Video Art and Digital Archives Part 2: The Time I Did Public Speaking About It
In my last blog post, I talked a little about the Mulka Project which is an archive in an Indigenous community in the Northern Territory of Australia. Mulka has two parts: the digital archive, which consists of historical and contemporary material, and the digital production house, which uses the archival material to produce installations and works of art. Mulka began as a digital repatriation project that aimed to give Yolngu people access to their own family documents. Before Mulka, Yolngu people had to travel to institutions across Australia and internationally in order to see photos, videos, and recordings of their family members that had been collected by anthropologists and linguists. Now, Yolngu people can just pop into Mulka and download these documents whenever they want.
I visited Yirrkala, the home of Mulka, last summer and got to see the archive in action. They have a computer room where people can access the archive and put anything they want on USB drives. They also have an auditorium where visitors can queue up videos to watch on the big screen. It was incredible to watch people download hours and hours of family videos, and then come back the next day to download even more. Photos and videos of elders are cherished by many people in the community.
Perhaps most relevant to my work, however, is the space where the “new stuff” gets made (that’s how people at Mulka refer to it). Shortly after Mulka started in 2007, artists became interested in incorporating the archival documents into their artistic practice. Yolngu artists have produced films, songs, sculptural works, and projection installations using the digital materials of their ancestors.
One artist who works at Mulka, Dhukumul Wanambi, was recently a finalist for the National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Award in Multimedia. Her work was titled Gurka’wuy, the name of her father’s ancestral homeland, and featured the projected image of drone footage he recorded at Gurka’wuy surrounded by animated rings of his clan designs.
I had the privilege of moderating a panel with Dhukumul and another artist from Yirrkala, Milminyina Dhamarrandji, at the Asia Society in New York on Saturday, September 21st as part of the exhibition opening of Madayin: Eight Decades of Bark Painting from Yirrkala. It seemed so timely because I had just finished drafting my previous blog post about video art and the way that Indigenous artists are engaging with and building their own archives. I was not originally supposed to be the moderator for that event, but circumstance made it so that I had about 12 hours notice before I was supposed to get up on stage, in front of an auditorium of people at a major New York City museum, and facilitate a discussion about Mulka and Yolngu filmmaking. It was the first panel I ever moderated and it was going to be at such an immense scale!
After my initial freak out over being on stage and having to do public speaking, I reminded myself that my role was just to give Dhukumul and Milminyina the space to talk about what they wanted to talk about. It helped that I had been to Yirrkala recently and was such a huge fan of their work. Dhukumul talked so beautifully about how she wanted to use video to show the inextricable connection between land and Yolngu culture, like with Gurka’wuy’s footage of her father’s Country surrounded by his clan designs. The medium of video makes that connection so explicit while simultaneously acting as an archival document. Milminyina spoke about how important Mulka was for preserving culture for future generations.
Archives and their relationship with Indigenous people is very complex. Archives were used as a tool of colonization, stealing cultural objects in the name of “preservation.” There are many scholars who explain this ongoing history much more eloquently than I ever could. But it is really interesting to watch how Indigenous people conceive of and build their own archive, and how culturally generative Mulka has become.
Because I am only just starting my second year of my PhD, I am still in the process of trying to figure out what my dissertation project will be about. Coupled with my pursuit of Digital Humanities through Praxis, it feels like something keeps pulling me in the direction of video, performance, and the archive. And I’m lucky to know Dhukumul, Milminyina, and other artists who will continue to teach me about their art.
Emmy Monaghan with Dhukumul Wanambi and Milminyina Dhamarrandji at the Asia Society