Mediated Interactions

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Throughout 2021 I am working on a research led Honours project at the University of New South Wales, Art & Design, Sydney, Australia. The traditional custodians of this place where I live are the Gadigal people of the Eora Nation. Sovereignty of this land where I live was never ceded.

 

I am a 'settler coloniser' who came here from Aotearoa, New Zealand over 30 years ago.1  I am using the privilege of my education to prioritise the 'process and practices with which settler colonisers may begin to participate in the work of bureaucratic, cultural, linguistic and psychological decolonisation'.2 I am researching, among other things, how to develop a decolonisation practice using Maori analysis, the indigenous people of Aotearoa, New Zealand.3 This means 'I recognise Maori as tangata whenua [people of the land]: by learning about the meaning of tangata whenua in the Maori sense'.4  

 

These short video poems are an experimentation of conceptualising how I relate to my immediate environment during the learning I undertake, as a "grateful interloper" on the unceded land where I live.5