Transcript
How do we emphasise joy and beauty without hiding from the hardship of the legacy? What do we do with all these narratives? What do we do with these threads of all these different stories? Some that are really painful and some that are so beautiful? And how do we honour that space with the right weight? Like, how do we tell a story with so many shades?
My name is Jazz Money. I am a Wiradjuri person who makes film and poetry and art kind of in varying degrees of proximity and seriousness. I'm working on a piece called Rodeo Baby! for ACMI, which is looking at visual archives, and I became really obsessed with rodeo footage. And then once I started looking, those just this plethora of Blackfella rodeo content.
And so I've been looking at that and also writing an essay about the complexities of the archive and have married these visual archives and this text into a very large fabric work. There's something really powerful about returning to these sites of tension and sort of restoring honour to people, those really strong ancestors and kin who were maybe documented in ways that weren't ethical but we now have the ability to sort of return that ethic and honour these people. We're all these living archives, you know, our body is the truest archive that we can have and when we look at images of bodies, we're looking at things that are so much truer and deeper and richer than any sort of archive on the shelf can ever be.
We're all coming from a place of complexity and ignoring that is not how we're going to make good of that complexity.