On the Bundian Way is an experimental art/curatorial project created as part of the Underbelly Arts Festival, Sydney. The project brought together six participants (artists and non-artists) to walk part of the Bundian Way, an ancient Aboriginal path and shared cultural heritage walkway. The participants made work in response to their experiences of the landscape, the place and their time with other participants. The project culminated in an exhibition at the National Art School in Sydney on the 7th-8th October.
How might we write history anew? How might we understand places, not as the product of some long internalized, introverted, settled history, but, instead, as a meeting place of a whole range of phenomena and social relations - from the global forces of imperialism, colonialism and capitalism, to the smallest of individual interactions, conversations, loves and movements. What does it mean to see a place as a constellation of vectors, of threads which may be unpicked and unpacked to reveal new histories and therefore new futures? What role can art play in such retellings? What, therefore, does it mean to truly believe that “nothing that has ever happened should be regarded as lost to history?”
On the Bundian Way is an attempt to answer such questions collaboratively - to realize new histories and create new representations of place and in doing so perhaps, new openings of alterity. That particular place is the Bundian Way, a 365 km track which follows an ancient Aboriginal route from Targangal (Kosciuszko) to Bilgalera (Fisheries Beach) in NSW. The track follows – and displaces – the traces of human movement, commerce and war for over 40,000 years. It is the first Aboriginal pathway to be listed on the NSW State Heritage Register, and is a shared heritage pathway currently being developed by the Eden Land Council - to become Australia’s first great pilgrimage trail.
“Nothing that has ever happened should be considered lost”
The vectors and histories that meet in this place are both ancient and everyday. They are the violent dispossession of the land and the ordering of a pie from the main street bakery. They are the Beyonce song in the room next door, the woodchip mill and the satellite overheard, transmitting data about the latest ForEx financial transactions. For the project, Fugitive Moments invited five participants to walk a section of the track near Eden together over a weekend in June. They have engaged with a range of experiences, landscapes, seminars, informal exchanges, and texts (selected by both curators and the participants themselves) and have begun to develop their work - to create new representations of this place and of history which pull at all the threads of place which meet here. The Bundian way is thus dually utilised: as both a formative site but also a workshop of artistic production and knowledge exchange. The result of these endeavours are to be presented with a display at Underbelly Arts 2017 and are also to be found on this website.
“Can’t we rethink out a sense of place? Is it not possible for a sense of place to be progressive; not self-closing and defensive, but outward-looking?”
Fugitive Moments believes (or hopes) that such attempts to produce new representations of place and history is a political act; that settler-colonialism is predicated on particular representations of places and of history. We hope to explode such understandings, to instead brush history against the grain, to demand that the practice of history must be rendered anew. Not only must we look to the untold stories, but we must find new ways to do history itself, to break its connection with power. In doing so we hope to locate the specificity of place, not by its role in supporting the existing state of things (which must be changed) but by affirming that each place is the meeting point of a distinct mixture of wider and more local social relations. The point, as always, is to open up new futures.