Well, thank you very much everyone. We're so happy to have Elizabeth Povinelli here with us not coming from that far or for Far enough or sort of we are far and Philippa Ramos also very well known also here For for me, it's very exciting to go back. Why we're doing affirmations in this school in the graduate school of architecture planning preservation And the reason why we started is actually these two squares I was telling Elizabeth and Philippa about this there's a stream that runs underneath this stage or whatever we call it this theater But architectures don't so many efforts to Kind of avoid to acknowledge that there's water running underneath and it's been running for longer than the school existed We actually need five pipes to prevent this one from flooding And I dream that one day we can have the water here and we kept celebrating Celebrating events like this and affirmations with the water without the need of an architecture that denies our Interconnection with water and streams and many other things and pumps that fail So hopefully we can soon get the water back and at one point I would make affirmations much stronger But we're affirming what is possible the affirmations sessions are intended to affirm what grows What leaves in through us beyond the cracks of the very thin and and sinking worlds Of extractivism, liberal capitalism, coloniality, racialization, patriarcates, carbonization, anthropocentrism, Ableism and technocracy There's so many things that are growing through these as opposed to these in the cracks of these Kind of ignoring them When we talk about ecology and the built environment It is often understood that for architecture urbanism design ecology means sustainability Leads certificates carbon calculations Somehow and accept an extension of the modern world to incorporate new problems that technology and optimization Will make disappear But ecology is something that can be very different something that means something very different that we that basically redefines what architecture what urbanism can be Today's session is called ecological entanglements That comes actually from a previous conversation that that you Elizabeth and Philippa you had right in the past Elizabeth Pobinelli is massively contributed to experience to sense what ecology is now and so does Philippa So it's kind of a privilege to have you here continuing this conversation Elizabeth in your work in your many forms of work and and through the many collective entanglements your work happens as Ecology lives in the mess Where togetherness and interdependency multiply and depend the terrain of the possible Depends like going deep right you often say that and you were repeating that before present and past times bureaucracy Anger ancestral spirits the ontologies iPhones Trump tides Night fire morning tea agricultural future just to mention a few of the things that that you put together Articulate their coexistence to your work and you acknowledge that and you work making that Something that we can sense and creating togetherness through them and Philippa you've been in conversation with Elizabeth for a long time and your your similar Text what the virus wants has helped us also understand what a pandemic is what what what we're living through now and what Spatial practices compositional practices mean now. I Actually remember very well when we created together the Shanghai Biennale, Philippa, and we brought the work of Caribbean phone collection This amazing two phones would turn in primary. I'm not saying it Well, it's our water dreams Such a beautiful film and the jealous one and I remember long lines of very young people Kind of spending hours watching these films and how how basically moving it was for everyone to see ancestors And then kind of workers are coming together and two iPhones Writing about again Both the coastal tidal Creek in northern Australia and a girl dressed as a young man lying face down Rather than just to prove that what happens and you you ask something that I Love when you write about Jepel Rather, it is to prove what happens when we ask the question of how variations How various modes of existence can establish or maintain their normative force in a world I think this is kind of a great beginning for a conversation like this that I hope we can Continue for a long time here in this room with it with the stream with the water with our practices with many people around your work and your conversation The session of affirmations is introduced by Marjan Paul man, then Elizabeth you will give a talk and then you will engage in conversation that we will open also to our Planetary cohort and to the audience here. Thank you. Thank you Andres and and welcome Everyone welcome again. I should say to to what is already and now our eighth Affirmation time really flies and it's really really wonderful to welcome is Elizabeth bovinelli here tonight with Philippa Ramos for an affirmation that we titled as you can see and as was mentioned ecological entanglements which indeed actually comes from an earlier interview that I had with with Elizabeth and that we think captures so well What will be at stake in the conversation here tonight and will likely Refuse also some interconnections with earlier affirmations. I see myriah here affirmation to on material ecologies For example, I think these threads really start to to emerge right now And as of those as those of you who have attended other affirmations No, as always, I want to welcome not only you here present in the room But also all of you who join us remotely on G subs YouTube channel and especially the members of our planetary cohort of respondents who are as in the previous seven affirmations Joining us across many different continents and time zones to follow these conversations. So good night. Good morning. Good afternoon Or good evening to all of you. Um, my name is Bartjen Paulman I'm the director of exhibitions and public programming here at Columbia G sub and as many of you know, and that's address So just just explained and we developed affirmations really as a project to interrogate and to affirm How to think and practice the re-worlding of societies and ecosystems now Societies and ecosystems emerging from the various cracks that start to appear within the multiple structures of power on which our current world is built So affirmations is very much also a project about possible about possible worlds And of course, this is with your world your work extensively deals with such such possible worlds And in fact, when we were putting together this years, I think your name was one of the first ones To come up and the collection of essays that that efflux published of a copy here on the title routes worlds Precisely deals with with the creation and the dismantling of world. So there's a lot of overlap Here dealing with with the dead dialectic of liberal capitalist capitalism and in doing so provides as the blurb on the back states Both weapons as well as inspiration And since we are in a school of architecture I also want to emphasize how fundamentally Spatial a lot of your your thinking is and for me, I might be biased As an architect, but the returning notion or metaphor rather of the seal in your work I find incredibly Powerful whether it's true Let's say the explanation of Brexit or Trump as an attempt at sealing the tubes Through which a global post-national elite sort of maneuvers around the planet or in a slightly more optimistic sense the notion of Sealing as it emerges from your interest in developing an anthropology of the otherwise that locates itself And I quote you within forms of life that are at odds with dominant and dominating modes of being and of course And then what you call I really love this word the and beg a nation of space For example gift economies one one such possible world are understood as being able to to to close a world But never seal it. Let's say creating access and deficits simultaneously And this this speciality sort of keeps repeating In the routes world's Book routes figure space that creates worlds routes configure things in 3d manifestations and things then that are to be understood Broadly from container ships to societies and from linguistic forms to social institutions And you give this example this is one example of the of the Panama Canal in the book basically not alter not only altering the landscape Of the canal but also redesigning shipping itself, etc And lastly possible worlds, of course, also Resonates with with Elizabeth's Seminole work as a founding member of the Caribbean film collection It was already mentioned and the words Caribbean in the emigrant goal Language refers to a form of coletivity and I quote again outside of government impose strictures or clanship or land ownership And I've caught and for those of you again who joined us for the last session There's some resonances here between with what a y'all white one and David Bengrove. We're talking about in their nebelivka hypothesis And I'm also really honored to have one of the foremost authorities I would say on Elizabeth's work here with this tonight. This of course, Philippa Ramos Who's sorry? In our own word no, but yes And this is of course if the parameters whose own work as a writer and curator Extensively deals with the intersection between technology and nature and the urgent and much needed Need to move away from from anthropocentrism in the arts and beyond I would say and and like I said You're an expert on for this a little pass on Elizabeth's work Which you have included in various projects including the the incredible really incredible and I highly recommend it to everyone multi-year interdisciplinary Festival and research projects called the shape of a circle in the mind of a fish So please if you haven't heard about it, please go check it out Which you you developed Philippa together with would see a bit produced the for the serpentine galleries general ecology project So a few words about the the format tonight, which slightly differs from other sessions So first we'll hear Elizabeth speak for about 30 40 minutes Which will be followed by by a conversation roughly the same for the same length of time Before we open it up to to two questions and we should be done around 8 8 15 and New York City time so both Elizabeth and Philippa's phenomenal Biographies can be read and found in all their detail online, but I'll briefly mention a few highlights Elizabeth Povinelli is the France boss professor of anthropology and gender studies at Columbia here Where she's also been the director of the Institute for research on women and gender and the co-director of the Center for the study of Law and culture. She's a founding member of the Caribbean film collective and Povinelli's academic work has focused on Developing a critical theory of settler late liberalism and it's after shops She deals with these thematics as the author of many many incredible books But has also explored similar Thematics in a series of artwork shown in galleries and museums and through the medium of film of course with her caravan colleagues and you have Developed already eight. I think award-winning films Philippa Ramos is a writer and curator and a research manifested in many different mediums as well Focuses on how culture addresses ecology attending to how contemporary art fosters Relationship between nature and technology She's the curator of the art Basel film sector and the founding curator Curator of the online artist cinema Fidrom and is the curator of many many exhibitions and just to name to the Catalan representation at this year's Venice Art Biennial And in twenty twenty one it was already mentioned and she co-curated body of waters the 13 Shanghai Biennial together with Andres Hake Lucia Pietro Dusti, Marina Oterofesce and Miu She's also a prolific editor and publisher and was editor in chief of E-Flox criticism and contributed to several Documentas in her upcoming book the artist as ecologist will be published this this year I also want to thank this opportunity to to thank Clarissa And and Callum in the back who are helping us everything with everything tonight in our AV team, of course Cain Shannon and and Marcio So with that let us get ready to maybe untangle some entanglements The floor is yours