AN EVENING OF FILM WITH THE KARRABING FILM COLLECTIVE

Karrabing have had a global influence on the visual arts over the last decade—for the artistic impact of their films, and also the way they collectively make them. This is a chance to see the films, but also and more rarely, to talk about them in person with some of their indigenous members.

As much as it’s a collective, Karrabing is really a whole community, and so its numbers fluctuate. Of its more than 50 current members, four are joining us in Skye —Rex, Aiden, Kieran and Beth, along with one of their key institutional allies in negotiating land claims, Ben. Over the course of the evening we’re going to watch two of their short films, chat, hang out and try to inhabit something approaching the Karrabing sociality that their films emerge from.

The films attend to the memory and practice of the ancestral present and the ancestral catastrophe that they and their more-than-human world find themselves facing. This catastrophe continues arriving out of the ground that colonialism and racism tilled. They are anti-colonial; sometimes sci-fi, documentary or essayistic; and can be funny, hallucinatory, profound and sensorially intense. They emerge from the collective, intertwined obligations of Indigenous life, mixing fact and fiction, manifesting a situated and specific idea of reality. They foreground slippages and ‘errors’—in continuity of time, place, subject, look, feel—expressing the contingent nature of the Indigenous everyday. Often visual elements or narratives loop, mirroring human and totemic ancestors’ struggle to stay in a place under ongoing colonialism. They might feature mermaids, dreamings, police, settler zombies, or indigenous sovereignty emerging in the toxic landscape settlers polluted but are now afraid to enter.

The Karrabing will be joined in conversation by The School of Plural Futures and ATLAS Director Ainslie Roddick.

Mermaids, or Aiden in Wonderland, 2019, 26 mins
Set in the not so distant future, Europeans can no longer survive for long periods outdoors in a land and seascape poisoned by capitalism, but Indigenous people seem able to. A young Indigenous man, Aiden, taken away when he was just a baby to be a part of a medical experiment to save the white race, is released into the world of his family. As he travels with his father and brother across the landscape he confronts two possible futures and pasts.

The Family and the Zombie, 2021, 29 mins

Alternating between contemporary time in which Karrabing members struggle to maintain their physical, ethical and ceremonial connections to their remote ancestral lands and a future populated by ancestral beings living in the aftermath of toxic capitalism and white zombies, ‘The Family and the Zombie’ mixes comedy, tragedy and realism to reflect on the practices of the present and their impact on worlds to come.

The Karrabing Film Collective uses the creation of film and art installations as a form of Indigenous grassroots resistance and self-organization. The collective opens a space beyond binaries of the fictional and the documentary, the past and the present. Meaning “low tide” in the Emmiyengal language, karrabing refers to a form of collectivity outside of government-imposed strictures of clanship or land ownership. Shot on handheld cameras and phones, most of Karrabing’s films dramatize and satirize the daily scenarios and obstacles that collective members face in their various interactions with corporate and state entities. Composing webs of nonlinear narratives that touch on cultural memory, place, and ancestry by freely jumping in time and place, KFC exposes and intervenes into the longstanding facets of colonial violence that impact members directly, such as environmental devastation, land restrictions, and economic exploitation.

Arika is a political arts organisation concerned with supporting connections between artistic production and social change. They have been creating events since 2001.

Prior to their residency in Skye, Karrabing will be joining Arika for their programme Episode 11 brings together five days of film, music, discussion and study to think through other ways of existing and of conceiving of existence—arrayed against the ecological and social devastations of a capitalistic, colonial worldview that has been obliterating other worlds for over 400 years.

Through art, speculation and collective assembly, it brings together artists, filmmakers, musicians, poets, activists, historians, educators and communities who practice or imagine other ways of knowing the world, right here and now.

Visit their website for more information on this incredible programme.

Arika will be Live Streaming most events. If you are in Lochalsh and Skye, and can’t make it down to Glasgow, you can join the live streaming link on the Episode 11 main page.

Since 2021 young folk from across Skye and Lochalsh have worked alongside visual artist Emmie McLuskey to build a space to speak about the reality and potential of life in Skye and Lochalsh focusing on the climate crisis and it’s intersections with social justice.

The school takes the form of a series of gatherings– hosted in village halls and community spaces across the whole of Skye and Lochalsh, the school is a space to think and create responses to local and global challenges facing young people. We ask questions and learn together about landscape, stories, tradition, culture and language. We work with a host of local and international guest speakers from across all fields including art, music, history, literature, activism, agriculture and science.

The school runs throughout the year and is now in its third cycle. Take a look at Year one, Year twoand Year three to see whats been happening and what’s coming up.

Closed captions are included in both films.

The Skye Gathering Hall has a small, low step to the front doorframe. There are closed stall toilets and urinals. There is no accessible toilet.

If we can make attending this event easier for you, or you require further access information based on your needs, please contact info@atlasarts.org.uk and we will do our best to help.