Léuli Eshrāghi

Saltwater Sensibilities: Poetry and Movements of the Great Ocean

1–6 August 2022

Media
Performance, Theory / Praxis

Location
Either Fortress Hohensalzburg (on site) or online

Teaching language
English

Maximum number of participants
20

Participation fee
€ 420.– (reduced € 340.–)

Before and during this course centered on saltwater sensibilities, participants will be immersed in Indigenous poetry and performance art from the Great Ocean. Extracts from recent works will form the basis of our gestural and intellectual inquiry, from literature: Craig Santos Perez, Noʻu Revilla, Dan Taulapapa McMullin, Léuli Eshrāghi and Paul Tavo; and from digital art: Shannon Te Ao, Angela Tiatia, Taloi Havini, Léuli Eshrāghi and Ahilapalapa Rands.

Following several days of discussion, reading, listening and sharing on a shared hearth in a collective learning environment, we will focus attention on orature, creating poetry, genealogical narrative, speculative proclamation, and on relational performance, creating new or renewed ceremony, choreographic gestures, and ritualized space for genders and sexualities that is constructed socially. This emphasis on creation informed by recent works and voices is part of a current of Indigenous creative expression that resists colonial museologies where Ancestral Belongings and inheritances are fixed in time. It does so to avoid using the terms of object or asset with their particular connotations.

Respecting Indigenous cultural and intellectual property principles, this course is imagined as a space promoting the non-cannibalistic consumption of alterity, according to collective learning modes defined by the Sāmoan and Tuvaluan artist and researcher Rosanna Raymond. In this vein, the course charts a humble journey through Indigenous art and ideas of the Great Ocean, which constitutes a third of this planet. Seeking to create our own non-colonial gestures to enact healing, rebalance and reparations, we will analyze and learn from the best practices of artists, writers, and curators who are not usually studied in northern Atlantic contexts.