Indigenous knowledge: How Australia hopes for the end of paternalism

by time news

AWhen there were no people living in Australia, the Dreamtime reigned. In this epoch spirit beings populated the continent. They shaped the country with their presence. This is how the descendants of the first indigenous Australians tell it. But their stories have been increasingly silenced as youngsters move from the bush to the cities.

Therefore, in 2010, some elders from the Anangu community in the Central Desert made a decision: Next generations should learn the old legends via smartphone, and the National Museum in the capital Canberra should implement this plan for them.

Visitors to the Humboldt Forum in Berlin can experience how this works. Using their smartphones or an audio guide, they immerse themselves in one of the continent’s famous creation myths: Kungkarangkalpa, the journey of the Seven Sisters. They must be wary of one pursuer – a shapeshifter – on their so-called Dreaming paths.

While the visitors walk through room productions like in a computer game and occasionally trigger digital animations, they listen to an atmospheric 40-minute radio play. In doing so, they find themselves in the role of learners similar to the early youth of the indigenous Australians, who ceremoniously appropriated the ancient stories through songs and dances, the so-called songlines.

Myth of the Seven Sisters

“Songlines: Seven Sisters Create Australia” is less an exhibition and more a multimedia performance of which the visitors themselves become a part. At the entrance, they are greeted on a man-high screen by the learned elders of three communities, through whose parts of the country the history extends from the west to the center of the country.

After that, visitors walk through a room whose walls are filled with colorful flowers after a desert rain, then merge into the starry night sky, through which the footprints of the Seven Sisters and a being named Yurla run. The projection dissolves into concentric circles of colored dots, which will later play a role in the painted images.

Songlines: Seven sisters create Australia in the Humboldt Forum

Quelle: the artist/Copyright Agency 2020, Image: Nathan Mewett

Next door are the Seven Sisters, as nine Australian grass weavers created them from colored natural fibers in 2018: amorphously dissolving figures, half women with large breasts, half nourishing yams. There, visitors start the radio play.

The bass of the lascivious Yurla (spoken Viktor Pavel) whispers, reminiscent of the lucky dragon Fuchur in Wolfgang Petersen’s film adaptation of the “Neverending Story” from 1984 on his flight. An older and a younger sister (voiced by Sarah Alles and Melina von Gagern) whisper and giggle like a fairy. They rush through the air to twenty different locations while dodging Yurla in his various forms.

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A special feature of the project is that the last living heirs of those who passed on the stories curated the show themselves. Some of the contributors have since passed away. “They’re not just an advisory group, they’re co-curators,” says Margo Neale, project director at the National Museum and chair of the Center for Indigenous Knowledge. Neale saw her own role merely as a museum expert in delivering for audiences.

Hartmut Dorgerloh was also enthusiastic about this new way of conveying the wealth of indigenous culture. The director of the Humboldt Forum brought the show to Berlin – the fourth stop after two locations in Australia and Plymouth, England. From April 2023 it will be on display at the Musée du quai Branly in Paris.

Seven Sisters und Wati Nyiru, 2018

Seven Sisters und Wati Nyiru, 2018

Source: NMA/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2022/Humboldt Forum Foundation in the Berlin Palace, photo: Stefanie Loos

In expansive sentences, Dorgerloh describes how the exhibition opens up “exemplary new perspectives” that allow the museum “to become a signaling space of opportunity for self-determination, participation, communication and mediation” and that “museum practice can decisively change”. The artistic director sees his institution as a host where visitors can learn new things – by being willing “to let something affect them without shaping it themselves.” In short: the time of patronizing European interpretation sovereignty over other cultures should be over .

Nevertheless, cross-cultural things become visible. For example mnemonics, which have been known in Europe since ancient times. It is possible that the Aborigines have been practicing such commemorative practices even since their arrival on the Australian continent some 60,000 years ago. Because the Songlines are cartography and educational canon in one. By embedding paths, places and facts in complex, ritually performed stories, the songlines impart knowledge along with strategies for its preservation.

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Construction of a Bai house by roofers from Palau in the Humboldt Forum

If Yurla transforms into a fig tree or a quandong tree in certain areas, then modern-day travelers can probably also successfully look for food in these places. Or they can find underground water if they recognize old streams or watch out for the wasp rolling mud balls. To do this, however, they must follow the paths of the Seven Sisters in the desert and beware of Yurla’s magic. Distinctive rocks appear to them both as landmarks and as incarnations of the Dreamtime ancestors to be respected.

Much of the performance remains fragmentary and incomprehensible, despite an opulent 250-page accompanying catalogue. Obviously, some stories cannot be fully told because parts of them are secret. Some details are preserved by authorized women and only consulted in certain situations, such as before marriage. It is the concept of the exhibition that no scientifically explanatory additional information fills in the gaps for outsiders.

Known for the art market

The show is also limited to the Western and Central Deserts, although this myth is known under various names throughout Australia. Nevertheless, the task remained enormous: The area covers more than 500,000 square kilometers – almost one and a half times the size of Germany. In this area, researchers from the Australian National University followed the paths of the three songlines depicted in a motor convoy with thirty of the partly frail elders.

The carriers of knowledge painted many of the exhibited pictures together on site. Be it because of the lack of time under these circumstances, be it because some of the artists found painting late or because their physical abilities have dwindled with age: the paintings fall short of the technical precision that they have enjoyed since the 1970s known through the art market.

However, it is by no means a concern of the show to cater to the boom in so-called “Aboriginal Art”. The images here do not have the role of autonomous works of art in a gallery space, but are intended to function as “portals” to the places mentioned. The female artists and the few male painters map the visible and invisible nature as dot paintings. Her symbolic ornaments, painted in colored dot technique, have developed over the past fifty years from actually ephemeral sand paintings into sought-after contemporary art on canvas.

Another famous form language that could be described as X-ray style bark painting is not represented, as it is not common in the Western and Central Territories. There are new forms of expression introduced by missionaries, such as ceramic vessels turned and glazed on the potter’s wheel.

Visitors in the multimedia dome room of the Songlines exhibition

Visitors in the multimedia dome room of the Songlines exhibition

Source: NMA/Stiftung Humboldt Forum im Berliner Schloss, photo: Stefanie Loos

Visitors to Berlin can get a glimpse of life in the deserts, where the Dreamtime for Indigenous Australians is still present – under a separate dome with a diameter of six meters. Inside, a high-definition video show connects the cosmos with rock paintings from the Walinynga cave complex.

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The flat elevation in the center of the Australian continent, also known as Cave Hill, may only be entered by foreigners together with the country’s traditional owners. The figurative rock paintings inside are probably up to 3500 years old and are for the locals the proof of actions of the ancestors during the Dreamtime. They can be interpreted as the journey of the seven sisters.

In the next largest city, in Alice Springs, indigenous people have recently managed the knowledge, sound and image material collected for the exhibition in an electronic archive. So that the Kungkarangkalpa songline lives on in the digital age.

“Songlines. Seven sisters create Australia”, until October 30, 2022, Humboldt Forum in Berlin

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