Her Eyes Were as Black as Coal
V Barratt and Francesca da Rimini
Medium: 3D Modeling, Algorithmic Processes, Animation, and Video (2019)
Issues: Australia, Cultural Activism, Decolonialism, Ecology, and Speculative Fiction
Project Links
Description
Her Eyes Were As Black As Coal is a work by the Australian collective In Their Interior (ITI), comprised of V Barratt and Francesca da Rimini. Originating from a “mother” script that the artists created through experimental constraint-based writing, this installation offers expanded ways to see, so that we may better comprehend the interdependencies of our existence and reflect on what is needed for us to collectively thrive. This conceptually immersive 2-channel video work features 3D modeling and animation, footage of Australian landscapes (unceded First Nations territory), fossils, human/non-human/speculative beings.
The script was generated through iterative algorithmic processes. The audio track includes a base of electronically generated sounds.Her Eyes Were As Black As Coal foregrounds the voices and images of non-human and speculative creatures and their connection to country. We consider the cultural significance of the site of Murrkangga and surrounds, the traditional lands of the Karta and Kaurna peoples. This location, so-called Hallet Cove in South Australia, is of “great geological importance”, with evidence of glaciation over 280 million years ago. The voices of 3 computer-modeled avatars–krill, spore and terra–speak to themes of human exceptionalism and violence, geology and time travel, noting that “all of the human strata will be pressed to the thickness of a single epidermal sheet.” The three speculative voices are counterpoints to colonial narratives of place and Western beliefs around sentience. Co-creation, a core value of In Their Interior’s (ITI) practice, is essentially anti-capitalist. Co-creation is mobilized in this context, not just between Barratt and da Rimini, but also between ITI and others connected ancestrally to the land and materials the artists use. This approach provides a rich basis for experimentation with form and methodology, embracing multiple creative modalities and theoretical perspectives, and creating an open system of doing-with-others that prioritizes mutual support and survival. ITI believes that this is the most appropriate way to pursue a creative life in times of precarity. They are committed to cultivating practices that disrupt capitalism’s commodification of the artist, and to using speculative modes to acknowledge historic and systemic injustices degradations, and to imagine different ways of being in this world with others.
Credits for information on Murrkangga, and the Kartan artefacts found at the [Hallett Cove] site:
Kaurna Warra Pintyanthi
https://able.adelaide.edu.au/humanities/kaurna-warra-pintyanthi-kwp-team
https://digital.library.adelaide.edu.au/dspace/bitstream/2440/110847/1/KrildhungMurrkangga.pdf
The artists would like to acknowledge:
They have benefited greatly from talks and Welcome ceremonies they have attended, and walking talking with Jack Kanya Buckskin, a member of KYP and a Kaurna language teacher.
The works of artist James P Tylor, who created a series of works called “We Call This Place”, as they have also gained insight to Kartan Culture through his exhibition “Karta (Island of the Dead)”. James P Tylor also worked on a great project with artist-activist Matt Chun called “Unmonumental”, which talked about the bloody colonial history holding up the many public monuments we find all over Australia, and rendered these in poignant watercolours.
The artistic and activist practices of the following friends and colleagues:
Natalie Harkin and the Unbound Collective
Auntie Margaret Brodie
SJ Norman and Knowledge of Wounds
R E A
Karla Dickens
Tony Albert
The webinars and workshops run by the Australian Earth Law Association, learning at the feet of Aboriginal elders who are erudite, fierce, passionate. People like Mary Graham and Anna Poelina. (https://www.earthlaws.org.au/resources/). Historian and activist Gary Foley (co-founder of the Aboriginal Tent Embassy) and renowned activist warrior Uncle Kevin Buzzacott
The first-hand accounts of dispossession and victories, shared through Aboriginal-led activist environmental campaigns such as the fight against a nuclear dump (the Irati Wanti campaign).
The compelling body of work by Indigenous activists, artists and data scientists from around the world https://spectrum.library.concordia.ca/id/eprint/986506/, who are leading the way in positioning Indigenous Protocols and Country-Centred Design at the heart of AI development and deployment, a material and inspiring example of how collective principles and practices developed by First Nations peoples over millennia are as relevant and applicable now as ever.
Refiguring the Future, Hunter College Art Galleries, 205 Hudson Gallery, New York, 2019
Sound: V Barratt
Voices: V Barratt, Harriet Fraser-Barbour, Agnese Trocchi, Lika Karavela
In February – March 2019, In Her Interior exhibited the mixed media installation ‘her eyes were as black as coal…’at 205 Hudson Gallery in New York. They had produced the work for the Refiguring the Future exhibition curated by REFRESH. Three characters – krill, spore and terra – emerged from the not-yet photographed black hole. The conditions were momentarily perfect to give voice to the anthropoetics of time-travelling fossil-becomings. These voices without organs had been channeled by In Her Interior through field trips and the fugue-induced sympoiesis of collaborative writing across timespace.
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