The Blakyard: Dr. Paola Balla / Immersion: Kalanjay Dhir

This is a limited edition print of Paradise Journal, an online and open-access publication for critical and experimental work on architecture in Australia.
Issue 01: Backyard

The Blakyard: Dr. Paola Balla 

The exhausting difficulty of being a Blak woman in the colony is that we are always having to disrupt its racism while we’re trying to survive and thrive.

In showing care for language and lineage, I pay particular respect by ensuring the word Blak is attributed to Destiny Deacon, the acclaimed photographic artist and KuKu and Erub and Mer Torres Straits woman. In the catalogue for the 1994 exhibition,    Blakness: Blak City Culture at the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art (ACCA), in collaboration with Boomalli Aboriginal Artist Co-operative, curators Clare Williamson and Hetti Perkins wrote: “The term ‘Blak’ was developed by Destiny Deacon as part of a symbolic but potent strategy of reclaiming colonialist language to create means of self-definition and expression.”¹ In conversation at the 2020 Cairns Indigenous Art Fair, Deacon stated:

“I just wanted to take the ‘C’ out of ‘black.’ I was able to convince Hetti Perkins and Claire Williamson to alter their curated urban Indigenous exhibition to ‘Blakness: Blak City Culture (ACCA, Melbourne) without the ‘c’ in 1994!”²

This Blak womanist act of resistance, dropping the “c” to de-weaponise the term “black cunt,” is an act of disruption that has grown through use, particularly by young Aboriginal women on social media and in new and emerging Aboriginal arts dialogue and Blak arts businesses.

Paradise Journal, 2021
English
Softcover, 30   pages
105mm x 150mm

Immersion: Kalanjay Dhir

As children, when our pets died, we would take their bodies behind the old ‘70s factories, to the artificial banks of the river. Imitating our father, my siblings and I would send our pets’ empty vessels down the river and pray. For us, the polluted Parramatta River emulated the polluted Ganga Mata or Ganges. It was only when I reached my teenage years that I realised the river we live next to was not ours, nor was it the Ganges.

Immersion is a step in problematising my relationship to the Parramatta River, gamifying the spiritual dissonance of what it means for a settler-migrant family to project stories onto Dharug waters and lands that we do not have claim to. Swimming in the river became a way of immersing myself in its immediate material conditions, a result of pollutants of industry and colonisation, while also considering its future under immense urban redevelopment.

Paradise Journal, 2021
English
Softcover, 10   pages
105mm x 150mm