Hira Sheikh and I were one of four finalists for F.E.A.S.T 2020: a more than human world, 4th October 2020, VisArts, Maryland, USA. F.E.A.S.T stands for Funding Emerging Art with Sustainable Tactics. It was a pleasure to be a part of this.
We acknowledge the land of the Piscataway Conoy Tribe on which this work is shown and the Turrbal and Yuggera people, the Traditional Custodians of the land on which this work was made. We acknowledge all the people of the lands that make this work possible. We recognise the continuing connection to lands, waters, and communities of all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people. We pay our respect to Elders, past, present and emerging, and commit to standing with our First Nations people.
Abstract
TransHuman Saunter is a geolocative artwork, by two women from the Indian Subcontinent living in Brisbane (Australia), that documents the artists’ entanglements with the multispecies ecosystem of the Indian Banyan or Indian Fig Tree. Constituting imagined narratives of multispecies, the artists utilise a decolonial ecocriticism lens on their collaborations with the nonhuman colonised Indian Subcontinent being: Indian Banyan Tree. It will also draw attention to the artists’ micro-narratives of brownness based on their identities as ‘lesser’ humans and that of the Indian Banyan Tree as ‘non’ human. The entanglements represented will feature weaving of lived experiences of colonialism, migration, oppressions, and everyday living in ‘White Australia.’
This is further juxtaposed with human-planetary crises of climate change, forest fires, a pandemic: all psychosis of disjointed human/nonhuman entanglements. This artwork digitally locates itself in Australia and on the Indigenous land of the Turrbal and Yuggera people. In engaging with the Indian Banyan Tree and unearthing the atrocities of the “other,” the artists hope to provide a space to transcend and disrupt White colonial forms of knowing so as to heal and repair. The eventual work will be a contribution to the pluralistic ways of knowing through an evocation of the narratives of the unseen: the “lesser”-humans, the “non”-humans, and the “non”-beings. The artists employ geolocative media, maps, images, sounds, poetry, and video to create this multispecies saunter. The project funds will be utilised to rent filming and recording equipment and register for editing and geolocative media software.