SHOPFRONT STUDIO ARTIST-IN-RESIDENCE

The Shopfront Studio artist-in-residence invites a selected artist to inhabit our Shopfront Studio (once a workers’ cooperative bank at the Waterside Workers Hall) for a year, developing their own projects as well as engaging in a range of discursive and creative tasks with Vitalstatistix.

In 2019 we welcome writer, poet, activist and academic Dr Natalie Harkin.

A Narungga woman, Natalie is a writer who has performed and published her works widely. Her archival-poetics are informed by blood-memory, haunting and grandmother stories. She is a member of the Unbound Collective and the First Nations Australia Writers Network; and has worked in the Aboriginal higher education sector in South Australia since the mid-1990s.

Natalie is undertaking a three-year Australian Research Council-funded project entitled Resistance Poetics and Decolonising the Archive: Aboriginal Domestic Labour Stories from South Australia. Through this project she is tracing a history of Aboriginal women’s domestic labour and servitude.  This includes working with community to share stories and develop transformative and healing ways to creatively engage with, respond to, and physically transform the colonial archive. Community engagement and research, including around local sites such as Glanville Hall, will be the focus of her time at Vitalstatistix in 2019.

Image: courtesy of the artist