Abstract

This practice-led research project explores how factual and fictional histories and futures intersect with my Indigenous ancestral narratives. Informed by my lived experience as a displaced Yanyuwa person, I examine how through speculation alienation emerges, particularly when engaging with ethnographic archives to bridge gaps in ancestral knowledge.

By converging Grace Dillion’s Indigenous futurism, Denis Foley’s Indigenous standpoint theory, and embodied storytelling, I use science fiction narratives to confront colonial biases—biases that displace the ontological relationship between the Indigenous body and ancestral Country.

This framework shapes my temporal drawing methods, inscribing ephemerality into both the work and its narratives. In this paper I highlight how transient experiences, made present through my methods, are often excluded from conventional archives, especially those of Indigenous communities.

Through practice, I combine cliché-verre, chemigram, and lumen printing techniques to transform the silver gelatin matrix into an Indigenous archival photo-object. I print multi-layered hand-drawn negatives, onto silver gelatin paper, then disrupt the chemical development process using resists in a painterly manner. The prints contain drawings depicting cyberpunk representations of myself embodying my ancestors, embedded with symbolism marking sites of ancestors’ displacement. The unpredictable mark-making of the chemigrams, create multiple print iterations, each capturing alternate speculative narratives that reflects Indigenous space-time thinking.

In writing and artmaking, this project contributes to the reimagining of the past through an Indigenous futurist worldview, using layered, obscured and fragmented imagery. Rather than resolving gaps in ancestral knowledge, I seek to widen them to a fantastical extent to make them obvious, offering new ways to honour my ancestors’ stories.