It took four people months to draw Archie Moore's enormous family tree – but it'll all be erased soon.
It takes a moment for your eyes to adjust as you take your first steps into Archie Moore 's world.First, the eye is drawn to the white glow of more than 500 documents that seem to hover above a black reflective pool in the centre of the room.
And so, Moore has spent the past six years building thousands of connections on ancestry websites, scouring state archives for historical newspapers and pastoral diaries, and travelling the country to speak to long-lost relatives.Moore's mother's family come from the Kamilaroi and Bigambul people of what is now southern Queensland and northern New South Wales...As Moore looked into his father's family history, he wondered exactly what he might uncover.
"I found these racist words in archival documents about my family — often about members, like my grandparents, who couldn't read or write," he notes. Slowly the tree disappears, and instead what you see is a tessellation of names, rising like clouds to the ceiling.Fissures or black holes represent the way Moore's family history has been disrupted by massacres, viral epidemics, and gaps in the archives.Only a handful of people are able to view kith and kin at any given moment. On entry, staff advise you to experience and respect the artwork like you would a memorial.
"And as you look up to the ceiling, it's as if you're looking to the ancestors where Kamilaroi people believe we went when someone passed away – they'd go to the stars, or the dark clouds between the stars." "Archie's talking about his own family that's very much entwined with the history of Australia that goes back 65,000 years, but he's also saying that everyone in the world is kin."Buttrose says that with kith and kin, the artist hints at "the breadth of Indigenous knowledge that he was deprived" and that First Nations history is everyone's history.
"Chalk is a way to talk about how fragile life is and how fragile those connections are, that at any moment they could be wiped away."On the large table in the middle of the pavilion sit hundreds of neatly stacked documents, redacted for privacy and positioned in sight but out of reach.That void represents "the incarceration epidemic that we're currently dealing with right now", says Buttrose.
Kith And Kin Venice Biennale Australian Art Visual Art Contemporary Art First Nations Australian History
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