Re-membering my Charrúa roots on unceded
land: weaving new narratives
The artist at her ancestral river, Rio Cuareim/Quarai at Perau. October 2023, Artigas, Uruguay. Photo by Ana Corina Britos.
The framework for my PhD thesis arises from my experiences cultivating relationship with Beada-o-Lajau an ancestral Ombú tree (Phytolacca dioica), native to Uruguay where I was born. My relationship with Lajau facilitates a journey of re-membering the knowledges held at the intersections of my ancestral lineages. Regular encounters with this particular plantcestor, who grows on Gadigal Country close to where I live, not only aided in my ancestral Charrúa re-membering but prompted a sentipensante/feel-thinking relationship with the land I inhabit. Taking an autoethnographic approach informed by a feel-thinking-doing methodology, a personal relational map emerges that spans multiple places and times, with Lajau at its center.
Working predominantly in tejido /weaving using crochet, tapestry, coiling and beading, I dance between being practice-led and led by place to express and integrate my experiences. In the process of relating aspects of my story, the practice of re-membering becomes a way to counteract colonial narratives of erasure and reckon with my position as a settler-migrant inextricably implicated in the ongoing colonial project that is so-called Australia. Weaving becomes a language and a space for feeling and thinking through reclaiming ancestral practice and embodied ways of knowing whilst living away from my ancestral lands. The resultant artworks generate their own symbolic visual language in the form of woven cartographies, a series of physically impassable gateways that speak to connections across waterways.
Although anchored in the personal, the themes in this research echo those who share in collective human concerns to be in right-relationship with ourselves, the communities we are part of and our environment. The lands and waterways affirm their role as living knowledge systems, facilitating re-membering and potential new perspectives on south-south global relationships and the intersections of Charrúa and Afro-descendant identities in Uruguay.
This project is part of a practice-led PhD comprising a written thesis and an exhibition. The exhibition will be open to the public on Saturday 14th of December 10:30am to 5pm and Sunday 15th of December 10:30am to 4pm.
River SkippingHúe Sepe/Saltando Rios/River Skipping is a collection of reflections on place that represent a personal relational map.
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Lajau is my universeLajau is my Universe is a visual journal documenting a 13 moon (Guaroj Detí Guidai/13 month) process of deepening my connection to a grandmother ancestral tree, Beada-o-Lajau.
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