As Country was cut, divided, commodified and consumed through colonial surveying, so too were the systems that governed the care of land and kin by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities for over 65,000 years. This disruption to systems of sustaining care was marked by a shift towards individualism and the accumulation of wealth and power — a characteristic of Western worldviews. The same force once welded by Gunter’s chains1 and property titles are today seen in the perpetuating hierarchical systems of colonial art and museum institutions that further entrench power imbalances and underscore the enduring legacy of colonisation.
Now, the concept of care appears in contemporary art institutional discourse, debating how provisions of welfare are embedded in the leadership and operations of these institutions. However, this discourse raises the question: how can these neoliberal institutions that were established upon and continue to benefit from violent histories of land theft and genocide work within a rhetoric of care? Therefore, the concept of care in the arts often becomes more about a diluted conceptual engagement with ideas of well-being and reconciliation than a meaningful commitment to restructure, repatriate and integrate care in their foundations.
To imagine what the practice of after-care could be, is to imagine beyond the current systems of State and Capital power. It would require alternative systems of governance that transcend the current social and economic frameworks that uphold colonial legacies and neoliberal ideologies. A system that takes the idea of collective care grounded in respect, responsibility and reciprocity is not new; it is ancient. Kinship systems and community-minded care have existed on this land and cross-culturally for tens of thousands of years. After-care practice within Indigenous social systems sees individuals, in relation to Community and Country, establishing responsibilities and connection to one another, the land and the universe — in turn, nurturing and being nurtured by community.
Unbound Collective are a group of artists based on Kaurna country whose shared creative practice is grounded in this kind of communal care. Interwoven by Community and practices in higher education through Flinders University, Dr Ali Gumillya Baker, Dr Simone Ulalka Tur, Dr Faye Rosas Blanch and Dr Natalie Harkin formed Unbound Collective in 2014 as a necessity to speak back to colonial institutions. As Ali Gumillya Baker describes
[…] we felt grounded with each other, understood each other's political values and ethical positioning. We had also all been surrounded as younger people by groups of strong, strategic and political First Nations women, it felt like it was important that we continued the legacies we had been taught by our matriarchs and that we could say something collectively that was important.2
For the Unbound Collective, after-care is not just a concept but an embodied practice that informs the content and methodology of their shared practice. Working within institutions, their site-specific installation and performance practice breaks-free and manifests knowledge beyond these spaces in response;
[...] to the violence of racialised genocide and colonisation processes, (as mothers, and one of us is a grandmother), we demonstrate a praxis which is considering and speaking back to trauma and violence in this settler-colony now called Australia […].3
Their Sovereign Acts performance series (2014-2019) is one such body of work that responds to these sites of trauma through loving, ethical and relational means and explores: ‘[…] ideas of visibility and anti-racist praxis’.4 In doing so, their work seeks representational justice for their ancestors through and beyond the archive. This commitment to disrupt, resist and reimagine the relationships with colonial institutions will culminate in a survey exhibition spanning the last ten years of their collective practice at Flinders University Museum of Art (FUMA) in September 2024.5 Ali Gumillya Baker articulates that their work always stems:
[…] from a place of First Nations critical love. Critical in the sense that it is challenging. Critical in the sense it can cause discomfort because we are speaking about recent events that the colonisers have not actively taught about in the schools and universities, but ultimately our work is about asking important questions what we can learn from these histories and violent presence and how can we ensure that we seek peaceful radical change in the present and create critical, loving, sustainable communities that seek justice. We try to maintain love towards ourselves and each other in this process, and this is a survival tactic.6
Unbound’s collectivism and shared actions of care blur colonial borderlines. Their non-hierarchical and laterally dependent working method de-centres the individual to prioritise community in truth-telling and acts of resistance. Where one’s work begins and another’s stops is indistinguishable and cannot be bound, bordered, packaged, categorised or contained. Through this mode of working, Unbound Collective staunchly repudiates a paradigm of the arts industry fixated solely on capital accumulation and objectification. It is a resistance against capitalism; a firm refusal of the foundational tenets upon which the colony was erected. Instead, their shared action cultivates a form of collective care that exists outside the market.
After-care is a prefigurative politics for envisioning and cultivating a better future for the arts. Inscribed in the Country that swells beneath these institutions are primordial systems of community-centred care. Unbound Collective’s work prioritises First Nations care that sustains collective wellbeing, environmental stewardship and social justice by acknowledging and addressing the violent historical injustices undertaken on this land. Their sovereign practice bridges past-present-future that builds within a communal prosperity to repatriate love back to our ancestors — a return to an after-care.
[1] Gunter’s chains was a tool used to measure distances when surveying town allotments in the early settlement of Australia. This tool was used in the 1840s to conduct surveys in Queensland. Source: http://qldspatial.information.qld.gov.au/FirstSurveyors/index.html#:~:text=Gunter's%20chains%20were%20used%20for,100%20wire%20links%20joined%20together.
[2] Author’s own interview with Dr Ali Gumillya Baker, on behalf of Unbound Collective. 19 May 2024.
[3] Ibid.
[4] Author’s own interview with Dr Ali Gumillya Baker, on behalf of Unbound Collective. 19 May 2024.
[5] Unbound Collective. Exhibition: Sovereign Acts I love Praxis, Flinders University Museum of Art. September 30 2024 - April 11 2025. https://www.flinders.edu.au/museum-of-art/exhibitions
[6] Author’s own interview with Dr Ali Gumillya Baker, on behalf of Unbound Collective. 19 May 2024.