It's great to be here I'm just gonna I'm gonna start since we don't have tons of time And I'm gonna start in May of 2023 when seven seven members of Cotabang Spent a week in my ancestral village Corizolo Located in the upper Sarca River at the foot of Valgeneva and in the shadow of the Dolomites, so I was there Cecilia Lewis Natasha Bigfoot Lewis, this is Katrina Bigfoot Lewis Cameron beyond a moon and two of our Little ones who I call great-grandkids Kina Lewis who was about four and Acadia Lewis Lee who's about nine We were also there with my cousin Evo Povinelli, but from a different clan and I'll that'll make sense later Cotabang we were in my village because we were traveling around we went to Austria we went to Vienna then Munich and then down to it was a great trip Venice Then up to Cortisol then down to Naples and up to Rome We were just moving around various exhibitions and we wound up in Rome to talk with the director of the Museo de la Chilvalta and Roma About a project that They're supporting called melting glaciers rising tides, which in Cotabang we sometimes called the two clans project Whatever we call this project sometimes melting glaciers rising tide Sometimes we call it that salt water and that that that glacier sometimes we call it, you know Depending who's talking your country Our country right your country Beth our country or y'all's country my country, right? So we call it all kinds of things whatever we call the project what it attempts to do is to interpret the history of the present of my ancestral lands in Cortizola And more broadly in the region of Trentino, Italy which now Italy which is just Below the Dolomite Alps and to interpret it from a Cotabang perspective To read the history of this place and history of the present of this place from a Cotabang point of view Now you I was didn't know if we'd introduce Cotabang for those of you who don't these are a bunch of slides from our Some of our films. I realized I should have put the names on them, but I didn't sorry about that Those who you don't know Cotabang Cotabang is a It's a artistic research group who primarily is known for our film work Cotabang is an Emmy angle term. So and I'll say what it means, but Emmy or Emmy angle is one of the languages of several and an area of several along the coast in what's now called Ansem Bay, which you know, you'll see That Composes the lands and languages of the Cotabang group Cotabang itself doesn't refer to any particular place or any Particular language group even though it is an Emmy term It refers to the state of a tide So when the tides in this coastal area are the furthest out We say it's Cotabang and they're set to come back and when they're up the furthest We say caught a call. They're set to go back out So it's a it's a term that refers to a coast that connects these lands but it's also a concept and It's a concept that hopefully you'll see a little bit how it functions. It's a concept that says while different members of Cotabang Pick up different parts of this coastal country The emphasis is on the fact that those Coastal lands are in the shape they're in in the form they're in with the language They're in because of the way they were formed through connections with other country and that I'll Pull this out more, but Cotabang is a concept that says That pivots against Western understanding of property and proprietary in this The other thing to know about Cotabang is that it is primarily a an attempt to Produce forms of relationality that are decolonizing rather than an Aesthetic practice we could say it's an ecstatic practice. It tries to create and and reaffirm and support bodies oriented to a decolonizing project So this is basically where we were and where we were coming from In the project that we're doing this rising tides melting glaciers it pulls together this area in Italy with an area in Australia and It seeks to use two conditions of water to examine how and whether the ongoing nature of differential colonial sedimentations are being altered in the context of contemporary climate shift and green energy imaginaries so the glaciers in the in cortisol and other villages in the Italian Alps as these start melting and The tide starts times are rising in Cotabang country on the coast What are the ways in which? The entanglements of these waters Help us to see how these Historical colonial relations are aren't being addressed. So it's a relational project I'm really happy to have Felipe here because she and Lucia Invited me to do a video Which in some ways in some ways one of the ways you get it was 2020 and I said, you know, we did do a video for the shape of the circle in the mind of the fish and I said, well, we're we're beginning to think about this project about rising tides melting glaciers so in that project I Brought together in a little video three conditions of water rising tides in Australia melting glaciers in in the what are now the Italian Alps where my family came from with the grandparents and fresh water and Deserts in the US where we went and we'll come back to that Now the underlying if we say well, we're interested in Cotabang's interested in reading the history of a particular place that is my ancestral place From the perspective of their country and the history of their country and if we wound up in cortisol Lu in 2023 the project of rising tides melting glaciers or Fresh water frozen water salt water, which are the three forms of water really that that We lived in It didn't the project didn't start in 2023 when we got to cortisol Right. It actually emerged nearly 40 years ago When I first arrived at Bellevue in in 1984 Just I want to give a quick summary of Where what Bellevue and is where it is It's the home of most Cotabang members of the Cotabang film collective But in a very quick way Bellevue and was Began as an internment camp Originally called Dullesville in the 1930s. So what you're seeing here is a photo of Dullesville in 1938 And it was this period is when a very small what was really a small Population of settlers Were were who had arrived only in 1869 so Darwin wasn't Literally settled until 1869 by 1930 it was still a very small population of Primarily white but also Chinese migrants the the the in the 30s The the settler government decided that it was going to start controlling the indigenous population by forcibly and turning people into on to camps both Christian missionaries Catholic and other kinds of Christians and Government settlements and Bellevue a Dullesville was a government settlement that took the ancestors of Cotabang and forced them into Into the into the middle of the Cox Peninsula, which is just across the harbor from Well, you can't see it here this across a harbor there. They see that pink dot That's Bellevue and Darwin's just to the east and it was started in the 1930s now so for from the 1930s to 1976 when the Land Rights Federal Land Rights Act was passed in 1976 all the movement The the the work life the marriage and intimacy life all aspects of indigenous Men and women were controlled under various wards of the state acts right so from Really in this started in the 19 1905 but 1905 1910 1915 then in the 1930s when people were forcibly jailed in internment camps all Aspects of indigenous life worlds were controlled by the state and it was only in 1967 that in Australia that a referendum was passed that allowed that told the federal government it had to count the indigenous population and Then One thing and then the other thing that that the federal government who had the right to pass special legislation About indigenous people so in 1976 they passed the first big piece of national legislation called the Land Rights Act of 1976 which Was the the settler, Australia lauded themselves praise themselves for finally Recognizing the fact that indigenous people had what they the settler state said were proprietary relations to their country So the state celebrated the settler state Celebrated the passage as this as this watershed in the colonial state settler states Recognition of the rights of indigenous people, but of course all you have to do is read the legislation to notice that the rights of indigenous people Were tightly restricted by the legislation that outlined The conditions but under which people could make a claim for their own land right and there were these very conservative anthropological models After the this Land Rights Act was passed all Communities that had been government settlements or religious settlements Reverted to an indigenous name so deliceville became Belle Ewan on the and on the basis of a water hole in the back where a this ancestral man Belle Ewan Lives and plays a didgeridoo for Folks so in 1984 we could say the rising tides melting glaciers project started Why because the women and men that I met and began a conversation with me that? Basically was like where where are you from white lady like young lady? Where are you from? so I'm like 21 and Again, I'm not an anthropologist. I'm just I'm a I had a degree in philosophy So it wasn't like you know informant thing. It was just like they were like where you've washed up to our Shore, where'd you come from right? You have you have an accent like Elvis, but you're in that Italian name That's what are you Elvis or Italy right and I was like look Don't start with Italy.  What my father I should say father and his parents drilled into My head and my siblings head that I've discussed in the inheritance, which is a Some pages from it and what they drilled into our heads were You where our semen Oz povenelli semen Oz we say skatum in dialect up in the mountains You're a semen Oz povenelli and all povenelli's emerge from this village in the Literally in the 1400s, right and they were like, you know, and cortisol and it was an argument cortisol cortisol the German pronunciation the more Italian pronunciation And what they also emphasize was that cortisol was a was a this a small Village within the cart to the regular system and the cart to system is There's a lot of books on it the cart to system was a system that was started as the Roman Empire like collapsed from 1027 and it ended in 1805 when Napoleon liberated us from our feudal ways and in which The Prince Bishop down in Trento said to all these little communities up in the you know in the Fringes of the Alps, you know what I have enough problems You guys can make your own rules for how you Govern your common lands. I Have ultimate authority, but you can make the rules right and these rules were based on Vachini families families from there and their ecompini. They're they're bounded bounded land and one so so this Mode of commanding went on for like 800 years and in 1805 Napoleon came in and freed us from feudalism Dispossessing families in this area from their family-based governance, right now We can see there's like the archive if you do the archive from this area It's easy to see when povin a povin alley emerges as a nickname in like 1480 or something This little guy Bart Malayo Detto boy Nelly, which means cheese little cheese. It's a little cheese guy and Then as this cart of system progresses these nicknames nobody had surnames these nicknames became surnames So that you could know who was inside the commune and who was outside so it was Evicini eat for a study the stranger so us and them right now as our Conversations progressed so you know it's 1984 and then it's 1985 and you know We just keep talking this we're going a long time But in those first couple years as our conversations progressed I actually found real it was like wow I was with my family I Had never other than my povin alley family and my ambrosia family and my my father's mother I had never heard people talking about Relations to country that sounded like my family, right and it was relations based on like Family-based relations like who are the families for this area? Who are the families for that area, but also more than human relations For instance, they would say does if your family is like from there Do you guys what are do you belong to like different place? I said, yeah, Cody Zola Pinzola, and they said no no no like in there are there like Do you have names for places in your mountains, right? And so I said, oh, yeah. Well before sure. I mean before they At least my grandparents