"PERMEATE | mapping skin and tides of saturated resistance" 2023
On this page
Read the wall text
Listen to the wall text
Wall text
Unbound Collective
Artist Collective formed 2014: Faye Rosas Blanch (she/her) (Mbararam, Yidinyji) born 1959, Atherton Tablelands, Yidinyji Country; Natalie Harkin (she/her) (Narungga), born 1970, Tarntanya/Adelaide, Kaurna Country; Simone Ulalka Tur (she/her) (Yankunytjatjara), born 1971, Tarntanya/Adelaide, Kaurna Country; Ali Gumillya Baker (she/her) (Mirning), born 1975, Tarntanya/Adelaide, Kaurna Country.
Live and work in Tarntanya/Adelaide, Kaurna Country.
"PERMEATE | mapping skin and tides of saturated resistance" 2023
two channel HD video, two skirts of fibre, sea gifts, cotton, feathers, shells, light, sound, vinyl
8:00 minutes
Courtesy of Unbound Collective. Unbound acknowledges the work of Clem Newchurch and Peter Turner. Video editor Jess Wallace, Projectionist Freddy Komp.
PERMEATE processes climate grief and rage, Indigenous blood-memory, the fast and slow erosion of land by water, and the irreversible salination poisoning of Kaurna Yarta mangrove forests. This is not another ode to the stalwart resilience of an Indigenous people and place under siege. This is a lament carried through breath and its absence, song and hum and their absence, as much as an offering to life-giving land.
It is not widely known that mangrove forests and seagrass meadows hold much more carbon than forests and plains on land. The jarring imagery of the dead zone ecologies next to still living ones is an omen and a contemporary teaching that traverses times and geographies, for the cycle of twining and weaving natural fibres into netting pervades Indigenous worldviews of mutuality and balance.
In PERMEATE, Unbound Collective focuses attention on the spiritual and cultural flows impeded by the increasing saline poisoning of the precious few mangroves remaining in Kaurna Country. The soft repetition of breathing and the slow traversing of mangroves in the film relay a certain calm before the storm of what is to come. Every fourth breath comes from the mangroves; they are the nursery for life and the oceans.