LunarTime
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Kinship-mind is about "relationships and connectedness... there are no isolated variables - every element must be considered in relation to other elements and the context." (Yunkaporta, 2019, pp.169-170)

Lunar phase, time, place (in progress)

 

2007
Connectivity (evolving)
Talking, drawing and dancing connect cellular memories.

2015 - 2020
connectivity: love and money
Hands trace phytoplankton dance

year
Title
About.

Connectivity, 2007 (evolving).
Voice: Mary E. White
Music: Max Eastman
Drawings / words: Kim Holten, Christine McMillan, Joris Everaerts
Animation: Lisa Roberts

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Back stories

Words by Kim Holten reflect kinship-mind responding to stories about changes to natural climate cycles. I met Kim in 2007 at the University of New South Wales where we were both studying. She was a teacher and Aboriginal Education Adviser, raised in La Perouse by her grandmother, a Dhanggati woman. I had just begun a PhD to explore how animation might be used to combine responses that people have, as scientists and as artists, to stories of climate change coming from Antarctica. Kim participated in workshops I led as part of that investigation. Workshops began with deep listening as we shared what we knew about climate change and Antarctica. We then moved, drew and wrote in response to that round table experience. I traced and animated our drawings and words and combined these in ways that reflected my experience. I showed draft animations to the group and incorporated their feedback to reflect, as much as possible, the group experience.

Years later, on Wed Feb 12, 2020, I read Nadia Wheatley's recollections of Kim in her 2012 Keynote Address to the Children's Book Council of Australia: http://nadiawheatley.com/new-page-5

"...Kim explains that the Aboriginal way of learning is to do with 'the way we communicate'."And it’s not just about the speaking but it's about the deep listening - it's being able to listen very closely to what people are saying. That was one of the invaluable lessons that my grandmother taught me, through the way she told her stories.

My auntie Boronia does it, even to this day. If she wants you to listen to her, she'll talk to you on her drawing breath in -it's like a whisper -so you have to get closer to her. And my grandmother would do that too, so it would force you to come close and lean in and listen, to really get the message — to get the meaning behind what she was saying, as that story was being built up and built up and built up and built up and built up! And then getting to the point, and the inflexion in the voice going down."

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