Lorna Munro
“ARKAN & IRBELA: A Blak Matriarchal Lens ”

She weaved tightly
And true
Twisting grains
Fixing fibres anew
Selecting blades
Slicing sharply
Through
Another age
Her disciples knew
The resistance rages
From a continuum
Tied
Ancestors
Returning to us through
Our children
A gun
A weapon
Of words
So absurd
It makes white heads hurt
Diagram this
Quote this
Sit here
Shut up
The women are speaking
They are teaching us
How to survive
The apocalypse.

“Our stories are powerful we have always been powerful” — Gabi Briggs

Gabi Briggs’ first film ARKAN & IRBELA is a visual offering of Anaiwan country, kinship and survival presented through a Blak Matriarchal Lens that demands the viewer to approach the subject matter of reclaiming personal, familial and sacred stories and unbroken bloodlines in the face of 236 years of colonisation with the utmost respect and reverence. THIS WORK IS NOT FOR YOU. It is foremost for our children and their children, the survivors of a genocide existing beyond 13 generations in places like New South Wales; the frontline of invasion and also of our resistance in so called ‘Australia’. The privilege of witnessing this work and testifying to truth is yours. The beneficiaries of our genocide. The disruptors of unbroken narratives and lore connecting us to time immemorial The purveyors of our subjugation and the audience which we have not asked for.

GEDYURA, The Woven Rifle, is a declaration of the Blak woman’s will to survive the colonial project, warning anyone who crosses her boundaries that she has the capacity to fire back, and she hits with the weight of every woman before her by any means necessary. There is nothing more I love to see than Bla(c)k and Brown women wielding weaponry.

The image of the woven rifle echoes the iconic image of a Sandinista rebel, breastfeeding her child while carrying a rifle slung over her back, taken by Orlando Valenzuela in Nicaragua 1984.

It reminded me of images taken by Juno Gem, of my Mum and older siblings at Land Rights protests wearing red, black and yellow berets made by my grandmother. It reminded me of the iconography of Kathleen Cleaver and Angela Davis and the Women of the Black Panthers/Black Liberation Movement, posed on woven rattan thrones. It’s Pam Grier as Flower Child Coffin ‘Coffy’ and Foxy Brown/Jackie Brown, and even the image of sexy and dangerous video game vixen Lara Croft; which I just learned was originally modelled on singer Neneh Cherry, A BLACK WOMAN.

ARKAN & IRBELA speaks directly to the blood and bones of GEDYURA, dissecting the flesh of our relationality, inviting you into intimate ritual practices, into the artist's childhood home – the home of her Grandparents – and to their table. The video invokes and responds to her Grandmother’s writing in Ingelba and the Five Black Matriarchs. It's almost like the blueprint for the woven gun had been waiting to be uncovered here at this moment. The artist and the women from her family’s decision to wear dressing gowns, can be seen as a deliberate act to appear non-threatening and unprepared, while an appropriated image of the ‘Last Supper’ emerges, replacing the most famous Palestinian in history – Jesus – at the centre of a banquet with a Blak woman, preparing to weave a gun. Weaving her own defence and taking up the arms of our matriarchs before us with what she has available. Very mindful. Very demure.

The images in ARKAN & IRBELA of women in homely dressing gowns worn in both exterior and interior shots, mirror archival images of our ancestors wearing possum skin cloaks. These women do come from cold Country after all, where having a possum skin cloak was key to survival. Today we are prohibited from hunting possums for their skins. Possum skin artists and crafters rely on the trade from Aotearoa, where our possums are considered pests. The images reference the part of our shared history of genocide, where our cloaks were taken by missionaries and replaced with blankets that were not sufficient for life in this part of the continent, resulting in mass deaths and sicknesses. The dressing gowns align with the skin of each person in the video, as they traverse across terrain, time and bloodlines; weaving the diagram of an unbroken matrilineal bloodline with Gabi as protagonist, linking past present and future. Each colour represents the generation each matriarch embodies and exists in, but also their relationship to one another. There are four skin clan groups, with the youngest woman in the video wearing the same colour as Gabi’s Grandmother (not pictured) representing a reset of the skin clan motif, embodying the belief that our ancestors return to us through our children.

Our family structures and clan-to-clan relationally are the framework through which our children are introduced to world views existing beyond Modern ideas of time. Without the mapping of our kinship we are lost. I grew up with multiple mums, as I know many of us have, and still continue to raise our children in accordance with these ways as much as possible. I am also raising children I did not birth. They are my children nonetheless. In fact our 'skinship' as Gabi likes to call it, tells us that all of our mother’s sisters are our mothers as well. All their children are our siblings. We have multiple Dads and Mums, and our Grandmother’s sisters and so forth are our Grandmothers as well. Within this framework we can always find our way home.

I have known Gabi for a very long time. I first met my ‘Tidda’ while we were both working in the Rocks area as tour guides. We connected on a few different levels: we had mutual friends, and mob with roots in the same places. We would get lost in our yarns about the binary of Patygoreng and Barangaroo and the early tropes of Blak women in the colony during our lunch breaks. Many years later we even got to read from Dawes Diary at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London together. Over the last decade I have enjoyed travelling and working alongside Gabi in many iterations. I am inspired by her and deeply value having a creative collaborator who has never ever once told me ‘that's a bad idea’, even when there have indeed been bad ideas.

I see in this current work for ARKAN & IRBELA a patchwork of oral histories and family stories told to me by my Tidda, spanning the good majority of a decade-long friendship and sisterhood that has sustained me in my formative years. Stories that criss cross into my own family tree and bloodlines, that throw me back to the moment of our initial meeting and beyond our intersecting and parallel pathways into archival community work, the forensic and detective work of language revitalisation, and reclamation of cultural practices and weaving.

While existing in white art spaces, Gabi’s art practice provides a level of exclusivity for her selected audience: her mob. At this intersectionI have witnessed Gabi invoke protection ceremonies, drive out bad spirits in cleansing rituals. But my all-time favourite Gabi the artist moment was when she’s partitioned off Blak Only spaces, bringing all the Karens to the yard.

Gabi mentioned to me that her Nan Pat considered her work a gift to her people, and that reciprocity is evident in GEDYURA and ARKAN & IRBELA. I say all this to say I have felt the vibrations of the seeding of this work and am now watching it come to fruit, to be harvested and devoured by minds that were in need of nourishment in the way that only our BLAK MATRIARCHS could give.

The purpose of this work, this generation's work, is to preserve and document what we have access to now in the history of the colonial project – which has been the topic of our conversations for a large portion of our Tiddaship – but also to remind Gabi herself who she is, WHO WE ARE as the granddaughters of language holders and matriarchs. We have had many teachers in preparation for a future their ancestors feared. An apocalypse with no language, no land, no kinship and no resources nor culture. Alas we have survived every attempt to genocide us. WE HAVE ALWAYS BEEN POWERFUL!

This essay was commissioned to accompany ARKAN & IRBELA by Anaiwan Gedyura artist Gabi Briggs.