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

亲属镜像师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。该项目涉及关键的社会和环境问题，探索关联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。该项目基于对新西兰奥蒂亚罗亚早期殖民史的研究，调查神话、小说和记忆，将其作为在殖民历史、全球化和气候变化的背景下设想新的亲属关系的一种手段。新西兰的地貌被殖民者深刻地改变了，是一个受到高度威胁的生态系统，目前引发了开创性的生态学研究。这项研究将借鉴和扩展这项工作，使其与视觉艺术、非殖民主义和女权主义理论的发展进行对话。这个项目将围绕着与我的曾曾祖母的一次想象中的对话展开，她是新西兰早期的殖民者之一。追寻世代、社区、物种和解释之间主观和本体论流动的段落，Kindred Specters表演了一种令人难以忘怀的，挖掘个人历史，以唤起暴力、边缘化和顽强生存的具体化历史。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。这导致了从英国和毛利人神话中提取的一系列叙事人物的发展，这些人物已经成为雕塑、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。金德雷德·斯佩克特斯借鉴了女权主义的体验主义理论和肉体经验，通过探索我们自己社区内的关联性观念如何影响我们与环境的关系来扩展这一探究。毛利民俗包含亲属关系的概念，描述了人类社区和风景之间的互动模式，这将是我调查的关键。作为对这些材料的回应，我将与一群毛利人艺术家和学者合作。考虑到围绕着从非西方文化中窃取和吸收神话的政治敏感性问题，我们将探索定居者和土著艺术家和研究人员产生新形式亲属关系的可能性，作为合作的基础。在与这一过程的对话中，我将研究当代文本和艺术品，它们描绘了处于历史、未来或想象背景下的各种形式的关联，这些背景与西方父权社会中对景观、环境和亲属关系的主导方法背道而驰，试图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·斯特拉瑟恩对美拉尼西亚人亲属关系结构和性别关系的人种学研究，以及唐娜·哈拉韦最近关于物种间友谊的理论。通过突出非殖民主义的视角，并将研究植根于以实践为基础的、具体化的和合作的过程中，Kindred specters试图扩展和复杂化我所利用的理论材料。该项目将跨越文化、物种和物质-技术边界的亲属关系扩展概念的人类学理论与身体、有机和无生命物质之间流动的概念联系起来，利用材料和雕塑研究，以及文本和视频，探索相关的具体物理体验。在实践和研究之间建立动态的相互作用，这种探索将导致一系列新图像的发展，这些图像重新构建了我们彼此之间的关系，与那些被我们边缘化的人之间的关系。

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.