"There is information that is restricted, that our children cannot learn about, there is information that is restricted even to adults, there is information that is of a secret or sacred nature, that many people have no knowledge of or access to. That knowledge is only there for certain people to have access to."
My ongoing research on indigenous Australian culture and its religious protocols stems back to a work titled „uluru“. It was an attempt to grasp the complexities of the tourist site “Ayer’s Rock” that is in the eyes of Aboriginal Australians a sacred site and taboo for not initiated people. There is modern legend that one of the last traditionally living Aboriginal persons from the uluru area had visited Alice Springs in the 1970ies where he encountered a photograph of this sacred site in an ad of a tourist agency. Shocked by this image he allegedly committed ritual suicide by spearing himself because he was not allowed to see it.
You’re damned if you do and you’re damned if you don’t.
the protocol archive
2009; vinyl lettering on MDF-boards;
dimensions variable; edition 1/3 + 2AP
An ever growing part of the Australian media tries to incorporate Aboriginal cultural protocols. Because of the complexities of the issue various governmental and private, indigenous organisations give advice:
„Many of the records, photographs and images in modern Australian society include depictions of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples, culture and experience. Such media may also include sensitive material that may require certain restrictions on access for spiritual reasons. In relation to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander content these sensitivities have greatest force when the materials include records and/or depictions of secret and/or sacred information which may have been recorded with or without permission. There are both published and archival materials which contain secret or sacred material which should have not be made generally available. An item may not be on open access to everyone. A sacred site may have to stay secret to only an initiated few elders. One clan may consist of different totemic groups, all of them restricted to only their own images, songs, rituals and artefacts. Furthermore, each clan and group is separated into women‘s and men‘s business thus creating a complex system of restrictions and privileges.“
summary of the “Aboroginal and Torres Strait Islander Library and Information Resources Network Protocols“
One of the most peculiar concepts to do indigenous protocols justice is when culturally sensitive material such as images of deceased persons is published in the mass media. Such cases could be news reports of accidents, historical documents but also movies in which indigenous actors perform (they will die one day, too and from that day on the movie will show a deceased person). In most cases when such images are being broadcast by the Australian media, one can find notifications at the beginning of the screening that address the indigenous population and warn of various forms of culturally sensitive material.
Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander viewers should exercise caution when watching this movie as it may contain images and voices of deceased persons.
There are many different versions of this message, some longer, more detailed or specific than others. They can be found on television, in movies, in books, on websites, learning material (i.e. CD-roms), etc. The idea is of course politically motivated. You don’t want to harm Aboriginal people by showing something they don’t want to see for spiritual reasons. But does it work this way? On the internet with its system of hyperlinks that one follows individually it might make sense to put such “stop signs”. But what if somebody tunes in on the news a little bit too late, misses the warning and catches a glimpse of a deceased clan member? It appears that those notifications are not the ultimate solution but that they might even have the opposite effect. It just becomes too easy to show things that are taboo by simply putting a readymade warning message up in front. I began to collect those notifications in “the protocol archive” in an attempt to research their context and their effects on the indigenous and non-indigenous communities. Their design for the media made it obvious to introduce them to another format that „shows“: the museum.
There are many artefacts of Aboriginal peoples on and off display in Berlin's Ethnological Museum Dahlem. Some of them are “altjerringa” or “secret-sacred” in english. Some of those hallows are capable to cast powerful curses, others are said to carry the twin souls of now deceased Aboriginal people. Until today those specific "altjerringa" are a nation's connection to its ancestors and the land on which they live. In Australia such hallows represent tremendous political problems for public and private collections; in recent time the pressure from the Aboriginal councils has even lead to a mass return of secret-sacred objects to their original nations. Due to the complaints of the Australian embassy about the disregard of indigenous cultural protocols in the past, most of the museum's altjerringa were taken off display and stored in the basement whilst some are still being shown.