say that there were there are these named rock area and I'm sure you can't read the Italian but According to you know my grandparents and all of the people in Cortezola Pinzola and other where in the during the Council of Trent the Council of Trent Exiled all and of course they called these witches and Devils they exiled all the witches and devils into the area right behind Cortezola my village, right and those Whatever witches and devils had always been able to transform themselves into Rock and untransform themselves into rock right so and on the on the this side It's a it talks about a chapter the gall which is in dialect Which sits in the has sat it sat in the it was a radic and it sat in the Valley and if it sees Christians coming it runs and it tells the head of this guy like they're coming and so they organize to block the Christians from there and According to Council of Trent and the Catholics is that God froze them solid, right? So they can't move anymore Right, but they're still there. They're in the place. They have the names and you know, so I'm like blah blah blah blah blah and when I Started talking about that they started talking about. Oh, yeah, the ways in which they their country was formed On the basis of the movement of Various ancestral creatures so the the country shape itself is The transformation of The bodies of various Ancestors That moved around the country for example, and I'll do it easy because we've talked about caught a being and we talk about this example a lot a Bear Mundy fish which maybe some of you Have eaten There were two Bear Mundy fish See the dot in the middle there are two sisters and they went around and around there are two sisters They went around and around and they're bickering and they're still bickering and they're bickering in the In the area out just outside this huge what is now there it's huge estering creek and they bicker bicker bicker bicker And they finally said you know what? This is crazy. We'll just split up and each one go our own way so one went to the west and Laid down in that little area here laid down and it created a Coastal point in its shape and it's called mobile up and So it's there some mobile up the other one went that way kind of east south southeast and it actually created the big river the now exists there this estering creek that means it's there and As the women said this they were like you know, they're saying you know So are your are these chapter to go all still? Both where they are now and where they were before and I was like Well, no if they I think if they were here and then went there then they're there, right? They said no because like in our country the relationality Means that two sisters made three places and to think about those fish you need for fish Right, so you have two going because they're all still there. They didn't Come from there leave and go somewhere else. They're still there So you have two in the center you have one over at Maublin And you have one over it wherever the other one is up the river, right? so a whole different topography of Relationality unfolds when we're not thinking about Where did you? Where did you come from in the sense of a Radici or an origin Right, where are you from? Right? I'm from Cordy Hill low, but rather Where did you come from and so that you ended up here, but you're also still over there You see what I mean?  It wasn't a question of reality Right what they were asking me and it and it wasn't let's compare Coritzolo to Bellion That's not what they were asking me They were asking me and also they weren't saying like what's the ontology? What's the relational ontology of your world? Here's the relation ontology of ours It wasn't an ontological project. It wasn't a comparative project. It wasn't a origins project it was a question about if you are from there Why did you wash up here and how in washing up here are you no matter where you're from part and parcel of the same repetition of Of certain people moving and certain people not and not only people moving here But our country going over there. So it was in the beginning a question of relationality and Again my social form No matter, you know, I could say well come from I come from Cortizolo and Literally, Povenelli's came out of the ground from there. We have these more than human Forms of being that break the geontological imaginary nevertheless how if In my Povenelli family and I'm Barosi family There was this discourse of Napoleonic dispossession, you know, we had We were, you know, the Chini from there for 800 years and Napoleon he dispossessed us All right, which is which is what they said in my family If we were dispossessed Like they were dispossessed again Why did these different forms of movement occur and why did do different kinds of bodies emerge the short of course is that and It's something that won't surprise any of us Hopefully in this room is that we weren't dispossessed in the same. We don't No matter how much when we sat down together in 1984 still today The feeling of like oh my god, there's nobody like how you guys think about your world feels so close to me Nevertheless we do not share dispossession and that's a crucial part of the Cotabing Methodology, what do we mean by that? It's simple when it's something that many people have said it by this point When my family was dispossessed by Napoleon We were dispossessed into possessive individualism we were dispossessed into being the kind of human That was afforded the quote right To take to both begin to own things to own ourselves as individual don't Land and country which we could not do it was it was inconvenient was bounded But no one in these commons Owned the land you own the right to make decisions about how it was used But when we were dispossessed we could also take advantage of other people's dispossession so Went by 1869 when my great-grandfather was born and as he grew up he started Moving from Corri solo, which was very poor people starving all over the place and go to Buffalo the lands of Seneca Why because he could take advantage of a different kind of dispossession a more radical Dispossession the kind of dispossession that Cotabing lived under so In this very first conversation and what you're seeing here, sorry Although my great I know those who don't know this poster although my grandparents And my father could in their own mind said we were dispossessed The way Native Americans were dispossessed No, absolutely not on the but but this idea of a shared dispossession is extraordinarily important right now in Europe in general and definitely in this area where I am but the return to this notion of We also had our indigenous traditions. We were also dispossessed by capitalism liberalism, etc. Etc. Etc. Christianity we need to go back and look at our look at our ancient Commonning traditions is a widespread discourse across Europe so this poster is From Leganord which is now just lega, which is a very conservative party in its first just up in In the north and now it's a national really a national party in in Italy Claims that if you know, they don't keep out Migrants then they will become like Native Americans, but they are also using this idea that Well, we we we we are indigenous. We are indigenous. We had our own country on the on the other side Of course is during the same period the way indigenous people in Australia are being treated under this This sex panic in this new piece of legislation that came out in 2007 that Imposed a whole new set of surveillance tactics on indigenous folks So the project that we're trying to do Really is trying to look at the way in which this this the emergence of a Throughout Europe It's different in the US and it's interesting thing about the difference here a a Movement an atmosphere both on the right and the left Very different politics, but Atmospherically similar to Return to an indigenous Europe often with that term used, you know, we Had our own traditions And I think this turn toward a European indigeneity Right, right a white Indigeneity or something European turned toward like, you know, no, we have our own culture Isn't doesn't show that the decolonizing a decolonial critique Failed. I think it shows the success of it the decolonizing today It's not what we wanted, but it's an interesting success Why because suddenly to have value you have to and it's a Weird inversion will get to you have to believe that you have your own Relation to a country now this is interpreted as a ratatouille as a route. You have to have a route a route and We really I have to say Cotter being we confronted this not in 2023, but in this is 2018 when four of us went to cortisol. This was prior to the trip. It was me and soon to rec sing and Linda Yerwin and Aiden Aiden sing and you know, we're looking they were like We don't know if you've just invented this country. We're gonna go and check it out and make sure you're not just bullshitting and so we went there and they're like, oh and but the genealogist Said since you're here Can you help us? Understand your clan because your clan pulled out of the village After the First World War So I'm sitting there showing doing this genealogy. This is Linda over here Linda's like going.  Why are they doing that? I said, that's a good question Why are they doing it? And what we heard where we're trying to you know, we don't want to steal other people's culture We want to return to our own Okay return to our own what you're gonna see here is just a series of pictures in which we've been trying to I've been trying to we've been trying to think about what how would visually we think about this movement of returning to one's own From a cotter being perspective and this first image was a long time ago in which we're trying to think about Not how to think about time from a cotter being perspective not past present future but the continual Recycling of activity into the soil and then out of the soil so that sedimentation itself becomes History, I mean, there's no history other than in the ground that you're making Then we started trying to sketch out can't see with my glasses What this might look like temporarily so that? Oh, I don't know like Here's in which there's always a Not between places although the knot looks more like that So there's all this kind of spooky action at a distance like how do you say what's happening over in? cortisol it's related to cotter being in the 1700s right would have to be spooky action at a distance as the boats go over and start gutting then the what? Comes to be called the Americas right and then tries to find other roots up into Southeast Asia and Asia under mercantilism, right and that floods into Europe Creating a crescendo of populations that then in my in the Alps All these villages start getting more and more inconvenient to contri and like seal off their borders How does that relate to the boats that are then sailing over to across the north of? Australia seeding disease Seeding forms of settler colonialism etc And how do we show that over time so that you're never thinking you can go back into your roots? But any root any radici you go into is always itself this relational world right This is something I did for Argue and Balls on in which it was I liked that it was like crayon in which again It's like how do you maybe this is a temporal diagram But how do you see every moment as this this form of knotting? That doesn't work in a cause-effect of relation anymore, but really is materially more Spooky action as a distance then we we started trying to this is my the cortisol outside of the the ground in which the ground itself it becomes the the object of Investigation in which you're trying to think about how was this built out? Over time as these folks hemorrhage out Or this is in Museo della Roma where we did a show In which we're trying to think again on this side like here's the ancestral catastrophe of the boats invading invading across the Atlantic and Pacific so the kind of shared ground, but then the ramification of that catastrophe only Working relationally across these across these fields so in Australia, it's Taranulias in Under the the viciousness of enslavement it's code war it's Various kinds of treaties. It's a differential of toxic accumulations and et cetera and then we started