Winimaku ara papa wiimatjaraku and other stories

Abstract

This audio-visual essay invites readers to enter a new intermedial archive of documentary paintings and stories by a celebrated and prolific multilingual Central Australian Aboriginal woman artist. Addressing our written text to intimate family and audiences from elsewhere, in multiple voices and modes of address, we offer an opportunity to consider the dynamics of creating, keeping and caring for memory through the affordances of digital co-creativity. These include what we term ‘painting remix animation’, a form of what co-author Rosalyn Boko calls mixamilani (‘mixing together’ of different elements). Guided by the artist's vibrant palette and life-expressive practice, visitors to the article can move and rest amongst a variety of standpoints through which to attune to questions of history, memory, pictorial storytelling, love, friendship and joy. We hope that in this way, everyone can sense the world-making powers and poetics of colour and understand how our style of slow research towards digital mixamilani creates a new kind of archive for holding paintings carefully, outside of the art commodity market.