The Unbound Collective

The Unbound Collective consists of a group of artists and academics working out of Flinders University in Kaurna Yarta. Their work engages with complex questions about what it means to be sovereign peoples— Yidinji/Mbarbram, Yankunytjatjara, Narungga, Mirning— and to exist both within and outside the institutionalization of the colonial settler state, which continually seeks to categorize and contain them.

The Collective considers ideas about what it means to be both bound and free: what people are bound to historically, and as sovereign peoples, what they choose to (un)bind themselves to, both now and in the future. They respond through embodied projection and public performance interrogations of State colonial archives; notions of ethical practice and responsibility; enacting memory and storytelling; and enacting sovereign identity and (re)representation. When the voices of ancestors are heard and listened to, this compels a call-and-response engagement with the broader Aboriginal community. Through film, performance, projection, grandmother-stories, and poetics, all can speak back.

The Collective consists of Ali Gumillya Baker (curator), Simone Ulalka Tur, Faye Rosas Blanch, and Natalie Harkin. Ali Gumillya Baker shifts the colonial gaze through film, performance, projection, and grandmother-stories. Simone Ulalka Tur’s performance and poetics enact an intergenerational transmission of story-work through education. Faye Rosas Blanch engages with rap theory to embody sovereignty and the shedding of colonial skin. Natalie Harkin’s archival-poetics is informed by blood-memory, haunting, and grandmother-stories.