Ephemerality:Morality:Sovereignty

BACKGROUND: This portfolio gathers published and exhibited works based on our collaboration as artist and academic. The works problematise the burden of responsibility on Indigenous people having to respond to ongoing forms of colonial violence. We ask: How do we journey towards a permanent sovereignty (of the self) without adding to this burden? This question legitimises the global movement of Indigenous people reasserting their rights. In Australia, First Nations communities are reclaiming knowledge practices as clear articulations of self-determination and sovereignty-never-ceded. Yet few have addressed what it takes to engage non-Indigenous researchers to the decolonising of research in the process of strengthening individual sovereignties. CONTRIBUTION: Ephemerality:Morality:Sovereignty links the theme of temporality to morality and permanency, and questions of sustained ethical engagement to the cause of Indigenous sovereignty. Couzens' contribution as artist challenges the context of ephemerality through her multimedia works, which represent communal narratives across the mediums of possum skins, metal plates and public installations. Guntarik collaborated to collate the media representations of these works as a sustained form of archival agency, thus positioning the practice of research with First Nations peoples as an ongoing politically- and socially-engaged agenda. SIGNIFICANCE: The works contribute to co-creation discourses (Spurgeon 2013), which are attentive to the ways in which cultural exchanges produce, realise and revitalise material and epistemic value, while echoing new concerns over Indigenous data sovereignty (Kukutai & Taylor 2016). We presented this project at the AIATSIS National Indigenous Research Conference in Canberra (2017). Couzens' work is supported through a Lowitja Institute award ($80,000) and was recognized through a 2016 fellowship, in the Australia Council National Indigenous Art Award category, at the Sydney Opera House.