wheatbelt anticipatory archive I
| wheatbelt anticipatory archive I | 2023 | looped digital video with archive | multiples |
| Artwork, image and photography © Perdita Phillips | both/and | ||
| 8 minute digital video installation | edition 3/3 available | $3300 each, archive NFS | |
| digital video with accompanying photographic archive | |||
| Exhibition: Bunbury Biennale: A cultural ecology | 2023 | Bunbury Regional Art Gallery, Bunbury | |
This work was created for the 2023 Bunbury Biennale: culture / nature.
Catalogue Statement
I see one of my own roles as an artist as creating spaces for imagining alternative environmental futures — of creating ‘anticipatory archives’ — not already in existence. I use what I call a strategy of ‘both/and’: acknowledging the role of complicity in social-ecological systems and how each of us struggle to maintain a contingent—yet effective—position as human and ecosystem participant. In February I was given an unassuming tray of about six thousand small photographs of farming properties in southwest Western Australia. Taken from a plane, they are an archive made by humans, for humans. I am the third artist to be custodian (or moral discharger?) of this accidental archive. I scanned in around 1000 photographs and set myself the task of unsettling the eye of settler colonialism with a more ecological vision.We are water damaged, blurry, eaten, glued-together, dog-eared and scratched. We represent a moment in the history of the Wheatbelt — sometime after the1950s? But we have lost our negatives and our histories can only be gleaned from occasional comments on our backs.What happens if an archive is for the future and not just the past? What happens if it speaks forwards as well as backwards — and for the more-than-human? Uncertainty about truth and orientation is at the core of unsettling the present. A thousand portraits of homes from the golden age of the Wheatbelt are partnered with animals on the edge of extinction, paleaorivers and salt lakes, and landscapes of recovery. With its insistent rhythm, this artwork is driven to count the toll, not just of the past, but for what might yet be possible.You are small fragments of experience at the level of the ground in remnant bushland — well below the scale of the aerial view. You are the colour of the soil and the sound of wind in the sheoak.