thinking okay What if we just really trying to create a image that Works sedimentationally in which the center would be things happening in a kind of I don't know general way and then the spooky Sedimentational effects as you look at one place or another Because again from a cotter wing perspective, you're never looking at anything abstractly. You're always looking From somewhere to some place right, but you have to look in such a way that you don't ever agree that The way things are related is Under the mindset of a cause cause an effect because that's would be a Western epistemology And then finally and we'll stop here finally in the now moment in the contemporary moment we're trying to think about again these relations of Water Fresno water fresh water salt water and in particular the the ways in which the use of the more than human world Allows for the relational accumulation of value in these two places. So on the this on this side of the This the map is you can see Cortisol is up here somewhere. There's cortisol over there. There's valgeneva Pinzolo cortisol is on the other side of the dollar in the 1950s There was this this huge engineering project to divert water from valgeneva and up in the Alps down over you can see down over to the mall Mulvanna as a storage place and then down to The guarda in a way that would power energy So it was a it was a power system, but also an agricultural system. So they could take all the water And use it for agriculture and use it generate power And it was in this moment. It was the engineering was this grand idea of modernity and man controlling nature and harnessing it and now of course as the Glaciers are melting. There's not enough water. There's not enough water for energy There's not enough water for agriculture and there's not enough water for skiing right, so there's a shift in the north to say, okay Well, what we're gonna do is we're gonna have solar power And we're gonna shift from a ski economy to a you know sports tourist economy So we're gonna climb the rocks of That have the frozen bodies of chapter De Gaulle and we're gonna say they're the frozen bodies of chapter De Gaulle isn't that cool so we're gonna sell the what Understood to be nothing but a myth To create a new economy and of course from a Cotter being put in view what you're seeing as this area as The snow melts and the water dries up What you see from Cotter being when you say, oh when when in Corticello and Tirilago and the other places when they say Oh, this is great. We're gonna have green energy. We're gonna have sports Cotter being says, uh-oh Here they come again because where is the material for the green energy coming from as per always It's gonna come from the places That have already been designated as as zones of poverty or abandonment, right and in In Cotter being territory over here, right? There's the again, that's the Cox Peninsula here there was a a White paper that came out and has predicted that in 50 years The north of Australia will be uninhabitable. Of course, it will be uninhabitable To settlers Right, but it will still be inhabited by Cotter being and other indigenous people But that's saying that it is going to be in an uninhabitable means that There's more justification for using it as an extraction zone to create the infrastructure for the places In which From which settlers came to continue to be Inhabitable and economic Voila. Thank you. Thank you so much for opening up these relationalities and temporalities and access to those Showing who has access to these as well. I would like to open it up Philippa to start the conversation It's It's also so incredible because the these images are a very powerful Anchors and they're very hypnotic and so and but In this case they really Guided us through they they anchored us and they guided us also through the different flows and vectors that that this this talk touched upon and And for me and it it led into so many different directions, but for me it really led me to think on the one hand about rights and the invention of rights and Who are rights for And on the other hand thinking about land and thinking about land not as a thing not as a commodity But as a set of relationships and it's really interesting that you you were mentioning you were often using Italian terms and It's really interesting that if we have the the English term neighbor the Italian one Visino it means closeness. We're close Visino means to be close and to be neighbors now and already shows that the land is not so much a thing but And a glue that brings people together and buy this together people need to understand how to relate to one another so it's a set of relationships and and Imagining exactly how in in in the beginning how you mentioned that Caribbean's methodologies and caribbean's perspectives could Let's say help us or or could launch a different view on On territories on lands that have known a history of Or that whose history has been so changed and it's really interesting that you mentioned the the Napoleonic Invasions and how they broke A historical philto Relationships of course they did because by doing that they managed to change the land from a set of relationships to a commodity That then can enter into a market and it can be alienated and and of course this this seems very obvious but we're going back to thinking how a caribbean perspective and methodology can can also Help you think about other places I Guess that more than questions I have responses or or modes of engaging to to what you said and and hopefully this this can become more a conversation than a sort of a series of questions, but I Would like to to start exactly thinking about relationships between lands and and laws which are so bonded into one another and by by just wondering how these methodologies and ways of thinking can also depart from Questioning rights for instance something that has surprised me constantly There was one one There's one interview where I left Catherine on attach one of them says well we approached We approached Beth because we we needed an anthropologist to sign our papers and well She wasn't an anthropologist. She was a philosopher, but we needed her and she became an anthropologist to validate this know so the fact that these Well, the Caribbean is a good example, but indigenous people still need to conform to laws to Norms to the rights that were written to oppress them, you know, and and One of them is the fact that they need a discipline that has made so much to Has made so much to other them and to to study them as as indigenous to validate their own claims no and so At the same time, how can this perspective break even the system Within which they have to fit how can this how can they Follow these rights for instance and think about rights and thinking about rights to the land and to their own rights of land well at the same time challenge these rights knowing that these rights were mostly written to as As White not the human is not an universal human is a white human Yeah, and it's a human that is disconnected from the land or for whom the land is You know, it's it's yeah, that's the conversation that started it and again for those of you don't know by law Indigenous people in Australia and it was also the case in Canada in the US cannot represent themselves Cannot represent their cultural traditions themselves they need to be mediated by an anthropologist That's why I'm one because the older folks said, you know, would you and they need a lawyer and an anthropologist Would you be a lawyer? I said, oh, please God anything else and they said anthropologists I said, what's that? I've said this story many times and they said white people studying us. I mean, they're Nobody was like fooled by this and I was like what no, please and they said no, we don't want you to study us We want you to alongside us and that's why this product sorry what? How why can't they understand when they keep on saying they they recognize they're giving us our rights And we describe to them our relations They can't hear us i.e. They can't hear the difference between rights and relations and In particular they can't hear they seem and I think they could hear fine, but they seem incapable of Putting two things Holding two things in the simultaneous frame. I Yeah, like in that in Natty that was Natasha with the with the fish and that was Rex Edmonds with the fish on the shoulder They're from Maubalook. That's they pick up Maubalook through that fish that laid down at Maubalook And so people say yes, I pick up that country through that fish But that fish is over down over there, too It's still going around a circle and this fish is here because it's over there. That's I'm in relation to this one Way I'm relation to that another way. I'm a relation to that another way plus ritual plus this plus bliss. It's all relational It's these entanglements of relations that don't equal a unity. It has a different math. It's incredible It's like there's I remember when they first said how many fish are there How many fish do you need bath and I was like to they said no You need four three places to fish for fish right and and what Happens is that this idea of rights, of course, we know this becomes basis of Napoleon coming over and giving us our rights weren't works to disrupt as It's happening throughout the the spaces in which European ships were invading Was to disrupt relations to fundamentally turn a complex set of relations into a set of individual rights for some For some relations got turned into individual rights for others relations were just shattered with the idea that there would no be no rights coming Because you would just be gone at a certain point. That would be Cotter being that would be Seneca. We're my my Grandparents ended up right and buffalo Seneca country So so the very concept of rights is something that Cotter being pushes against and when it's interpreting the the move the European Movement toward commons. It's also moving against understanding these as rights But rather saying okay Let's let's understand the okay. You guys want to go back and we had these great conversations with people you guys want to go back and Reestablish your relations to Country which is not ethnic and not national Okay, what are the relations right and what are you willing to do and lose and give back To hold on to those relations To the country the second thing they say is And are you looking at the the ancestral present of the country the ancestral on going this of your country? Or are you trying to bypass that ancestral? ongoing this By going down his history. What does that mean? It means your country's form So cortisol a little turtle all the the pencil all of Westina tons of them up there the the very The the wealth of your country was built up out of Differential dispossession of other countries. It's simple right we know this So if you're going to reestablish your commons You have to reestablish them not going down or not going back into history But reestablishing them in the actual relations are in so if you want to have solar power Where are you getting the stuff from? If you want to you know remember that chapter the gall and various other more than human The geological formations are your relations right and one of these is a povinelli relation because Long story about witches and cheese, but their relations are you Willing to actually reestablish a relation are you going to mobilize this as if it was Just something else that could go into an economy, right? So if Carter being is trying to reestablish its relation with its Geological ancestors that means it cannot be in an economy Right Are you willing to do that people in cortisol and Pinzolo? Are you willing to? Lose What you feel is your right and that right is to be comfortable To look at these multiple relations relations with other places relations with the more than human worlds and etc if it's only a right then The the grindingness of this system will continue on and on Exactly, and and I feel that we're very much in this tension because very often there's these conversations about Climate change and change and change and change But all this is changing and there's an awareness, but the fantasies are not changing Desires are not changing they remain the same Yeah, and