postcolonial nostalgias: shrine to our speculative ancestors is a collaborative artwork. It uses the decolonising and prospective potential of nostalgia as an opportunity to reconnect with lost histories, so as to dream up sovereign futures of solidarity. We situate this work in a postcolonial temporality, which is to say that we understand our lived experiences through the myriad ways that a violent colonial past continues to shape our present.
While we acknowledge the limitations of nostalgia – particularly in so-called ‘Australia’ where it has been co-opted by capitalist structures to enforce a false and harmful nationalistic identity – we also believe it is open to being re-tooled for other purposes. In making this shrine, we have created a space to reflect on childhood rituals, honour sacred futures and memorialise our speculative ancestors, whose transcontinental relationships persisted through colonial attempts at separation and control. We understand a speculative ancestor as an intangible presence, who represents the parts of our histories obscured by ongoing imperial epistemicide. In doing so we affirm that colonisation is not the metanarrative of our lives, nor was it the metanarrative of those who came before us.
This artwork was made on Wurundjeri land.
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