Migratory Wanderings

RESEARCH BACKGROUND: Migratory Wonderings offers an encounter of country through a series of works developed on Culpra Station in regional NSW; an interdisciplinary mapping workshop in collaboration with the Culpra Milli Aboriginal Corporation, exhibited at Mildura Arts Centre as Interpretive Wonderings. Framed as acts of critical cartography, these mappings seek to contest dominant and hegemonic power structures inherent in conventional cartography by opening a space of encounter through interpretation. RESEARCH CONTRIBUTION: The project aimed to open a transformative space of encounter through collaboration and participation between creative practitioners, community members and 'country' itself, through interpretive juxtaposition and overlay of stories. The space thus opened has been explored as a means through which truth claims are questioned and examined; new stories are produced and mapped. Migrating to 107 Projects in Redfern, a new spatial encounter is offered between Australia's regional and urban Indigenous contexts in relation to Redfern's urban history. The works explore multivalent connections to country, made explicit through literal and conceptual acts of migration, simultaneously realizing incremental shifts in non-indigenous understanding of Aboriginal cultural knowledge and its specific relationship to country. New knowledge is generated as these understandings relate to a broader relationship of community to country through the reinterpretation of Indigenous cosmology. RESEARCH SIGNIFICANCE: 107 Projects is a multidisciplinary, public creative space/gallery located in Redfern, supported by City of Sydney's Accommodation Grant Program. Inclusion of Migratory Wonderings in the 107 Projects program was enabled through the Creative Program Callout and Arts NSW Smartygrants Quick Response grants scheme. The public opening was attended by approximately 100 people, running a further two weeks.