and that's the problem is that the a large part of it over in capacity is an awareness that The world is changing much faster than our own imaginaries and right around desires or our own capacities to conceive how to live and And this is why it is important to to attend to other stories and And I'm using other in a non naive way the stories that we have others and when I say we and I'm speaking as a white Western woman To to try to see if in some kind of a At this point, I don't know if it's a hypnotic or a kind of a repetition process this Possibility of transformation emerges, but I do think it has to come through a process of of fantasy and storytelling because somehow it was Fantasies and mythologies that got us here Yeah, in the sense if if it was possible to write these narratives of segregation of Difference of separation of superiority of some in relation to other based on myths on myths of Even on aesthetic Because some resemble more a certain idea of a god who was blonde with blue eyes and others I don't know it must be also possible to unwrite them and to unwrite other ones and And this and this is why I think the work that the caribbean is that you the caribbean are is doing in Telling stories and telling stories that also remember people from Trentino that their stories are Similar not that the narratives of dispossession But the fact that this rock that now people are climbing may one day shake and shake these people down. It's already shaken From a caribbean point of view the treatment and They look back up right two things They're not we caribbean does not try and find what's common And I think there's really important. It's one of the deepest one of the deepest fantasies That structure that continue to structure the relations we're trying to Tangle in and tangle at the same time and by that I mean This drive to find what's common Across and often humans but sometimes humans and non-human human animals and non-human animals or Busting through the geontological divide all existence what's common to it we search for the common Why because if we can't find what's common among us? Well, then we go to war. It's the weirdest thing. I know I'm reducing it But think about the way in which you know our good colleague Butler works like okay. We all share The state of precarity of vulnerability all humans we all come into the world vulnerable Right and we're born that way. We need to care of others. So we share that But Precariousness I think it is I can't I can't remember a charity which one is which but anyways But then that vulnerability is distributed unequally, right? So some people I caught a being like Let me tell you it's distributed People are very comfortable in cortisol. Oh, it is not comfortable at billion So it's distributed But this idea that if we could see that we're all you know what we share Common our common common humanity is vulnerability then when we look into the other eyes We say you are also, you know, and then I grieve you or I don't kill you We're not cotton doesn't look for commonality Right, we don't look for commonality And the opposite of commonality is not war It's huh, that's interesting We think our way is better, but you know, we would never go and tell you to do it our way because it's your way Because it comes out from here So for instance many many many times we would caught a being would be in in a you know We'd be presenting the film would be on stage here Some of us or whoever and people would say do you guys think you're a model for other Film collectives for other indigenous or other film collectives and everyone would say no And I always find it really interesting. I was like They were like are we supposed to say yes? I said no, I'm not supposed to say anything We just whatever anybody thinks we just say When were their rules a God of it But then once we were in Berlin and it was me and Gavin and Rex Edmonds who was with the fish and someone asked the same question Do you guys see yourself as model and Rex said yes my head almost flew off and I was really curious what he would say and he said we're a model because we started doing films We keep doing films because people in Want to do them so they come and do it and in doing the films were actually Creating bodies oriented toward country and each other these particular kinds of relational with the films in the practice of making them Practice a relationality and then as an artifact to actually show the relationality that we can see And so our model is whatever works for you. You should do that Right, you know might not be a film. Maybe it's like a water. No, maybe it's going camping or something So I just thought it was a brilliant cutter being way of seeing things like it's not a model in this is the answer It applies to everyone at all times everywhere and here I'm quoting by Deloria's critique of Western forms of revelation You get a revelation and you say in the West.  Versus caught it being it's like, oh, okay. What's happening here? How do I adjust? How far is here? Right? I don't know how far we don't know where that other fish went Kind of went over there. We don't know Does this help you over there think you're a thing? No, okay, it's cool Right, so it's an opening of conversation. So when we go to cortisol. Oh, everyone says okay well So these rocks these rocks that people are climbing on they're like your ancestors How does that work Right and people like well, it's a it's just the table Right. So my cousin Evo God bless. He's from a make to use a different plan very We could actually probably marry even though we're both bowing Ellis Even though I'm not marrying a guy But if it was a whole nother world And I don't exist it but when we sat down We were sitting down in this in up by the old sawmill and I said Eva nobody believes me Just can you tell him the old story about how Povnelli's came from the cheese story and the chapter the gold stuff And so he said oh, yeah, I have some but you know, they're just fiabe Yeah, they're just fiabe meaty meaty. I was like, why do you start like that? Why are you starting like that? They were like, what do you say I said he says they're a bunch of myths and then Natty and Katrina of course said and See we was there. They said oh, so he thinks ours are just myths. I Said well, it might also be I said so what do you say Evo? And he said what they say I said they want to know if you think their country is just nothing but myth and And he and nobody was good. He was like, oh, right right, so So like the conversation doesn't insist But it says like wires like what's going on here and Then more Fundamentally Catering says, you know, you're basing all this on the on this long history in the west of well This is me on tolgy and epistemology that turns into fact right and modes of science being and Then fact gets opposed to this is very sketchy, but fact gets opposed to myth legend right and then anthropology says okay, but there are those who's The ones we we study are the ones who still live in the myth, right and In the emergence of the 70s across the globe definitely in settler colonialism There was supposed to be this shift in which the state was like oh, no now we celebrate that you live in the myth And indeed we insist that you show us that you still live in the myth But the settler state remained in the fact world right But the condition of you getting your land back was that you perform that you live in the enchanted world Even though it's not affecting us at all so those things and meanwhile, of course caught up being in their parents and Grandparents were like can't you see that if you fuck with your Country ancestors They will go underground they will be transformed they won't go away, but they will be transformed and thus you will be Because it's a relation You change the river you change you change the rocks how they use the rocks you change You turn it all into an economy the economy unravels you Now that is that myth or fact you want to live in a world in which Your you still have glaciers Those rocks the chat to the gall are your ancestors But that means you have to treat them in a certain way You want to live in a world of melted glaciers, right in which in trying to keep the the snow happening So you can get the economy you have to suck out more water to make artificial snow That's fine But that right So it tries to upset the whole thing about myth and legend and fable in fact by saying the way you Treat someone produces the world you live in Including land including humans including at all and at the same time And at the same time what I find profound very interesting is that There is this constant negotiation of attunement That hopefully leads to a perception of of the the profound relationality and entanglement of of vectors that are also physically very far and and In the desperate way this leads me to a moment to this great talk that you had some months ago in London at Goldsmiths for the opening of the carving show you were talking with With Catherine Yusuf and a certain point You are speaking about one of the films where there's the sound of a pelican and you say We don't care if the audience understands that that is a pelican or not Most you said most people will probably not know that what they're listening to is a pelican It sounds like a baby crying and there are other baby crying Yeah, and and that's not important and that that moment for me clicked like at the same time as there is this way of Attunement and conversation and that is interesting that is curious. There's also a resistance to deliver This performativity of the indigenous that is expected. Oh, yeah from a car in the sense that The carving are not explaining their condition. They are not delivering a sort of Representation of who they are the films are and the images you showed us, which is why they're they're so hypnotic because they're the layered know they're they're they're also Complex to to to look at your you're covered with other elements of fish and different maps and diagrams and so There is there is a I would say almost the politics of opacity in which yes There is this position of it's interesting Let's let's attune to one another and let's reflect about profound Entanglements and at the same time we are not going to do this expose ourselves our experiences like this in the art that we make You know, that's right. That's right. So, yeah There's there's that so in caught up in films and part of this like how do we do this? We're kind of making film or kind of making But in caught up in films the image itself The the the the layering of the image itself emerged It started it's the very end of the second film had a little bit and then really hit in the third film when we just We got rid of even the little external camera crew Because we had started going around and we noticed that everyone was like past present future like the untouched past What part of this film is about that? What part of the present and what's your view of the future? right and everyone was just like Where do you think these things are right where do you and and we thought there's a Moment in it in which you get to pass. He's sorry you you get to the end and Linda Yerwin has Found herself in a war text and she's gone back to old de Lissabelle. It's the 1950s And it was meta commentary on what was going on in the country at the same time now, but anyway, so she ends up going back there and And of course she's like she finds the ancestors and she's like having argument because they're not helping her in the Time she's in and they're like why don't you call out to us since we're still here. Can't you see we're in the ground here? And there's then the ancestors answer The the whole thing starts by saying the ancestors the ancestors point of view and it's like What's put in the ground? Remains in the ground so History is right here What's it's here? now We can't see it, but you could open it up right the history is that melting glaciers. That's history right there The rising tides, that's history Those seats like what if I said like, you know, they're just seats, but what if I said no actually that's someone's country That metal Belongs to oh, I think that metal probably belongs to that mob up by Roper River probably is dug out there and This heat is probably