“postcolonial nostalgias: shrine to our speculative ancestors”
Leila Doneo Baptist and Mia Boe
29 Oct → 13 Nov 2022
Leila Doneo Baptist and Mia Boe have collaborated for the first time to present postcolonial nostalgias: shrine to our speculative ancestors in the West Space Window.
"This work presents the decolonising and prospective potential of nostalgia as an opportunity to reconnect with lost histories, so as to dream up sovereign futures of solidarity. We situate this work in a postcolonial temporality, which is to say that we understand our lived experiences through the myriad ways that a violent colonial past continues to shape our present.
While we acknowledge the limitations of nostalgia – particularly in so-called ‘Australia’ where it has been co-opted by capitalist structures to enforce a false and harmful nationalistic identity – we also believe it is open to being re-tooled for other purposes. In making this shrine, we have created a space to reflect on childhood rituals, honour sacred futures and memorialise our speculative ancestors, whose transcontinental relationships persisted through colonial attempts at separation and control.
We understand a speculative ancestor as an intangible presence, who represents the parts of our histories obscured by ongoing imperial epistemicide. In doing so we affirm that colonisation is not the metanarrative of our lives, nor was it the metanarrative of those who came before us." — Leila Doneo Baptist and Mia Boe, 2022
The West Space Window is supported by the City of Yarra through their Annual Arts Grants Program.
Leila Doneo Baptist is an undisciplined artist with Asian-Middle Eastern-Australian ancestry, who grew up on Djugun-Yawuru land in Western Australia. Their work is informed by dispersed mixed-race histories with a focus on creative practice as an opportunity for relational connection, decolonial healing and what it means to be speaking from a settler-immigrant positionality on stolen land. Leila currently lives and works in Naarm-Melbourne.
Mia Boe is a Naarm/Melbourne based painter from Brisbane with Butchulla and Burmese ancestry. Her work is influenced by the inheritance and 'disinheritance' of these two cultures, often responding to Empire's deliberate and violent interferences with the cultural heritages of Burma/Myanmar and K'gari (Fraser Island).