Lumen & Elastic Fiction: Readings for Uncertain Times
Thursday 3rd September, 11am - 1pm (via Zoom)
Headline reading - Dark Emu: Aboriginal Australia and the birth of agriculture, Bruce Pascoe
How can Dark Emu inspire practices for unearthing and re-rendering our land histories?
Join Lumen for a reading group and online gathering using Bruce Pascoe’s Dark Emu to discuss how and by whom our ecological narratives are shaped; the habit of historical erasure by colonisers and how we can begin to collectively re-write more accurate, accredited histories and futures. Whilst it centres around the indigenous Australian story, the story resonates across global cultures. The session will be chaired by Lumen and led by Elastic Fiction (Becky Lyon), on the occasion of Lumen’s On Ancient Earth exhibition collaboration with The Artist Expedition Society in Australia’s Northern Territory. Headline and supporting texts will open up discussion around Pascoe’s work whilst the ‘reading group’ is explored as a method for working through confusion, cynicism and uncertain futures.
About the text
Bruce Pascoe is an Aboriginal (Bunurong/Tasmanian Yuin) Australian writer. In 2014 he published Dark Emu, destabilising the perception of pre-colonial Indigenous Australians as hunter-gathers and instead presented a robust, highly referenced argument that they were seasoned agriculturists. Investigating the journals and source materials of the colonial explorers themselves, he pieced together evidence of farmed land, village dwellings, cereal harvesting, aquaculture systems and animal husbandry - all of which until then was only meant to have arrived with the Europeans in 1788. Until publication, this history was not known and certainly not taught. The ‘agricultural aboriginal’ is antithetical to the barren land of ‘primitive’ wanderers and ‘inhospitable bush’ the European explorers were anticipating and have since touted to erase the more insidious narrative of colonisation. Dark Emu has won countless awards, been published as a children’s book and been transformed into a blockbuster theatre show.
About the reading group programme
This and forthcoming reading groups offer a welcoming environment for discussion that is open to all and encouraging of multiple understandings of the world around us. The sessions are embedded and engaged in interrogating more-than-human times, exploring how ‘nature’ has been and still is, colonised, controlled, represented, researched, and protected today. In precarious times we privilege words, philosophies, imaginings of our peers and esteemed thinkers alike for wisdom and guidance.
How to join the reading group
To join this and forthcoming reading groups, we are asking for a small fee via Patreon, to help with running costs now, and hopefully in the future, based on subscribers. All subscribers will be offered a place in the reading group and if unable to attend, will receive notes from the session.
Participants are not required to read the text beforehand.
Supported by Arts Council England
The reading group programme is funded by Arts Council England, which supports Lumen’s exploration of sustainable online activities during a time when galleries large and small are looking at alternative offerings for networks of artists and audiences.