coming from forget whose country what if everything in here, of course is the actual Rearranged relations of many many many places and what if The way you use something depends on how you're related to one or the other of those places Right, what if because you know, I come from cortisol. Oh, then I shouldn't like be marrying my brother and that's My brother's country. I shouldn't sit on it. How would I know right? How would I know? but that's the kind of problem that really gets Presented in in Cotter being and so what we do with our films is we say these these history there isn't history or future there's the Decision about where you take and put things and How in taking and putting you reorganize material leaving some of that material behind usually toxicity in the place Extracted from and take what you think is worthwhile somewhere else and you build up there That's that's it's not an archive It's it's in the ground And then the question I guess for us is Who gets to Understand those relations when relations themselves have been commodified and racialized So that caught up in films Not all the kids know The stories they're telling but when they watch they know they're caught up in film and so they're competing with each other to guess How the sounds relate to the characters how the characters relate to this other This geography that we know is going on in the film and etc We want them to be figuring it out If Audiences wanted to figure it out, then they have to go and put some sweat. They have to move their material from the audience Back to Kotowin country put effort Into that country and if you really go back and you just I would be everyone's lovely You agreed to help and do this or that or the other thing really not just Not really like really Then you would learn Then you would be able to understand then you'd hear the difference between a baby and a pelican right But it has to be in that relational effort I think this is a great moment to open it up for audience questions If there are any oh, yes, I'll tell you please one second. We have microphones coming I Called this project our Moby Dick project because it's like oh my god. How would you do something like this? No idea. Yeah. Anyways, it's a somewhat simple. Maybe I don't know maybe maybe many interesting things It seems like in the story of Italian relationality. Yeah, very genealogical, but that's not present in the Kotowin Story of relationality. I was I wanted to ask you about your thoughts on this question of kids versus skin, you know It would say it again it versus on the question of kids versus can like blood relations who you can marry versus this other Relationality where none of those questions seemed to be present. It wasn't about blood Relationality in carving side. Oh, you know, I guess I was also just like they get that all the time They just get that that's just this form of discipline on them, but But that was the other thing that was really When I first went literally when I first showed up in the conversation And I was like oh, yeah, and of course, you know, we have these different clans and you have to be like marry your thing of your Things and it people like, you know, they were like No, white people marry strangers. It's the weirdest thing. I was like, well, yeah, my dad married a stranger That's my mom but that was the first stranger, you know, I was like rah, rah, rah, rah, and And and then then they started like saying, oh, yeah, well the way here, how does it work there the way here? It works is that you know, and then like, you know the way you connect in the way you connect in marriage also, it still kind of does but map sound to country too because marriage also creates these we call them roads So it creates these roads to different country because you have to fall you can't just go somewhere You have to follow something right so you can follow the track of like a fish or or the track of a Marriage or a ritual so I tell you so yes, so no they're very much there But they're again interestingly they're not They're very much not a radici. They're not origin Right.  It's relational, right? so so absolutely blood and you know like Desperate time desperate measures you can marry your father's sister's kids or Mothers brothers kids, but you should not they're like too close, but they're technically marriage. So no, there's a lot there, but but this the the The Vichini is not just we're neighbors in the system and it's that's why it's not the same like in the Alps It was econfini there were borders It was ours versus theirs and What's really interesting if you go back to the archives isn't the kind of interesting. It's interesting. I don't know what to do with it But it's interesting you know as as the as this as this silver floods in from From the assault in the new world right floods in through Naples and that we have price inflation in Europe early on and then The mad dash mercantile dash Right to grab raw material wherever you could find it through whatever means Bring it back at value Sell it back and that's why the Austrians they've lost everything. But anyways The population starts going up and more the population goes up in these hills some more people are like putting boundaries around their Their lands and in the archive There's these there's one moment at least in a couple that I've found but it's one in particular in which Then these disputes happen because archives are all about elite you it's all about the you know fighting and the fights are that's why semi-autonomous because the fights are settled by the the sovereign out of trying to and this juridical guy who's solving a fight between Corrizolo and Pinzola Back in like the 1530s says, you know What is happening here? These this this these borders these convenience were supposed to create harmony between places and instead They're just increasing conflict and the the the legami the vinculi the bonds of Brotherhood between places are being destroyed and You have an example of massimilia Massimina folks who are being told by Corrizolo folks that that that's our maulin That's our pastor. You can't have that you you know you quick house here We get five hundred dollars or what whatever not five hundred dollars, but whatever it is and these poor massimino folks are like Where you're like we're full to steady in the technical sense. We're not the local families that But we're your brother-in-laws. We've always shared these pastures Not any more convenient convenient So in that system it really mattered like your roots like who was an original family and who's a stranger and What's weird now in those areas is that there's still this obsession. So when I'm semen Oz and my grandfather Basically pulled out all the semen Oz because they were everyone started up and the Bruca and Rosie and a lot of the Nellows So when I first went back or I told them I was there They were like, oh the lost semen odds You know really weird. I was like you guys you're like psycho But not psycho, but the so there's this their way in which the confini the bound borders Created this fantasy of roots and Rex Edmonds again the one with the fish was really you know We have a film called the riot which is kind of tells how caught up in started He said something in there that then when he was listening everyone described what happened in Corticello He's like it's the same thing when Pettigot came here when we say white people that we need settlers came here they They in the Land Rights Act really made it much worse. They said, okay This little area belongs to these families this little area belongs to these families And so they just cut all the We would say legami or a vinculi the ties and obligations between and Just severed them into forms of like I would say there's kind of a European idea of a common Khmuna Right in which the families decide on a territory Which conforms to a proprietary idea, right? And so those relations of marriage and Severed and all you get now are these Anthropologically bizarre descent groups Yeah, and which you're always saying what's my what's my about ratatouche? What's my origin? That's Reese. Please send that even there, thank you so much so inspiring and there's Putting side-by-side these you know these the what we see is our heritage, you know White European American and so on versus, you know a culture that you really have gone in to Understand and see the differences and I really love that you finished up, you know towards the end of your Talk you started saying You know questioning the notion of there's this myth Yeah, yeah, and I mean yeah, right frankly, you know All right, so The I would I you know, I'd like to suggest that Getting beyond this is not you know, you've used the word relation Relation, it's a relationship between us and us. I mean that's where the problem begins that we see Ourself distinct from each other Right, so therefore we have to have a relationship In order to combine or to connect Whereas the aboriginals Do not see themselves as distinct from each other Or even distinct from the land the the land. Yes, you know that we call it ancestral or they call it ancestral Because that's a one of our words Ancestrally present in cester Lee ongoing. It's just one of our words they use but you know when you really listen to them Talk about it for a long time It is them right we they are They are not rooted in the land They are the roots of the land because we are all just we come to be In order to look after the land the responsibility is to go on and You know and the way they transverse the land is to sustain themselves, but also care for it You know their responsibility for caring for the land is far more in you know significant and we've got a lot to learn from that and so You know then so then we start to say If You know and in fact in you know in Western culture even in Christianity we say dust to dust I mean we That's exactly what we mean. We come from there. We go back to there So, you know, they're way ahead of us in terms of understanding Our existence in the world and they see the coexistence of everything the coexistence of them in the land Rather than a distinction and therefore the need for a relation a Relationship and therefore the need for possession and dispossession and so on and this is you know This is sort of partially why I Think they sort of get so confronted with our notion of you know, what's your achievement versus mine? And so therefore, you know, I think Sorry, what I want to ask is if you would speak a little bit about You know, how we it's not they it's not who needs to change and understand it's it's we So how can we get inside that hit? I mean, I've lived in Australia with my life and I've you know Had a lot of experience learning this and and so on and still hard to get but how can we because we're never going to solve the problems of our warring and now, you know possession and so on the way we are You know that very rich Comment question Codding's always been very clear that There are Difference, it's this phrase and again, it's a phrase Same different different same right and But both sides are really important It's like and if Angelio in a Lewis of us here. She's very articulately very about this point in The way her father is related to this one area in over in Arnhem land and mother over and our side Very different. They're the the modes of ritual are very different, but there's the set like Yeah, okay Same sweat, but they're different and we try and hold so yeah, so so it's It's both of those also So Relationality is different. So for instance And I'm sorry. I'm the only one here tonight, but but the the the Monday story the bare Monday story. It's not a story the bare Monday geography. Let's put it that way Is Just one of many overlapping geographies, but it's really I think important because The relation the relations and Differences are what constitute The difference in the relations and it's just sounds like a loopity loop but it all of them are important because the the two sisters are Fighting they're not like peaceful harmony. I live everyone's laugh. They're like, you know people think peace and harmony We're just always fighting and it's like yeah, I know But they're they're bickering We always say what were they the young people say what were they bickering about and the older people we say well, probably, you know Brothers because two sisters can marry the same guy. So they're probably bickering about that and And so they're different They come to agree that they should go separate and in going separate They go to they create different geographies as they remain. They're doing that thing and so the the difference Created the relations between these two places, right? But you can't have the relation between two places unless you have the differences So but difference is not a problem. So what's a problem, right? It's why do we think difference is a problem? Why do I have to get under difference and find the commonality? right well That idea emerges out of Europe in the long history of justifying why it is that you can go in and Terrorize and steal from other people. Why can we do this? They're different in what way are they the same or are they different? Because if they're different we can just destroy them Do do non-human animals have are they like us or not like us in terms of language in mind? If they have language in mind they're like us and therefore we can't just murderize them What about rock so they like us are not like this.   