KarrabingCollective-visualization

According to the authors of this piece and the members of the Karrabing Collective of indigenous people in north Australia, a key aim of their films is to push back against forms of documentary cultural representation and other bureaucratized forms of knowledge production about indigenous lives. They argue that the "delusional promise of visual media" cannot capture the sheer magnitude of their lived experiences of settler colonialism as an ongoing, constant condition of life. Their films aim to show the "multi-leveled" worlds within which indigenous families live in. They not only represent (qua ethnographic realism) a culture or the lives of people somewhere, but their intentions are to through the process of filmmaking, "making true something in but as-of-yet unable to define about the world." (41). The goal of visualization is for the collective to playfully probe the structural conditions that shape their life in the present.