AUSTRALIA

Golden Lion for Best National Participation
Motivation: “In this quietly powerful pavilion, Archie Moore worked for months to hand-draw with chalk a monumental First Nations family tree. Thus 65,000 years of history (both recorded and lost) are inscribed on the dark walls as well as on the ceiling, asking viewers to fill in blanks and take in the inherent fragility of this mournful archive. Floating in a moat of water are redacted official State records, reflecting Moore’s intense research as well as the high rates of incarceration of First Nations’ people. This installation stands out for its strong aesthetic, its lyricism, and its invocation of shared loss for occluded pasts. With his inventory of thousands of names, Moore also offers a glimmer of possibility for recuperation”.

Today commonly used together to generically indicate “friends and family,” the terms “kith” and “kin” have over time lost their ancient connotation linked to the concepts of “fellow countryman” and “homeland.” Always sensitive to the issue of the erasure of Australian native languages, particularly those belonging to his own family legacy, Archie Moore extends his artistic inquiry into the impact that English colonization has had on indigenous populations in order to stimulate a recovery of the sense of belonging to the land and sovereignty of the native nation.