Artist Kate McMillan is in conversation with Sophie Fuggle. In this event which draws on her art and film work, she looks at listening as method in relation to spaces like Manus and Nauru but also the silencing of indigenous culture in Australia.

In this online event, artist Kate McMillan will be talking about various projects exploring the postcolonial legacies of former penal colonies, prison islands alongside the ongoing use of extraterritorial detention by countries such as Australia and the United States. We will be talking about of the notion of 'listening with my feet' - listening as a decolonial tool on contested ground, and the influence of indigenous thinking on McMillan growing up in Australia. We will also explore McMillan’s collaborative work with Cat Hope considering ways in which systemic silencing of those both displaced and detained as part of colonial and neocolonial modes of government might be listened to differently.

The conversation will incorporate two short films: The Moment of Disapperance (which includes footage from Tasmania, Rottnest/Wadjemup, Pontikinisi, and Isle of Wight) and The Island is silent (filmed in St Petersburg and the fortress island Fort Alexander with footage from Gruinard Island) and excerpts from sound recordings including the Manus Recording Project and Cat Hope’s opera Speechless.

This conversation is online via YouTube Live.

Bios:

Kate McMillan is an artist and Senior Lecturer in Creative Practice at King’s College, London. Her research engages with histories connected to colonial violence and women’s knowledges. She is the annual author of ‘Representation of Female Artists in Britain’ commissioned by the Freelands Foundation, as well as various other academic publications that consider gender inequality in the visual arts. In 2019 Palgrave Macmillan published her monograph called Contemporary Art & Unforgetting in Colonial Landscapes: Islands of Empire which investigates female artists in the global south and the ways their practices defy colonial amnesia. Her own creative practice incorporates sound, film, textiles and sculpture to create immersive environments which aim to engender empathic responses to difficult histories.

www.katemcmillan.net

Sophie Fuggle is Associate Professor of Postcolonial Studies and Cultural Heritage at Nottingham Trent University. Her research focuses on legacies of France’s overseas penal colonies in French Guiana, New Caledonia and Vietnam.