Right and then the way you keep from destroying other is you say you're the same as me That was a land rights act.  What happens if I don't do that? I mean what happens if I don't say this is a myth or a fable, but it's an actual Relation what I mean by that is not you get out of this is it a fact is that a myth you say what happens? What world is produced what things are possible what things are not possible if that is a chaff the de Gaulle You do not climb on it if you do not climb on it. There's no income from rock climbers If there's no income from rock climbers, well, guess what the right to be comfortable Starts changing the relational right to be comfortable starts changing Yeah Since we have we're running out of time, but we have one more question from Hiva. I propose Thank you so much. This was great a lot of things to think about I just have a Question that has I mean, I don't know how it's gonna come across But it's a political question or the implications for the politics. Yeah, so if I'm gonna take the question of Europeans or people from Italy or Austria looking for Like saying that they have the relationship with the mountain. Yeah as a way to argue Because this is they're using indigeneity as a way to stop the idea of new immigrants coming over. Yes Yes, yes, this is exactly it. This is why this is just really has to be pushed against yeah Yeah, but then how can you stop? White folks from taking that kind of discussion and telling indigenous people. Yeah, listen We are now in a capitalist economy So you might as well want to live with that and think about new rationalities because this is what you're asking of us of thinking of something Because the economy is a relation So you're saying you if you want to climb the mountain as a fable, but you're making it an economy I'm not sure I want that kind of relationship, but this is the Present we're living in so how can you stop this from going back and going saying you can't ask me for reparations? Because I live now right now on that land and you might as well want to think of new relations of that Yeah, you know what I'm saying. No, I do but that but the The temporality I would say is off because they're already doing that over there That is in sorry in Settler colonies like Australia. They're already saying if you want to Live not live well if you want to just live past 50 You have to understand that this was the big thing that happened in 2007 You have to agree that your relation to country is myth mythological and Therefore can be it's just a myth But even if it's not a method logic method even if it's not a myth, I'm sorry And I don't know no go ahead go ahead even if it's not a myth even if I believe that that Fable is not a fable and that my ancestors are in the mountains and I do believe My the creation of of a way of thinking about country that is my country But if I'm telling people right now if I'm telling people in Europe right now You cannot claim that kind of indigeneity or history. Oh, I see what you're saying. Okay I think then I can go back to the people and say you cannot claim your land for reparation. Yeah. Yeah, okay So yes, sorry. No, no, no, no, it's really it's really an important question and I think there are there are One of the things that got me like going what is going on when I was going around Europe was a Couple and I'm gonna get to it a couple things one is that on the left a very strong support of you know, indigenous Struggles in context of settler colonialism On the other very anti some quarters and anti Belonging to anywhere in particular because that's very close to fascism for a lot in Europe It's like they're just your your egg get up your hair gets up And then this then this movement toward commons the re reconstitute the common So why why do I say look? You know and the flippant kind of way and I apologize I say if anyone could be indigenous white indigenous to a place. I mean Walla we came from there and and look at this kind of things that One can do by saying like chapter Debal and stuff like that. Okay But I firmly say no, don't say that Don't say indigenous McCordy solo. Why? because indigenous settler is a Discursive relation that emerged as these ships created connections by Literally Moving people here. So, you know, it's like a ship the great repopulation moving people here forcing people there Maskering there pulling up material hauling it back leaving the pollution behind That's what indigenous means indigenous is a relation to settler colonialism in in let's say Povinelli relation to quarters old Unless you just ignore that it's you know in a phenomenon way it is in a colonial relation You'd have to ignore that to say it's indigenous. I'm not sure if I can you see what I'm that's why So it's like I don't care how far down the route goes The ravici the route is what creates indigenous settler relations and Thus, it's a perversion to to for me to go. I'm indigenous like And again a lot of suffering a lot of everything, but no absolutely not and not only did it start like that But it continues just same thing over and over I Think we can in my did I at least understand what you're asking me? Okay? Okay? I think I think we can stop there. Please join me in thanking Elizabeth for this incredible Incredible talk and I want to remind everyone that the next and and last information for now will be April 3rd on a Wednesday We'll have Jack Halberstam, Paul Preciado and Marquis Bay here on the stage. See you then


Let's go to our final presentation today. Keeping with the variety, we have Joanne Benamou, and she is a registered nurse working in clinical research in the area of radiation oncology. She is also, and let me take off this list, executive director of Friends of Science and Medicine on the committee of the Australian Skeptics, administrator of Stop the Antivats Network, and founder of the Facebook group Nursing Skeptically. So of that list, the top of the list, she's gonna talk to us about Friends of Science and Medicine standing up for science in Australia. Please welcome Joanne. And I'm not the executive director of Friends of Science and Medicine, I'm on the executive. So a little bit higher up than I'd intended. Okay, so as Ray said, I'm a registered nurse by profession and I work in clinical trials and radiation oncology. And this morning I'm gonna be talking to you about how a small group of concerned health professionals and scientists have set about standing up for science in Australia in the face of a growing alternative health industry, which is based largely in pseudoscience. A couple of brief disclosures that I've set up on the executive of FSM. I'm also a committee member of the Australian Skeptics Inc. And Australian Skeptics provided an initial startup grant to FSM. So my talk today is about Friends of Science and Medicine in Australia. And it's gonna be divided into two parts. The first part is gonna cover the main streaming of CAM, Complementary Alternative Medicine. And the second part will be about the formation of Friends of Science and Medicine itself. I'm gonna explain why Australian scientists, doctors and allied health professionals see the need for an organization to counter claims and commercial ventures that exploit vulnerable people's need for cure. So what do we mean when we talk about CAM? Many things fall under the CAM umbrella. Some, but very few, have evidence to support the claims made for their use. Under the Complementary umbrella, we can include somewhat innocuous treatments like aromatherapy, meditation, and some vitamins and supplements. But then there are those that seek to act as primary care providers like chiropractic and homeopathy. And these are the ones that we're most concerned about. They're the ones that pose the greatest risk, either because of their intrinsic anti-medicine stance or because the treatments themselves have an unacceptable risk benefit profile. Now the use of CAM in Australia is staggering. Approximately two thirds of the population use at least one form of CAM remedy or intervention. So we're not talking about a mind power cottage industry here, we're talking about billions of dollars annually. In 2006, a study found that almost as many visits were made to CAM practitioners as were made to medical practitioners. And if you have private health insurance in Australia, you can be reimbursed for many of these CAM treatments regardless of efficacy. And of course there's the problem with universities. You can now graduate with a degree in chiropractic or traditional Chinese medicine. So from the industry side of things, historically one major company played a significant role in where we find ourselves today. In 2003, the Therapeutic Goods Administration, the TGA, which is equivalent to the American FDA, ordered a major recall of pan-pharmaceuticals products and suspended their license. This prompted a review of the alternative medicine industry and the review found major weaknesses and potential dangers to the public. They recommended about 49 areas for reform, which were to be implemented by a joint Australia New Zealand authority. However, the head of the company, Soothe TGA, claiming that the TGA had failed to adhere to due process. And in 2008, they received a settlement of 50 million Australian dollars. And this left the regulatory bodies extremely shaken and reluctant to pursue similar action in the future. Sadly, in the previous year, the proposed joint authority collapsed taking with it much of the intended reforms. And this brings us to where we are today. So the TGA is now seen as a toothless tiger. We have a two-tier system whereby your pharmaceutical or more high-risk products like chemotherapy antibiotics and so on fall under the OST-R system, which is the registered products, while the more low-risk products, which most of the can products fall into, go into the OST-L or listed category. Sponsors are simply expected to confirm that their product only has low-risk pre-approved substances. They're expected to hold evidence for the product, but they don't actually have to submit it for review. The TGA's Complaints Resolution Panel is seriously under-resourced and very slow to respond to any complaints. And there have been repeated breaches of the code. In fact, in 2011, a review found that 90% of those products assessed actually breach the code. But there are few, if any, consequences. And those sanctions that are available are even non-punitive or ineffective. And an example of this is one of Australia's major companies, Swiss. They're a huge producer of vitamins and supplements. And in 2013, just in April, actually, they were found to have mislead consumers with a product called the UltiBoost Appetite Suppressant, which Swiss claimed caused weight loss and significantly reduced hunger. So what Swiss did in response to this was to simply rename the product to UltiBoost Hunger Control, relist it and replace it in stores under the new name. Now, incredibly, since its inception, the TGA have not made one single prosecution. So adding to the current situation is a powerful CAM lobby which includes the Complementary Health Care Council of Australia. And they lobby against proposed changes which would strengthen consumer protections. Now, in 2008, there were plans to end the OSTEL listing system and replace it with one which actually assessed the efficacy of products. And the director of the council stated that this flew in the face of sound, efficient and economic risk-based regulatory practice. Now, sadly, the public appear to be either unaware or apathetic to the problem. Our crew is the Australian Health Care Practitioners Regulatory Authority, or Regulatory Agency.  