Kindred Specters: Myth, Kinship and Embodiment within the Colonised Landscape

Kindred Specters是一个以实践为基础的美术研究项目，专注于亲属关系的表现。该项目致力于解决关键的社会和环境问题，探索相关性作为一个生态概念，这是建立更可持续的共同生活模式的关键。该项目以新西兰奥特亚罗瓦（Aotearoa New Zealand，NZ）早期殖民历史研究为基础，研究神话，小说和记忆，作为在殖民历史，全球化和气候变化背景下设想新亲属关系的一种手段。 新西兰的景观，深刻地改变了殖民化，是一个高度威胁的生态系统，目前引发了开创性的生态研究。本研究将借鉴和扩展该作品，将其与视觉艺术，非殖民主义和女权主义理论的发展进行对话。该项目将围绕与我的曾曾祖母的想象对话展开，她是新西兰早期的殖民者之一。追踪几代人之间的主观和本体论流动性，社区，物种和解释，亲属幽灵执行一种困扰，挖掘个人历史，以唤起暴力，边缘化和顽强生存的具体历史。研究背景和方法这个项目将使我能够探索仪式，神话，生态脆弱性和身体政治之间的关系，这是我在过去四年的艺术实践中出现的。这导致了一系列来自英国和毛利神话的叙事人物的发展，这些人物已成为雕塑，表演和视频作品发展的基础。这些作品使用材料，形式和叙事结构来探索性别身体，当地神话和环境退化之间的微妙联系。借鉴女性主义的体现理论和身体经验，亲属幽灵通过探索我们自己社区内的相关性思想如何告知我们与环境的关系来扩展这种探究。毛利人的民间传说包含了亲属关系的概念，并描述了人类社区和景观之间的互动模式，这将是我调查的关键。为了回应这些材料，我将与一群毛利艺术家和学者合作。考虑到围绕非西方文化神话的挪用和共同选择的政治敏感问题，我们将探讨定居者和土著艺术家和研究人员产生新形式的亲属关系作为合作基础的可能性。 在与这一过程的对话中，我将研究当代文本和艺术品，这些文本和艺术品描绘了位于历史，未来或想象背景中的相关形式，这些背景与父权制西方社会中的景观，环境和亲属关系的主流方法相抵触，寻求重新想象家庭的局限性，并将其扩展到包括人类和非人类行为者的网络。我的研究将特别借鉴玛丽莲·斯特拉瑟对美拉尼西亚亲属结构和性别关系的民族志研究，以及唐娜·哈拉维最近对物种间友谊的理论化。通过突出非殖民地的视角，并将研究植根于一个基于实践的、具体的和协作的过程中，《亲属幽灵》试图扩展和复杂化我所借鉴的理论材料。该项目将人类学理论中的亲属关系概念扩展到跨越文化、物种和身体技术界限的概念，以及身体、有机物和无生命物质之间的流动，与文本和视频一起，探索相关性的具体物理体验。在实践和研究之间建立动态的相互作用，这种调查将导致一系列新的图像的发展，重新构建我们与彼此的关系，与那些我们边缘化。

Kindred Specters is a practice-based Fine Art research project focused on representations of kinship. The project engages with key social and environmental problems, exploring relatedness as an ecological concept that is key to establishing modes of living together that are more sustainable. Grounded in a study of early colonial history in Aotearoa New Zealand (NZ), the project investigates myth, fiction and memory as a means to envisage new kinship relationships in the context of colonial history, globalisation and climate change. The NZ landscape, profoundly altered by colonisation, is a highly threatened ecosystem, currently provoking pioneering ecological research. This study will draw on and extend that work, setting it in dialogue with developments in visual art, decolonial and feminist theory. The project will center around an imagined dialogue with my great-great grandmother, who was one of the early colonists of New Zealand. Tracing passages of subjective and ontological fluidity between generations, communities, species, and interpretations, Kindred Specters performs a kind of haunting, unearthing a personal history in order to call up embodied histories of violence, marginalisation, and tenacious survival. Research Background and Approach This project will allow me to build on an exploration of the relationship between ritual, myth, ecological fragility, and the politics of the body, which has emerged within my artistic practice in the last four years. This has led development of a series of narrative figures drawn from British and Maori mythology that have become the basis for the development of sculptures, performances and video works. These works use material, formal and narrative constructs to explore subtle links between the gendered body, local mythology and environmental degradation. Drawing on feminist theories of embodiment and corporeal experience, Kindred Specters extends this enquiry by exploring the ways in which ideas of relatedness within our own communities inform our relationship with the environment. Maori folklore contains conceptions of kinship and describes patterns of interaction between human communities and the landscape that will be key to my investigation. In responding to this material I will work with a group of Maori artists and academics. Considering the politically sensitive issues surrounding the appropriation and co-option of myths from non-Western cultures, we will explore the possibilities for settler and indigenous artists and researchers to generate new forms of kinship as a ground for working together. In dialogue with this process, I will examine contemporary texts and artworks that depict forms of relatedness situated within historical, futuristic or imagined contexts that cut against dominant approaches to landscape, environment and kinship found in patriarchal Western societies, seeking to reimagine the limits of the familial and expanding them to include a network of human and non-human actors. My research will draw especially on both Marilyn Strathern's ethnographic research into Melanesian kinship structures and gendered relations, and Donna Haraway's recent theorising of interspecies companionship. By foregrounding decolonial perspectives and rooting the research in a practice-based, embodied and collaborative process, Kindred Specters seeks to extend and complicate the theoretical material I draw on. Relating anthropological theories of an expanded notion of kinship that spans cultures, species and corporeal-technological boundaries to notions of flow between bodies, organic and inanimate matter, the project uses material and sculptural research, alongside text and video, to explore the specifically physical experience of relatedness. Establishing dynamic interplays between practice and research, this enquiry will lead to the development of a series of new images that reframe our relatedness with each other, with those we marginalise.