Paper short abstract:

In the township of Alice Springs (Central Australia) the 'intense proximity' of Aboriginal residents and their counter-hegemonic cultural life-worlds, creates spaces of contestation and social conflict. This paper will posit an everyday visual ethnography of how and where Aboriginal life ways are conducted, embodied, and brokered, in everyday exchanges and in public utilities - in spite of on-going hegemonic structures to remove this Aboriginal 'presence'.

Paper long abstract:

Space as a socially meaningful category has to be conceived ethically. It provides zones of participation, belonging, and communicative possibility. To be constitutive of the social implies a compulsion towards a 'secure being' and the drive towards a 'safe life' inasmuch that belonging socially equates with emotional, psychological, and physical security. These are the aligning tenets of kinship, and, by extension, the conditions of Aboriginal sociality: systems of attentive social organization that define every aspect of culture. For Hannah Arendt (1958) 'the space of appearance' is dichotomous: a public realm organized hegemonically - already divided, apportioned, and posited within inclusion and exclusion. Historically, those excluded have been the slave, the foreigner, and the barbarian - those outside of the sphere of politics and reduced to de-politicized forms of being (Butler, 2011). However, in spite of this, 'the space of appearance' can be re-claimed: by performativity and by an embodied presence (Arendt, 1958 & Butler, 1997). In the township of Alice Springs (Central Australia) the intense proximity of Aboriginal residents and their counter-hegemonic cultural life-worlds, creates spaces of contestation and social conflict. In this paper I will posit an everyday visual ethnography of how and where Aboriginal life worlds are conducted in the public and social spaces of Alice Springs. By utilizing photography and film, aesthetics will be reanimated into an emergent relational space of creative intervention, one that privileges an Aboriginal world-view, and challenges the prevailing hegemony through 'the space of appearance' and 'the right to appear'.