Curatorial Design at the Cultural Interface: Mapping Culpra Station

Abstract

While the impetus towards decolonization presents significant issues for more institutionalized forms of curating and how they attend to Indigenous cultural content, equally, this situation presents distinct opportunities to establish alternative forms of curatorial practice that engage with inter‐cultural knowledge exchange through collaboration with Indigenous communities. We offer here a contextual framing of a series of interconnected design events and exhibition outcomes that originated from an invitation to creatively ‘map’ an Aboriginal owned station property in southern New South Wales, Australia. Curatorial Design will be used to encompass the mix of disciplinary knowledge that this creative research project calls upon along with interdisciplinary approaches employed that draw from (but are not limited to) practice‐based methods from art and design, especially spatial practice, as well as archaeology, anthropology, cartography and ethnography. This overarching term has been adopted in an effort not to pigeonhole the nature of thinking or doing that the creative curatorial practices detailed in this article entail, either of the participants involved in the project or outcomes resulting from the collaborative processes discussed herein. As the opening, scene‐setting entry of the Interpretive Wonderings Portfolio*, this article identifies the contexts within which the project situates itself – between Indigenous and Western knowledge systems; disciplinary and interdisciplinary “know‐how”; theory and practice – in order to establish the positions of the four chief protagonists directly engaged in the project in relation to this ‘cultural interface’. It sets out some of the shifts in understanding of these positions and in particular the ways that the original project’s framing through critical cartography was both facilitated and transformed in turn through consideration of Aboriginal ontologies. These evolving positions and their relationships to each other are articulated in a series of abbreviated individual reflections provided at the conclusion of this project overview. *The Interpretive Wonderings portfolio comprises a set of interrelated writings that attempt to provide a distinctive, multi‐perspectival account of this creative research project. In addition to this contextual piece, other articles include: a compilation of short texts that offer reflective analyses from the different perspectives of the project’s curatorium and principal researchers, Sophia Pearce, Campbell Drake, Jock Gilbert and Sven Mehzoud (Drake et al. 2019b, this issue), and individual research‐led articles by Gilbert (2019, this issue) and Mehzoud (2019, this issue). Read individually, each designated article presents a focused inquiry (depth); taken together as a curated series, they provide the reader with the opportunity to gain a comprehensive overview (breadth) and appreciation of the project’s guiding aspirations, objectives and outcomes that amounts to more than the sum of its discrete parts.

On Country: Emplaced Approaches to Collaborative Community Engagement [and] ((in) Through) Mapping Processes in ‘Workshop’ Mode

“…As contextualized previously in the accompanying article found in the Interpretive Wonderings Portfolio (Drake et al 2019a, this issue), the Interpretive Wonderings workshop allowed or facilitated a shift in understanding from the concept of landscape towards that of Country. The anthropologist Deborah Bird Rose has described Country as 'multi-dimensional'; "it consists of people, animals, plants, Dreamings; underground, earth, soils, minerals and waters, surface water, and air.…”

“…*Editorial note: The Interpretive Wonderings Portfolio comprises a set of interrelated writings that attempt to provide a distinctive, multi-perspectival account of this creative research project. In addition to this research piece, other articles include: a co-authored contextual overview which situates the project in theoretical and practical terms (Drake et al 2019a, this issue)', a compilation of short texts that offer reflective analyses from the different perspectives of the project's principal researchers, Sophia Pearce, Campbell Drake, Jock Gilbert and Sven Mehzoud (Drake et al 2019b, this issue), and an associated research-led article by Mehzoud (2019, this issue). Read individually, each designated article presents a focused inquiry (depth); taken together as a curated series, they provide the reader with the opportunity to gain a comprehensive overview (breadth) and appreciation of the project's guiding aspirations, objectives and outcomes that amounts to more than the sum of its discrete parts.…”

Collected Reflections

“…The sentiments expressed in this speech are indicative of an open and inclusive curatorial process that is outward facing enabling an active engagement in the spatial politics of reconciliatory processes across institutional and non-institutional contexts. An extract from this speech can be found in the accompanying article (Drake et al 2019a, this issue) that forms part of the Interpretive Wonderings Portfolio.…”

“…The emphasis on active participation suggests the potential for a co-authoring of the exhibition content. The process of the Interpretive Wonderings intercultural partnership and art project involved a workshop on Culpra Stationdiscussed in more detail in the contextual overview (Drake et al 2019a, this issue) and the research article provided by Gilbert (2019, this issue); both included as part of the Interpretive Wonderings Portfoliowhich provided the opportunity for the participants to learn about Barkandji cultural practices and listen to and share stories about Barkandji country. In response to this three-day experience, the creative practitioners generated works as spatial mappings that interpreted Culpra Station, its people, its place, and time.…”

“…As described in our contextual overview to the Interpretive Wonderings Portfolio (Drake et al , this issue ), community members and participants were invited to respond to the material and immaterial qualities of the landscape of Culpra Station through the Interpretive Wonderings mapping workshop. The invitation was extended to engage with these landscape qualities both through direct experience and through the stories of that landscape as told by elders and community members and to interpret these stories through creative practice, thus producing a mapping as an artefact for exhibition.…”