Phone & Spear: a Yuta Anthropology

Publication details

Paperback
$21.95 T | £16.99
ISBN: 9781912685189
272 pp. | 6.5 in x 9 in
160 color photos
December 2019

Author and/or Editor name/s

Miyarrka Media: Paul Gurrumuruwuy, Jennifer Deger, Enid Guruŋulmiwuy, Warren Balpatji, Meredith Balanydjarrk, James Ganambarr, Kayleen Djingadjingawuy

Author and/or Editor bio/s

Miyarrka Media is an arts collective based in the Yolngu community of Gapuwiyak in northern Australia. Since 2009 co-founders Paul Gurrumuruwuy and Jennifer Deger have fostered a multi-generational team of Dhalwangu, Marrangu, Guruwiwi and Ngaymil artists, developing award-winning films, time-based art, and interactive digital works driven by a Yolngu commitment to more-than-human relational politics and aesthetics. They have exhibited in Brisbane, Darwin, Melbourne, Sydney, New York, Denmark and Taiwan. Their work has featured in Artlink, ABC TV, and SBS. Their first book, Phone & Spear, is a experiment in responding to the contemporary push-and-pull of life through phone-made digital collage and patterns based on connections to kin and country.

Year of publication

2019

Publisher

Goldsmiths Press, London

Abstract

Phone & Spear is an collaborative, intercultural experiment that responds to today’s digitally intensified push-and-pull of life through the rhythms of colour and pattern created in phone-made collages that refract anew powerful and enduring Yolngu connections to kin and country.

Yuta is the Yolngu word for new. Phone & Spear: A Yuta Anthropology is a project inspired by the gloriously cheeky and deeply meaningful audiovisual media made with and circulated by mobile phones by an extended Aboriginal family in northern Australia. Building on a ten-year collaboration by the community-based arts collective Miyarrka Media, the project is an experiment in the anthropology of co-creation. It is a multivoiced portrait of an Indigenous society using mobile phones inventively to affirm connections to kin and country amid the difficult and often devastating circumstances of contemporary remote Aboriginal life.

But this is not simply a book about Aboriginal art, mobile phones, and social renewal. If old anthropology understood its task as revealing one world to another, yuta anthropology is concerned with bringing different worlds into relationship. Following Yolngu social aesthetics -or what Miyarrka Media translate as “the law of feeling” – the book is a relational technology in its own right: an object that combines color, pattern, and story to bring once distant worlds into new sensuously mediated connections.