INFRACTIONS is a feature documentary in dialogue with frontline Indigenous cultural workers’ struggles against threats to more than 50% of Australia’s Northern Territory from shale gas fracking.
In the last decade, amid an unceasing mining boom, neo-paternalistic policies have aimed to reverse investments in remote Aboriginal homelands and land rights. With the lifting of a shale gas fracking moratorium in the Northern Territory in 2018, British, US and homegrown settler mining companies exploit the weakness of Indigenous rights paradigms – explained in the film by Professor Irene Watson – to licence the expansion of a toxic industry across vast, ancient underground water systems.
Refuting capitalist and colonial models of land and water on the driest continent on earth, INFRACTIONS seeks to establish productive connections between disconnected archives of land, memory, activism and research.
Featuring contributions by: Dimakarri ‘Ray’ Dixon (Mudburra); Jack Green (Garawa, Gudanji); Gadrian Hoosan (Garrwa, Yanyuwa); Juliri Ingra (Gooreng Gooreng); Jackie Johnson (Gooreng Gooreng); Que Kenny (Western Arrarnta); Robert O’Keefe (Wambaya); Neola Savage (Gooreng Gooreng); the Sandridge Band, and Professor Irene Watson (Tanganekald, Meintangk Bunganditj), author of Aboriginal Peoples, Colonialism and International Law.
Production credits: Director/Research: Rachel O’Reilly. Editor/Visual Research: Sebastian Bodirsky. Camera: Tibor Hegedis, Colleen Raven (Nharla Photography), Rachel O'Reilly. Sound: Rachel O’Reilly. Sound mastering: Jochen Jezussek. Map visuals: Valle Medina, Benjamin Reynolds (Pa.LaC.E). Subtitles: Katharina Habibi.
INFRACTIONS is commissioned by the KW Production Series, organised in collaboration with the Julia Stoschek Collection and OUTSET Germany_Switzerland, and was produced with additional support from The Australia Council for the Arts. KW Production Series is curated and produced by Mason Leaver-Yap. This event is additionally supported by the
Birkbeck Centre for Research on Race and Law.
Que Kenny is a Western Arrarnta woman, community support worker and activist from Ntaria (Hermannsburg), 130km west of Alice Springs in the Northern Territory, also studying law at Deakin University, Melbourne. She has been involved in grassroots campaigns against the Northern Territory Emergency Response (‘The Intervention’) since 2007, and against Northern Territory gas fracking with the Protect Country Alliance.
Sarah Keenan co-directs the Centre for Research on Race and Law at Birkbeck Law School, University of London. Her research and teaching are at the intersection of legal and political theory, geography and post-colonial studies. Her monograph Subversive Property: Law and the Production of Spaces of Belonging was published in the Routledge Social Justice series in 2015. She has recently completed a Leverhulme Fellowship on her current project Making Land Liquid: The Temporality of Title Registration.
Olivier Marboeuf is a writer, storyteller and curator. He founded the independent art centre Espace Khiasma (2004 – 18) in Les Lilas, Paris, and ongoingly works in translation, making stories from experiences, poetics as politics from the French banlieues to Caribbean contexts, through oral culture, questions of representation, the visible, the invisible, bodies as archives and places as bodies. He produces films within Spectre productions and contributes to the cinematic distribution and research unit, Phantom.
Anthony Faramelli lectures in visual and cultural theory at Goldsmiths, University of London, a mental health recovery programme consultant at Single Homeless Project, and a member of the Network for Institutional Analysis. His research intersects psychosocial theory, recent French philosophy and postcolonial theory, and often is focussed on social movement and indigenous resistance. He is the author of Resistance, Revolution and Fascism: Zapatismo and Assemblage Politics and an editor, with David Hancock and Rob White, of Spaces of Crisis and Critique: Heterotopias Beyond Foucault.
Rachel O’Reilly is an artist and writer, PhD researcher at Goldsmiths’ Centre for Research Architecture, and theory seminar leader at the Dutch Art Institute. She was previously a curator at the Australian Cinematheque at the Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane. Her artistic work and research have been presented internationally, most recently at Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven; E-flux, New York; and UNSW Galleries, Sydney. She co-wrote On Neutrality with Jelena Vesic and Vlidi Jeric for the Non-Aligned Modernisms series (MCA, Belgrade), and publishes with Danny Butt on artistic autonomy in settler colonial space.
Thanks: Stories from the Frontline: Artists on
Climate and Cultural Change, Katherine Regional Arts Centre September 2018,
organized by the Protect Country Alliance, Mason Leaver-Yap, Lauren Mellor,
Alex Read, Irene Watson, Billee McGinley, Lisa Stefanof, Diana McArty, Sarah
Keenan, Kirsty Howey, Richard and Lindsay Johnson, Lloyd Beck, Caro McDonald,
Marion Caris, David Nixon, Alex Kelly, Carmen Anselado, Cheryl Watson, Richard
Bell, Beth Sometimes, Phil and Rick, Mimi Catterns, Bong Ramilo, Tam Hanson,
Sonja Hornung, Jo Holden, Karen Auty, Kathy McKenzie, Lindy Nolan, Carol
Matthews, Joe Collins,
Zowie Douglas-Kinghorn, Sumu Sivanesan, Nathan Gray, Agnieszka Polska, Jacklyn
O’Reilly, Louise O’Reilly, Lawrence O’Reilly, Jonathon Oxlade, Hypatia
Volourmis, Marina Vishmidt, Siddhartha Lokanandi, Danny Butt, Filipa Cesar,
Katja George, Anika Joyce Sadiq, Margarida Mendes, Dele Adeyemo, Constanza
Mendoza, Regina Sarreiter, Watch This Space (Mparntwe), the Phd Roundtable of
the Centre for Research Architecture Goldsmiths, the Extracted Bodies | Corporeal
Grounds group of women artists in Berlin.
no. 236848.