Making and doing people-places in north central Arnhem Land

This presentation elaborates practices in creating archives of ‘contemporary doing of Indigenous Country’. Together with a commissioning group of Indigenous elders and knowledge holders from north central Arnhem Land, over the last 18-months we have experimented with using video to enliven ‘people-places’ across generations. This has involved staging a series of journeys to remote Ancestral Country using helicopters, boats, 4wd vehicles, video cameras and drones. While apparently these videos constitute an archive of a contemporary moment in the on-going collective life of these Ancestral places, they profoundly challenge the Western concept of archive. The presentation will attempt to bring to the fore the practices of both Indigenous and Western institutions involved in the staging of the collective performance of people-place. In doing so, we intend to expose the tensions inherent in the digital objects we have created together.