SHORT BIO
Antonia Aitken is an artist and educator currently living in lutruwita/ Tasmania, Australia. Her creative research practice is informed by critical place theory, walking, and a material knowledge of printmaking and drawing. Her work considers walking and drawing based methodologies as forms of critical inquiry and dialogue with place. As a settler-descendent living in Australia, the challenge of how to address the complexities of walking unceded territories is a fundamental question. Her work considers how walking can enable re-conceptualisations of place that nurture ethical relations. Antonia is a skilled educator and is currently lecturing in Printmaking, Drawing and Critical Practices at the University of Tasmania. Her work is held in significant public collections, and she has exhibited and undertaken residencies nationally and internationally.
PROPOSED WORK
WALKING AS PRACTICE presents a unique opportunity to connect with an unknown place, as well as creative practitioners who recognise and are exploring the political, philosophical and poetic dimensions of walking as an act of inquiry and dialogue with place. Like lutruwita/ Tasmania, Björkö is an island with a unique ecological and cultural landscape, shaped by its geographic position within a local and global archipelago. To live on an island is to understand being simultaneously autonomous and in-relation; both connected and separated; particular and universal. I am curious to consider how this island place in the Northern Archipelago of Stockholm might shift or expand my thinking about islands as loci for relation and imagination.
During the residency I intend to enact a familiar process of moving and deep listening with place. I will use an expanded drawing approach where my body and gesture are employed as a way of physically and conceptually negotiating and mapping my experience. The marks I make become a record and trace of my embodied wayfinding. I am looking forward to the opportunity to share the residency process through dialogue with other residents and community, enabling conversation about the process and potential of thinking with one’s body in place.
Studio 28
Dates: Sept 4-Oct 2
walking in relation -
a series of gestures with place made during one month at BKN
4th Septmber - 2nd October 2023
Thursday 7th Sept Relational loop #1 with Karin Brygger 9km 2:18:42hours
18 Degrees Celsius
Wind SSW 31 km/h
Humidity 81%
Cloud Cover 76%
Visibility 24 km
Cloud Ceiling 6,100 m
SR 5.53am
SS 7.32pm
conversation shifting from practice to life and back again, building intimacy, wild blueberries leave bruise-purple stains on fingers, swimming naked in archipelagic waters, soft forest trails, and goblin bridges
relational loops: moving
though place
acts of relational gesturing
projecting and retrieving
a gathering of knowledge
A heap of testimony - Hebrew
Metaphysical meaning of Jegar-sahadutha (mbd)
Jegar-sahadutha, je'-gär-sa'-ha-du'thå (Heb.)--heap of stones for a testimony; Jegar--a heap of stones; a stele; a cairn; Sahadutha--an eye witness; a testimony; a testimonial; a memorial.
The Aramaic name of Galeed (Gen. 31:47). (See GALEED.)
Meta. See GALEED.
a declarational walk: we write our walking testimonies on a scoll and place it inside a cairn - Antonia, Hayley, Nehelli, Karin
forest petition, ink on kozo paper, drawn daily over a month and walked with on the 16th Septemeber 2023 - part of our Voicing gestures walk to support the referendum.
voicing gestures:
walking with solidarity
a pie gathered from place
a grandmother’s recipe
a cleansing of the body in smoke
a signal to our ancestors
a message stick whittled from the forest
a stone gathered and placed
a word translated and uttered to the wind
a forest petition signed in shadows
a gentle unpicking of power
a common story shared
a declaration drawn in charcoal
a friendship woven in red, black and yellow
a mai-ogi gesturing to a tree
a backward movement through space and time
a walk to water
a heap of testimonies
a shedding of mistakes witnessed by a fish
and we bathe our skin in the earth’s arteries
Voicing gestures: a response to the 'Walk for Yes' Campaign, 16 September 2023.
On the 14th of October 2023 Australian’s voted in a referendum to change the constitution to the recognise the First Peoples of Australia by establishing a representative body called the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Voice. In the lead up to the vote, the yes campaign took to the streets. Endorsed by many grass-roots organizations and political and cultural leaders, these ‘Walks for Yes’ saw hundreds of thousands of people in Australian cities and regional towns walk with an urgent statement for change. Part of a long-established history of politically motivated public walking, these marches are an example of embodied gesturing, collective movement, and communal voicing to inform social and cultural change.
Whilst this was occurring, I was undertaking the WAP residency. To align with these ‘Walks for Yes’ happening at home, I invited the group to participate in a workshop. I wanted to share the historical and political context of the referendum and of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander petitions to government. These significant cross-cultural statements bring together traditions of performing lore through embodied action such as dance, painting, and song, with the western written signature. For the workshop everyone was invited to make a creative response or gesture as we considered how we might practice and enact embodied petitions and voice with solidarity.
Protest walking as an important part of First Nations people’s pursuit for justice and as a radical movement of decolonial action in Australia. At a time when anti protest laws in Australia and around the world are being redesigned to silence and discourage non-violent collective disruption, discussions about how we might occupy, and voice civil discourse and dissent is becoming vitally important.