Re-membering my Charrúa roots on unceded land: weaving new narratives

Abstract

The framework for this thesis arises from my experiences cultivating relationship with Beada-o-Lajau an ancestral Ombú tree (Phytolacca dioica), native to Uruguay where I was born. My relationship with Lajau facilitates a journey of re-membering the knowledges held at the intersections of my ancestral lineages. Regular encounters with this particular plantcestor, who grows on Gadigal Country close to where I live, not only aided in my ancestral Charrúa re-membering but prompted a sentipensante/feel-thinking relationship with the land I inhabit. Taking an autoethnographic approach informed by a feel-thinking-doing methodology, a personal relational map emerges that spans multiple places and times, with Lajau at its center.

Working predominantly in tejido /weaving using crochet, tapestry, coiling and beading, I dance between being practice-led and led by place to express and integrate my experiences. In the process of relating aspects of my story, the practice of re-membering becomes a way to counteract colonial narratives of erasure and reckon with my position as a settler-migrant inextricably implicated in the ongoing colonial project that is so-called Australia. Weaving becomes a language and a space for feeling and thinking through reclaiming ancestral practice and embodied ways of knowing whilst living away from my ancestral lands. The resultant artworks generate their own symbolic visual language in the form of woven cartographies, a series of physically impassable gateways that speak to connections across waterways.

Although anchored in the personal, the themes in this research echo those who share in collective human concerns to be in right-relationship with ourselves, the communities we are part of and our environment. The lands and waterways affirm their role as living knowledge systems, facilitating re-membering and potential new perspectives on south-south global relationships and the intersections of Charrúa and Afro-descendant identities in Uruguay.