, layered stories of Indigenous life conditioned by relentless extraction, attempts to pay tribute to ancestral presence in the everyday landscape. In their cinematic language, developed over nearly fifteen years, layers of video make images think, dream, and act at once.
Selected excerpts from the conversation:
Q: How does Karrabing move from the Darwin wetlands into the visibility of a settler art world? How do you negotiate the social, affective, and aesthetic economy of the films and what they generate for the community in Belyuen?
EP: If you have seen some of our other films, you’ll see what’s going on in our community under the corroding extractive settler condition. While we show films about the ancestral present geography, we don’t explicitly tell viewers what story they are seeing. There is a story underneath the story. The kids at Belyuen school can see the understory because we taught them to see it.
But I am guessing all of you wouldn’t be able to see it. Say, if you saw Mermaids, or Aiden in Wonderland, you would know that there is a set of ancestral narratives subtending the action on the surface, but the film doesn’t tell the stories. And why should we tell it? Why should Western audiences know it?
God bless the art world for giving us money. We are very grateful. Seriously. But the art world doesn’t have a big effect on us. Not even on our artistic practice. We look at the films and we see how we have grown up, how little Kinah, who is now five or six years old, was back then. Making films is a practice oriented to keeping the memory and obligations to country strong.
