Climate change and Oceanic Responsibilities: Listening and dancing with Saltwater Country, Australia

Keywords: climate change, Saltwater Country, sand art, drone photography, healing
Session Type: Virtual Paper Abstract
Day: Friday
Session Start / End Time: 2/25/2022 05:20 PM (Eastern Time (US & Canada)) - 2/25/2022 06:40 PM (Eastern Time (US & Canada))
Room: Virtual 12

Abstract

This paper decolonises oceanic knowledges through a focus on currents of belonging to Saltwater Country, Australia. The paper focuses on sand art that emerges from listening and dancing with Gunditjmara and Wathaurong Saltwater Country. Oceanic responsibilities materialise and become sensible through the touch of the sand, seasons, tides, waves, currents, wind and sky that then goes viral when these artworks are captured by drone photography. While mainstream geospatial ontologies use scientific expertise as well as artificial intelligence to document and address the effects of climate change, the grounded as well as aerial vision explored in this paper calls for flying and communicating with elemental and spiritual forces. Coming together across their diverse experiences of racialisation and belonging to Country, Lowell, a Nyul Nyul Saltwater Man with creative as well as cultural knowledge expertise and Michele, an Australian woman of Indian heritage from deltaic Bengal illuminate the vitality of ‘oceanic turns’. These turns mobilise movements of peace, reinvigoration, cleansing, healing, whale dreaming and ‘help us find our way’ amid the violence of climate change. The experimental collaborative storying of belonging to Saltwater Country that meshes photographs, videos, scientific knowledge, embodied participation and artistic performances produces more-than-human frames of knowledge that decolonise the Southern Ocean.