Caring for Country is about fulfilling one’s responsibilities over a territory, it refers to the importance that Australian Aboriginal peoples place on customary land and water management. But Country does not only concern a specific place; it includes all living and non-living beings coexisting there. It is close to the notion of territory, central issue of international Indigenous struggles, primary place of colonial dispossession.
These issues bring another light to the question of care about artworks, objects and archives preserved by Western cultural institutions, in a post-colonial context. This study day will examine the sensitive and conceptual landscape in which these works were conceived as well as their ability to act and to relate. Articulating the notions of concern and ethics with those of artistic practice and museum conservation, the following question will arise: can art be a factor of repair?
Lotte Arndt participates in the round table organized by Daria de Beauvais and Morgan Labar under the theme « From Caring for Country to care in cultural institutions » in the frame of the seminar «Indigeneity, Hybridity, Anthropophagy».
Program:
Du "caring for country" au "care" dans les institutions culturelles | ENS (psl.eu)
The International Study Day within the framework of the seminar "Autochtonie, hybridité, anthropophagie" takes place on April 21, 2023 in Paris, École normale supérieure, department ARTS.
The rise in visibility of Indigenous practices in international contemporary art is a major phenomenon in the history of art being written, with the risk, at times, of becoming a simple label. The terms «hybridity» and «anthropophagy» (in reference to the «Anthropophagic Manifesto» of Oswald de Andrade) were thus attached to Indigeneity to avoid identity assignments and to question the invention of variable practices and identities, thwarting the categories inherited from colonialism and making it possible to rethink the relationship to nature, territory, humans and other than humans. By leaving the floor to researchers and artists, this seminar aims to shift the focus from institutional issues to those of creative processes, from assigned identities to the practices by which individuals designate themselves and invent their relationships to the world.