Truth Telling Through Creative Practice Research

Australia remains a continent strikingly rife with colonial-placemaking and troubling commemorations celebrating colonial land grabbers and murders. How can Australian cities and towns more meaningfully embed truth-telling in public (stolen) places and promote it as a civic responsibility? In this panel we discuss how First Nations artists are imagining the future memorials and First Peoples-centred placemaking for unceded lands, in creative practices and public artworks that truth-tell Australia's colonial foundations and celebrate First Peoples enduring presence and cultural resurgence.

CHAIR
Dr Amy Spiers

Amy Spiers is an artist, curator, writer and researcher living and working on the unceded Country of the Wurundjeri Woi Wurrung and Boon Wurrung peoples in Narrm (Melbourne, Australia). Amy is currently a Vice Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Fellow at RMIT School of Art (2022-25), where she is engaged in research that explores the capacity of public and socially engaged art to critique and positively transform present society, and how such art practices might generatively address difficult colonial histories and social relations between Indigenous and settler peoples in Australia. She was recently awarded an Australian Research Council 2024 Discovery Early Career Researcher Award (DECRA) for the project: 'The hard work of decolonisation: Truth-telling Australia's colonial past with art by non-Indigenous artists'

PANEL

Associate Professor Vicki Couzens is a Keerray Woorroong Gunditjmara woman from the Western Districts of Victoria. Vicki has worked in Aboriginal community affairs for over 45 years. She is a Senior Knowledge Holder for Possum Skin Cloak Story as well as Language Reclamation and Revival in her Keerray Wooroong Mother Tongue. Vicki’s contributions in the reclamation, regeneration and revitalisation of cultural knowledge and practices extend across the ‘arts and creative cultural expression’ spectrum, including language research, community development, public art, community arts, visual and performing arts, writing, publications, and her personal creative work. Vicki acknowledges her Ancestors and Elders who guide her in her work. Vicki is the Co-Director of the new First Nations Transdisciplinary Research Initiative Yoonggama at the School of Media and Communications.

Dr Jody Haines (palawa) is the Research Fellow of Self-Determination and Sovereignty at the new First Nations Transdisciplinary Research Initiative Yoonggama at the School of Media and Communications. Jody is a contemporary artist based in Naarm, whose practice blends social practice, photo-media, and public art, creating large-scale public activations that include projections and photographic installations. Rooted in Indigenous feminist known materialism, Jody's work explores themes of identity, representation, and the female gaze.

Access
This session will be recorded but not live-streamed.
The Building 100, Level 10 spaces are accessible via lifts from the street-level entry located at the corner of Victoria & Swanston Streets.

Image: Jody Haines, Blak Swan, from the series Flowing with the Future (Surviving Batman), 2024