by Lux Eterna
Acknowledgment:
The 8th Day is a work and ongoing collaboration that primarily acknowledges the traditional Barkindji, Mutthi Mutthi and Ngiyampaa First Peoples of the Willandra Lakes Region of NSW, Australia and celebrates their enduring connections to Country, knowledge and stories. Respects are paid to Elders and Ancestors who watch over us and guide our Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander brothers and sisters.
This essay is published with permission from the Embassy of Australia.
The 8th Day is a creative sustained exploration of the relationship between the Earth and human civilization. It invites us to reconsider and subvert the dominance of certain theological and cultural notions that have long separated humanity from the natural world and amongst each other. This work can be seen as vision-mapping away from socio-cultural hierarchies, towards a new authorship of land-informed origin stories, with which to re-spirit our human collective, in deeper relation with our Earth.
‘The universe is not made of atoms, it is made of stories’ Muriel Rukeyser
What is human civilisation without its stories told? Who tells these stories and why do we esteem certain ones, especially those which do not validate an earthly life above others?
In the exhibition titled triple channel dance video work, The 8th Day’s mysticism challenges the tropes of priestly and apostolic scribes. This work challenges the dogma of ordained systems that overrode relational interchange between the more-than-human and ourselves. This exhibition further scopes the sacred honouring of all earth informed socio-spiritual practices, the embodied wisdoms of our grandmothers, Indigenous and First Peoples globally; the sacred knowledge bearers whose scripture has been coded into our DNA. Those who thrive in deserts and those who teach us how to be with ourselves and amongst others, building kinships that support, protect and heal.
The 8th Day dance video work can be seen as a process. One that was carried from seed to shared dream and final production over five years. Filmed on the ancestral desert lands of the Barkindji, Mutthi Mutthi and Ngiyampaa People; the Willandra Lakes region, a UNESCO world heritage site enveloping the striking Lake Mungo, held the requisite deep time and space for its creation.
Making one’s journey out into the desert, is a life changing experience. Having worked with themes of arriving, departing, gravity, guardian, a 40000 year old body, unspoken language and deep time; the experience itself, now an ongoing locational practice, became the work. With Auntie Tanya Charles’ (Mutthi Mutthi) and Kerzlake’s (Wiradjuri) guidance, both overseeing our safety and guiding cultural connection to Country during production, synchronicities emerged effortlessly and are reverberating post production. More-than-human kinships manifested through sentinel ancestor magpies during smoking ceremony when welcoming us to Country, a mob of emus tracking us over three days and a final crowning by the Aurora Australis. What Auntie Tanya relayed to us as the most vital aspect of this chorus, was that we were ‘dancing spirit back into Country.’
This exhibition asks us to re-imagine our place in the world; not as dominant drivers, but as inseparable spirit of the Earth. Instead of cartographers who demarcate land; yet rather those who map the shared psycho-geographic fluctuations of a place over time. The 8th Day also serves invitation, to physically gather; to be in a web of relation, to weave in stories of old, and yarn in those yet to be told.
Here, we remember.
Confronting our colonial history and the atrocities committed; it took on average 5000 oak trees (35 hectares of woodland) to build a 110 gun ship in the late 18th century. Throughout this period, there were some 12000 British ships contouring our world’s oceans. What happened to our planet’s once vertiginous and ever-verdant expanses during this era, correlates how the globalized acceleration of agriculture, industry and now approaching techno-capitalism, trades land and life for ‘selective’ human progress.
Here, we dream.
Purposefully featuring in another part: a collection of intricately drawn trees, their inked limbs, reaching across coloured backgrounds, gilt with reflective gold elements, we may glimpse ourselves. Revering these majestic beings, by plotting frequencies received from meditations therewith; we are reminded that we are not separate from the more-than-human world and that they too, dignify us into being. Standing quietly, in a hall of cosmic mirrors, reflecting; there is another way.
Here, we dance.
Embodied experiences in stillness over slow time and gentle movement in synchrony with place and in chorus, enables us to hold Earth and her timescale in our bones. And before she takes them back; allows us to store this sacred intergenerational knowledge, rich in our socio-cultural DNA.
By turning to civilizations, who in decentering their human narratives, have long lived in harmony with nature; we begin to unravel truths which have been forgotten or ignored. Relational traditions, grounded in deep listening to, custodianship of and veneration for the land – provide us with cosmographical mappings, so that we may fully inhabit ourselves once again, as full spiritual beings, in communion with all life, to usher in a new paradigm.
Here, a new world.
A new world is possible, and necessary. We are at a juncture in time, bearing witness to the urgency of growing ecological crises, exacerbated by immense geopolitical instability. In the absence of stewardship and reciprocal animism; we allow decisions concerning our home turf, to be made by those who privilege financial profits and power over all life. Beyond despair, our work is to now organise, teach, build community, foster mutual care and dignity for all life. It’s time to privilege our elders, our sages and our visionaries to help imagine new frameworks into which we can start to inhabit ourselves.
The 8th Day points to such, yet reminds us that our survival is bound to the survival of the land. To come home to the land is to come home to ourselves. And in that act of returning, we find not only healing for the Earth, but also for our own spirits. This exhibition encourages us to rethink our relationship with nature – not as something to conquer, but as something intrinsic to us. That nature maps deep time, is in constant relation with and authors the stories that usher in new worlds, through us.