A collaboration with the coastal, river and desert people living at one arm point and Fitzroy Crossing
Cultural Exchange, or even the more (apparently) modest notion of artistic collaboration, is typically fraught with pitfalls and misconceptions. Beyond diverse ethnicities, cultural and social differences and politically inscribed power relations, there are the more mundane but equally pressing issues of individual identity such as personality, sex, gender and ambition. Yet generally speaking, we assume that such exchanges are beneficial (like roughage in the mornings); that collaboration, by its very nature, is democratic, creative, generous and morally more certain than more selfish, individual pursuits. It is, however, a shifting ground, involving unstable relations and nowhere in this country are these notions of exchange and collaboration more fraught, than between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal artists.
Curator, Djon Mundine, speaking as part of the Art(iculations) program' at the Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts this year, commented ironically on the number of European and non-Aboriginal Australian artists who seek to impose their desire tor collaboration on traditional Aboriginal communities. Visiting European artists in particular, are understandably fascinated by the possibility of 'collaborating' with artists from the traditional communities, but as Mundine noted somewhat wryly, it is a mistake to assume that 'our' desire tor collaboration (or reconciliationtor that matter) is reciprocated. There is a not so fine line between colonisation and collaboration.
Despite the difficulties, such efforts at collaboration and exchange are critically important to the future of Australia and occasionally it is possible to experience an event which extends the gift of hope, that evokes the possibility of a reconciled future tor black and white Australia. In the current political climate, I am grateful tor the smallest glimmer. But, less sceptically, the experience of sound installation, lngamal Godingi, at the Fremantle Arts Centre