Opening: Objects testify

You are invited to the opening event for Objects testify, a community-engaged program exploring the colonial legacies of Australia's built environment and its ongoing impact on First Nations communities, led by Wiradjuri anti-disciplinary artist Joel Sherwood Spring.

Aunty Rhonda Dixon Grovenor will give a Welcome to Country to open Objects testify. Aunty Rhonda is a Gadigal, Bidjigal and Yuin elder who works in healing ceremony.

Objects testify provokes an understanding of architecture as not just the built environment, but the digital and social technologies that propel the conditions of extraction from the mine to the materiality of social life. Sherwood Spring articulates ‘digging’ as the foremost colonial technique that makes all other colonial forms of exploitation possible.  Alongside Sherwood Spring's video work DIGGERMODE (2022) are loaned objects from public and private collections which illustrate the technologies of extraction and the ideologies that propel extractive practices.

A program of closed and public conversations between First Nations community, scholars, artists, architects, and designers articulates the wider discourses of DIGGERMODE and consider the possibility of new forms of testimony. For this opening session, Joel Sherwood Spring will be in conversation with Lorna Munro. 

Lorna Munro, or ‘Yilinhi’, is a Wiradjuri and Gamilaroi woman, multidisciplinary artist and regular radio and podcast host at Sydney’s ‘Radio Skid Row’. A long-time active member of her Redfern/Waterloo community, her work is informed by her passion and  well-studied insight in areas such as culture, history, politics and popular culture.