Rural Utopias Residency: Alana Hunt in Kununurra #1

Alana Hunt is currently working with the community of Kununurra. This residency forms part of one of Spaced’s current programs, Rural Utopias.

Alana Hunt is an artist and writer who lives on Miriwoong country in the north-west of Australia. This and her long-standing relationship with South Asia—and with Kashmir in particular—shapes her engagement with the violence that results from the fragility of nations and the aspirations and failures of colonial dreams.

Here, Alana shares an update from Kununurra.

Thank you both for your emails – we will contact you as soon as possible.

Tue 27/08/2019 4:05pm

Response from a potential host who never once replied to another email.

 I am the first artist who lives in the region within which their spaced residency will take place. This prospect really excites me, in terms of my own capacity to chew through work close to my heart and home with the support of an established organisation like International Art Space. And to move beyond and side-step the fly-in-fly-out practices that dominate much of the art world, and regional and remote Australia more broadly. However, it took over a year, and a trail of briefly answered or more generally unanswered emails, to find a local ‘host’ for my SPACED residency; a core criteria of the SPACED program. And so, in some ways this residency began to exhaust me before it had even begun.

Through this process I felt awkwardly pressured to prove and convince other people of my worth. If I had come from elsewhere—perhaps a city, or another country—I suspect this would have been easier. But there were also more complex factors at play that made securing a ‘host’ organisation a little more difficult than it could have otherwise been.

This illustrates the stretched capacity many organisations within the north-west of Australia live out as their status-quo, and/or their inherent dysfunctions. I also think it points to a kind of structural conservatism that shapes Kununurra, a town that is racially divided and was forged on on Miriwoong country in the 1960s. Additionally, there was the more complex fact that while in other SPACED residencies the host is asked to support artists by providing accommodation and introductions to the community, in my case, as a local artist with a home and relationships already established, these two things were not needed. So, by default we were actually asking organisations to come on board more as partners in ideas, process and research. A bigger, bolder commitment, particularly when my practice engages with the violence and fragility inherent in colonial aspirations for a rural utopia.

With no apparent host, I came very close to giving up on the residency and just getting on with my work. And then one evening, quite by chance, I met a staff member at the Kimberley Land Council. We began to discuss some photos I had been taking over the last two years which will feature in The National in 2021—mostly of tourists, roads and gravel pits. And suddenly our mutual artistic and legal practices came together like two pieces of a puzzle.

In October 2020 we finalised an MOU so that, as part of the Spaced program, I became the KLC’s first official artist in residence. This is a responsibility I don’t take lightly. I am conscious of being a non-Indigenous person drawing energy and insight from an Aboriginal organisation, one whose importance in the region cannot be overstated. I know it is a hard nut to crack, but I hope the energy and insight can be something we share, that builds fluidly over time.

I’m not here so much to learn about “Aboriginal culture” but want to use this time with the KLC to learn about my own non-Indigenous culture, specifically the legal and bureaucratic processes it structures to enable colonisation. And to find ways to make this ongoing legislated violence more legible to the world through art.

I am learning more about the WA Aboriginal Heritage Act and the forceful acquisition of gravel pits in the region. I am thinking critically about processes of ‘consultation’ and various notions of ‘community’, ‘engagement’, and ‘benefit’, (terms thrown around quite commonly within the arts and also beyond).

I began the residency by attending the KLC’s AGM at Kooljaman on Bardi country, roughly 200kms north of Broome. Here I was able to listen to the organisation’s key priorities, workings and decision making processes, meet with old friends, get to know staff, and to speak with the legal team in person and in depth.

I now work Friday’s from the KLC’s Kununurra office, and at other times when invited. In doing so I’m drawing on the artistic influence of artists working in relational ways by slipping within non-art organisational structures, such as Mierle Laderman Ukeles and her ongoing relationship with the New York City’s Department of Sanitation. Another work that comes to mind is a complex and powerful artist residency program that placed artists within Israel’s Department of Urban Planning—folding in and against the strategic heart of the Israeli occupation of Palestine. I heard the curator’s of this program speak in 2014 at Open Engagement at the Queen’s Museum, but mysteriously can’t find any evidence of the program online since, so it may have become something else in my mind. But it is an inspiration nonetheless.

I am reading documents, and learning how simple it is to fill out a form in order to get legal permission to destroy an Aboriginal site. I’m navigating maps, that are as incomplete as they are full. Talking and listening, and building relationships. Visiting places. Asking questions. Wrapping my head around the various forms of legislation that make colonisation legal. And I am looking for the best ways to make these violent dreams of a rural utopia more legible to the public via relational and responsive art making processes.

-Alana Hunt