Future Present Desert, 2016
Video installation
This work is a new single channel video - to be presented as an installation including physical elements and video projection - made on location in Lajamanu, a Warlpiri community about 900 km from Darwin, on the edge of the Tanami Desert in central Australia. The piece is a surreal, dystopian blend of ‘reality’ out in the remote, Australian desert, traditional ghost stories and dreamtime stories, personal experiences of the Warlpiri artists, and science fiction.
The work forces the audience to attend closely to the critical elements framed within the work, the social commentary stemming from the contemporary, lived experience of the Warlpiri people - rather than relying on known stereotypes or traditional cultural frameworks.
In this way, this cultural point of view is presented as vibrant, living, and possessing its own agency to synthesise the present out of tradition, the past, and the future. There is an investigation of the ways in which culture and technology intertwine and how technology is appropriated by marginalized communities and used for their own purposes.
Acknowledgements: the Lajamanu community and Lajamanu elders, the traditional land owners, the Warnayaka Art and Cultural Aboriginal Corporation
