<em>Performing Statelessness</em>: Creative Conversations between First Peoples and Refugees

Abstract

Performing Statelessness is a creative and practice-led research initiative that foregrounds stateless communities’ voices and lived experience to investigate what it means to be stateless in the context of Australia. This project extends the legal notion of ‘stateless’, generally used to discuss national citizenship, to stage an encounter between practicing artists who identify as having a First Peoples, asylum seeker or refugee background to understand the connections between communities experiencing disposession and displacement by the colonial nation-state form. The interedisciplinary performance lab at Bunjilaka Aboriginal Cultural Centre at Melbourne Museum explored the potential of performance as a de-instrumentalising and anti-extractive modality within a collaborative research process, understanding that communities can be the source of their own theory, and the starting and ending point of value.