Rural Utopias Residency: Alana Hunt in Kununurra #5

Nov 4

Alana Hunt is currently working with the community of Kununurra. This residency forms part of one of Spaced’s current programs, Rural Utopias.

Alana Hunt is an artist and writer who lives on Miriwoong country in the north-west of Australia. This and her long-standing relationship with South Asia—and with Kashmir in particular—shapes her engagement with the violence that results from the fragility of nations and the aspirations and failures of colonial dreams.

Here, Alana shares an update from Kununurra.

The Sound of Circles and Squares

Documentation of live events often run the risk of building an image of something that isn’t quite true to the dynamics of what took place in time and space, between people, in the air, at a precise and precious moment in time.

Each image or video of the Waringarri Dancer’s performative response to the screening of Nine Hundred and Sixty Seven at the Kununurra Picture Gardens on 25 September 2022 seems to fragment that evening.

It is difficult to fully capture the wholeness of what took place between dancers and singers, between performers and publics, between cinematic projection and the body’s movement, between narration and song, between the setting sun, this stolen Country, and our unconventional gathering. As if evidence of Ali Cobby Eckermann’s poem Circles and Squares—the right angles of our visual frames seem wholly inadequate.

That evening was a unique encounter with the persistence and banality of bureaucratically embedded violence and the liveliness and joy and humour and power of Miriwoong culture as it was held and delivered by the Waringarri Dancers, led by Chris Griffiths.

I invite you—quite simply—to listen to this melange:

Sam Walsh AO, former CEO of Rio Tinto, narrates 967 project summaries of applications submitted between 2010-20 via Section 18 of the WA Aboriginal Heritage Act seeking legal permission to “destroy, damage, or alter” an Aboriginal site.

Waringarri Dancers respond.

Please, turn up the volume. And give it your time.

Alana Hunt

October 2022