Mapping Shadows of the Bight: a road trip residency

In August 2023, a collective of arts and humanities scholars undertook a mobile residency on the Far West Coast of South Australia, along the Great Australian Bight. Moving through deeply storied country that is largely marginal and neglected in the cultural and political imaginary, and negotiating our relation to this displacement as settler-colonial scholars with the privilege of mobility, the residency sought creative and critical approaches to self, place and others that might build capacity for shared reparative futures. Encounter, embodiment and entanglement – modes of staying with shadows cast by global forces of capitalism, industrialization, colonization and climate change and, just as importantly, staying clear of research methods that rehearse epistemic violence – formed the core of our intentionally indeterminate methodology. In keeping with a framework that accepts the contingency of knowledge and knowledge production, we offer not findings but seekings: invitations to engage in pursuing new collaborations, methods and politics for expanding imaginaries of materiality and connection, resistant to the dematerialization, dissociation and disregard inherent to the contemporary global order.