Over three days of talks, performances, screenings, workshops and shared meals, participants reflected on experiences across different communities, lands and histories. Grounded in exchange and reciprocity, the programme created space to imagine collectively how we might challenge cultural, spiritual and ecological erasure.
In the following reports, commissioned writers reflect on each day of the event.
Madison Howarth explores how Indigenous women artists from across the globe shared performances, language and research grounded in rematriation, an Indigenous feminist paradigm. Through weaving, dance and storytelling, the day examined the power of transgenerational learning to keep culture alive.
Bunmi Agusto traces how speakers positioned grandmothers as custodians of suppressed knowledge systems, transmitted through embodied practices like weaving, cooking and tending land. From keynote reflections on memory as infrastructure to hands-on work with clay, the day demonstrated how ancestral knowledge persists through intergenerational care and relationships with materials.
Mandy Merzaban examines the tensions that emerge when slow, relational and sacred ways of knowing enter institutional programming. Covering ancestral mapping to sonic offerings on dreaming and conversations on women’s creative speech, she reflects on the structural contradictions that arise when museums embrace ethical engagement through programming alone.
‘Ancestral Knowledges: My Grandmother Is My School’ was organised by Hyundai Tate Research Centre: Transnational. Australian and New Zealand artist travel and administration was supported by the Australian Government through the International Cultural Diplomacy Arts Fund and the Australian Government Department of Infrastructure, Transport, Regional Development, Communications, Sport and the Arts.