Ali Gumillya Baker and Collaborators
Incubator residency
Loophole Shelter and the Places We Look for Her is a multidisciplinary artistic and research project responding to transformative understandings of intergenerational grief. Ali Gumillya Baker will collaborate with First Nations writers, educators, researchers, and artists, to enact processes of observing, reading, speaking, singing, and moving in place and with ceremony as remedy for toxic neo-colonial relations.
Iterations of this work include video and live performance work, text-based work, and site-specific works in public environments. The project will honour water and tree knowledges across First Nations landscapes. Trees memorials, rivers and waterways as living archives. Through interviews and oral histories, this work will think about place, activate knowledge of public environments, and consider how to deal with the grief and loss through the living archive of country.
As a praxis, this new work is influenced by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander scholarly research and artistic practice, Indigenous multidisciplinary and Black feminist work.
Ali Gumillya Baker is a Mirning artist and academic at Flinders University. She has worked with Vitalstatistix over several years as a member of Unbound Collective, whose works Vitalstatistix have supported and commissioned through our Climate Century program, Adhocracy, and residency programs. In 2021 Vitals commissioned, produced, and presented APRON SORROW/ SOVEREIGN TEA, a major new work by Natalie Harkin and Collaborators, of which Ali was part of through Unbound. We hold a relationship with Unbound that we treasure, with a commitment to supporting both the individual and collective practices of Unbound Collective.
Creative Team: Ali Gumillya Baker and Collaborators, including Unbound Collective
About the artists
Ali Gumillya Baker is a Mirning woman from the Nullarbor on the West Coast of South Australia. She is a visual artist, performer, filmmaker, and a member of the Unbound Collective, that brings together four Aboriginal artists, activists, and academics. Ali is an Associate Professor at Flinders University. Her areas of research interest include colonial archives, memory, photographic agency and intergenerational transmission of knowledge. In 2023 Ali is one of the Creative Directors for the Australia Pavilion at the Venice Architectural Biennale. She is also performing as part of the TarraWarra Biennial 2023: ua usiusi faʻavaʻasavili, with the Unbound Collective.
River Love Songs Symposium
Loophole Shelter and the Places We Look for Her is related to River Love Songs Symposium, in collaboration with Flinders University, September 29.
An in-depth exploration of Indigenous creative praxis and research, as the first iteration of an ARC-funded project titled ‘Reimagining Humanities through Indigenous Creative Arts’. Leading and acclaimed Aboriginal, Torres Strait Islander, and Pasifika artists and scholars from across Australia come together at Flinders University to discuss collective decolonial movements in global kinship and creative solidarity during three panel sessions.
Speakers: Assoc. Prof. Ali Gumillya Baker, Dr. Paola Balla, Dr. Lou Bennett, Dr. Faye Rosas Blanch, Dr. Eugenia Flynn, Dr. Julie Gough, Prof. Natalie Harkin, Lisa Hilli, Kim Kruger, Dr. Jen Mason, Kimberley Moulton, Dr. Rea Saunders, Assoc. Prof. Katerina Teaiwa, Prof. Simone Ulalka Tur, Dr. Romaine Moreton and Judy Watson