I decided to restage Dahlem’s exhibition of Arrernte artefacts at the „Museumslabor Dahlem“ as part of an art education program. In the appearance of a live-webcam video streams with time and location codes programmed on top, the particular vitrines displaying the remaining "altjerringa" framed various scientific and artistic works about this taboo. „The protocol archive“ was one of the mixed-media installations to highlight the complexities of Aboriginal image prohibitions surrounding such delicate relics. People were invited to put the said warning messages, printed on wooden boards, to the test and to block those parts of the projection where „altjerringa“ could be seen. Nevertheless, the visitors soon realized that they could not „un-see“ them, once having entered the exhibition.
The “Museumslabor Dahlem” was accompanied by an artistic research about the provenance of those exhibits, all belonging to the “Wettengel Collection” (see right). The collector Nikolaus Wettengel was a German missionary for the Lutheran church who lived in Australia and converted Aboriginal children in Hermannsburg between 1896 and 1906. The publication “Die Sammlung Wettengel” is a chronological reconstruction of his correspondence with the church and indicates that he has plundered a secret-sacred cave where those “altjerringa” were hidden before he sold them to the “Völkerkundemuseum Berlin”. One might ask why they are not simply returned to the Arrernte nation in Central Australia. It turns out that their restitution to their traditional owners also clashes with indigenous protocols. It appears that within the communities nobody would even dare to accept, let alone look at them if they were ever returned. It isn’t clear to which totemic clan they belong and no Aboriginal person wants to risk breaking a sacred taboo by looking at another clan’s “altjerringa”.
So when the question of restitution is asked, the old saying applies: You're damned if you do and you're damned if you don't.
Die Sammlung Wettengel "“Die Sammlung Wettengel” ist eine künstlerische Recherche über den Missionar Nikolaus Wettengel und seine Rolle bei der Beschaffung heiliger Artefakte der Aborigines aus Zentralaustralien. Diese sogenannten "altjerringa" befinden sich heute im Ethnologischen Museum Dahlem, teils als Ausstellungsstücke, teils im Depot.
Wettengels Geschichte, die eng mit der Biografie dieser Heiligtümer verflochten ist, soll hier aus unterschiedlichen Archivquellen rekonstruiert werden, um der genauen Herkunft dieser Artefakte auf den Grund zu gehen.
Die Briefe, die Wettengel an das Missionshauptquartier in Deutschland und später an das Berliner Museum für Völkerkunde geschrieben hat, wurden zum besseren Verständnis von Sütterlin in lateinische Schrift transkribiert. Abschnitt für Abschnitt finden sich kurze Zusammenfassungen und bildnerische Kommentare, um seine Erlebnisberichte zu illustrieren.
Balzar geht dabei mit detektivischem Spürsinn der Frage nach, ob die Sammlung Wettengel in ihrer Gesamtheit womöglich aus einer heiligen Höhle nahe Hermannsburg geraubt wurde."
land in land, installation views @ Villa Merkel, 2005
catalogue text
7th INTERNATIONAL PHOTO-TRIENNIAL ESSLINGEN
LAND IN LAND (2004) [...] looks at racial relationships between aboriginals and whites in Australia. Discrimination against the natives still persists. Racial prejudice is still rife, and Australian law lays down different penalties for the same crimes for whites and aborigines.
LAND IN LAND shows the darker side of the way white society deals with aboriginal identity. [...] Ayer’s Rock, which has mutated into a tourist attraction, is the spiritual heart of the country if seen through the reverential eyes of an aborigine, and the centre of the culture that is 65.000 years old.
And this culture asserts that Ayer’s Rock should be left in peace, and not even looked at. Australia is the continent of fire, and not just because of devastating conflagrations in the bush: places and people are full of energy, luminosity and colour.
Christoph Balzar selects shots from his collection and puts them together to make a new whole. Although viewers discover that the works in the series are digital montages, they are intuitively aware that despite all the construction they depict a social reality of which most people are unaware and that Australia largely distances itself from.