And they came about in 2010 at the same time as the health practitioner regulation law came into effect. And what this effectively did is to bring most of our health professions under one regulatory umbrella. The problem is that APRA doesn't evaluate the validity of the theories and treatments which underpin the professions that it regulates. So we have a system now where we have medical practitioners, nurses, psychologists, physiotherapists and so on under the same umbrella with chiropractors, traditional Chinese medicine practitioners and osteopaths. Now, there has been much criticism leveled at APRA in terms of how this process has been carried out and in particular over the issue of the individual professional boards which govern each profession. One of the arguments, of course, by having them there, we are giving the protection to the public, but the counter-icom to that is that we're legitimising pseudoscience. And one of the examples of this is the Chiropractic Board of Australia. The board has been widely criticised for failing to act on a number of very worrying issues. Firstly, chiropractors treating babies and children for a range of diseases. And in addition, chiropractors generally making claims for clinical effectiveness for non-musculoskeletal condition, which I'm sure many of you would know or have heard that the only evidence that exists for chiropractic is for low back pain, which is really not different to physiotherapy for low back pain and so on. The other issue has been their failure to speak out on the use of the controversial subluxation theory as the basis for chiropractic. And it was also found recently that there are a number of continuing professional development courses available for chiropractic, which contained anti-vaccination information. And these were tacitly given endorsement by the board who had farmed out the continued professional development to one of the other chiropractic organisations. Adding to that also is the fact that 70% of the professional membership of the Australian anti-vaccination network are chiropractors. So moving on to the university system, as I mentioned earlier, you can now get a degree in many of these practices and a survey by the Australian Skeptics in 2011 found that out of the 39 tertiary institutions in Australia, 30% offer high level degrees under the Health Sciences Banner, which are based in CAM. And these range from a bachelor's degree all the way up to a PhD in chiropractic. Similarly, there are legitimate academic courses such as nursing, midwifery and pharmacy, which incorporate CAM into their programmes. So for example, although thankfully it's not widespread in nursing, there are some courses which carry a component of therapeutic touch. Or within midwifery and pharmacy, you can complete part of your programme in complementary medicine and integrated medicine. And it's not just about learning what they are, it's about how you can incorporate it into your practice. Sorry, how do I go back? There are also many alternative colleges which offer bachelor degrees in homeopathy and naturopathy. These do sit outside the university system, but they're recognised as legitimate courses by the government, which you can see by the fact that students can actually receive government assistance in the form of student loans. So now for the second part of the talk, I'm going to talk to you about Friends of Science and Medicine itself and a little bit more about the problems with CAM that have led to its formation, how we've gone about creating an effective lobby group, the actions we've taken and achievements thus far and where we plan to go from here. So as I've covered so far, this is an industry that has little government audit or control. Many of the treatments available are either ineffective or potentially dangerous and there's real potential to delay evidence-based diagnosis of treatment. Quality control is a significant issue with many instances of adulteration, contamination, variable dosing and missing ingredients. And there's also widespread misuse of pathology testing. So recognition of these issues led to widespread alarm amongst academics, clinical researchers and laypeople. And in 2011, the current secretary and CEO of FSM, Loretta Marin, compiled a report on a pediatric chiropractic clinic being run out of the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, which also runs one of the chiropractic degree programs. This was supported by several of the current FSM executive and it received widespread media coverage. In September of 2011, the co-founders of FSM as well as 29 of our supporters issued a protest to the Central Queensland University regarding their 2012 Bachelor of Science in Chiropractic. And it was these actions that laid the foundations for the new group. In December of 2011, FSM was formally launched and in February of the following year we became an Incorporated Association. In March we launched our website. The founding members form a cross-section of concerned professionals with a history of promotion of good science and medicine. Our president is Professor John Dwyer, Emeritus Professor of Medicine. And we have two vice presidents, Professor Alastair MacLennan, Professor Rob Morrison, our treasurer Professor Marcello Costa, and our very, very busy secretary and CEO Loretta Marin who many of you might come across before. So we've committed ourselves to a number of very important ideals. We'd like to see the removal of pseudoscientific courses from tertiary institutions. We intend engaging regulatory authorities in harm reduction strategies and to publicly challenge the non-scientific principles of many practitioners of CAMHS. Public engagement is incredibly important in order to help clarify the importance of good science for better healthcare, and in particular to educate the public so that they can access evidence-based healthcare and avoid misleading and sometimes dangerous CAMHS. So it's been a very busy couple of years for us. We initially wrote to the vice-chancellors of all of the universities to validate the initial information that the Australian Sceptic's got on the pseudoscientific health courses. We did receive replies, and they varied from the helpful to the ambiguous, and some of them were downright hostile. Some didn't reply at all, and you can see their responses on our website. Very importantly, we met with the Parliamentary Secretary for Health and raised our concerns regarding the lack of oversight of the industry, the pseudoscience and universities, and in particular fundamentalist chiropractors. We've also made several submissions to regulatory bodies, including the TGA, and we've also written an open letter to private health insurers asking them to withdraw the CAMHS rebate for therapies which have no evidence base. We've provided this to anyone who actually wants to submit that letter themselves to their insurer. We've also written to all of the chiropractic organizations regarding the inappropriate treatment of babies and children and also to the university faculties offering chiropractic regarding their position on subluxation theory. Now, at the moment, the government is conducting a review of the rebate for natural therapies with private health insurance, and in May of this year, Professor Dwyer presented at this review. Sadly, FSM was the only voice for science in medicine, and we're still awaiting the results of this review. Now, it was recently discovered that probably the Cormidwifery textbook which is used in every university in Australia is in its section on discussing vaccination with parents is directing students to the Australian vaccination network as a source of non-government information on vaccination. And when we discovered this, we took action and this resulted in pretty good media coverage. We've also been in touch with our state health departments and they've directed the universities to alert the students to the misinformation in the book. In addition, the editors have given reassurance that they will be removing this section of text from the next edition of the book. What we do, people about the last six years of midwives who've been exposed to the textbook in its current form, I'm not so sure. Now, one of our significant achievements has been to simply attract media interest in the issue and this has been very successful indeed. As you can see by just the small selection of the coverage that we've received. And I'd encourage you also if you can to get hold of a program called Catalyst which screened on Thursday night in Australia which gave an excellent expose of pediatric chiropractic and which FSM played a significant role in. Our membership has grown rapidly, attracting a broad range of health professionals, scientists, journalists and consumer advocates. And we've got our first Nobel Prize winner, which we're delighted to welcome Professor Peter Doherty. Now, these are people who in the words of Professor Rob Morrison, are keen to defend not only the good name of health but the good name of science against those who seek spurious scientific respectability while debasing the science that they invoke. Internally, we have established working groups to address specialty areas including pharmacy and nursing. We have a regular column in Australasian science called Bit of Hill which we do accept submission for as well. And we've partnered with Linda Rosa from ISM to form an international discussion group for nurses and we're aiming to collaborate on an international white paper on nursing. We'll also be releasing a position paper later this year on pathology testing which is supported by the Royal College of Pathologists in Australia. We've also expanded our executive recently to include myself and Dr. Sue Yurachi who's a specialist in emergency medicine. So given the wide range of chem modalities, the lack of government oversight and the increasing public buy into the naturalistic fallacy, we unfortunately do face a long road ahead. However, we are now considered a powerful lobby group with a rapidly growing support base. And in the face of an aging population with an increase in burden of disease, it is more important now than ever that our scarce health dollar is not squandered on ineffective and potentially dangerous pseudoscience. Now, you too can offer your support by visiting the FSM website and becoming a named supporter of our objectives. Thank you, Jill and we have time for maybe one or two questions. Do we have any, please come up. So from my perspective in British Columbia and Canada in general, we have extended health has now been extended to chiropractors and other pseudoscientific health ways. My question is, do you feel like you're winning? And if so, can you help us win? Because we're not. I don't think we're winning yet but I think that we are in a position now where we've got enough voices that are trusted by the public that if we can keep getting that message out there then the public will start to realize what an important issue this is. And I think particularly, that main issue that I raised at the end about our scarce health dollar, we endlessly hear about the problems in our public hospitals, about having enough nurses and all of those issues. So I think if you can engage the public on why this is so important in terms of evidence-based healthcare, that is a really important message to get out in terms of why money is being funded away from the important side of healthcare, things like palliative care and aged care and all of those areas which are really missing out. I think that's a really important part of it. But yes, please get in touch and we can see what we can do. Let's thank Joanne one more time. Thank you so much. Thank you.