PARADISE JOURNALISSUE 01BACKYARD 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. I ask how we, as Blak women, assert our sovereignty in visual ways, as well as how our very survival as sovereign warrior women acts as resistance against white supremacy, colonialism, patriarchy and state settler violence. My work seeks to create a dream world of unconditional love, contemplation and respite where Aboriginal women embody the disruptive and transformative work of art and resistance. It also speaks back and Blak to dominant white and patriarchal public narratives and spaces that enact and hold violence and erasure. I created Ghost Weaving in dialogue with Professor Tracey Bunda, Ngugi/Wakka Wakka scholar, to name a matrilineal, intergenerational approach which could embody curator Stephen Gilchrist’s adaptation of the term, the “everywhen.” In his exhibition, “The Everywhen, the Eternal Present in Indigenous Art in Australia” (2016), Stephen Gilchrist stated that he utilised: “the elastic paradigm of ‘the Everywhen’ to explore the ways that Indigenous Australians conceptualize, mark, and manipulate time, rather than separating past, present and future… The past is not inaccessible to Indigenous people. It is instead part of a cyclical and circular order. Indigenous conceptions of time rely on active encounters with both the ancestral and natural worlds, and these dynamic relationships find expression in artistic production.” 3 Ghost Weaving disrupts old white readings of Aboriginality and makes intimate connections between the urban and the rural as extended practices of Country. It also speaks to the practice of making art in family spaces: Blak women’s homes becoming places to gather, re- create cultural practices, tell and listen to stories, negotiate difficulties and struggles, and share in private the very public work of survival.