a genealogical cosmographer

by macarena gómez-barris

from blackness we are born and into blackness we will go. this line has been forming in my mind since i first gazed upon the vast and complex web of archie moore’s practice. a cosmography that chronicles 2,400 generations over 65,000 years; an expansive web of relations documented through and upon the blackboard paint and chalk handwriting of archie’s family tree.

blackness of the universe that contains all living creatures and its visible and invisible relations. blackness that formed and made the earth red. blackness as the four-dimensional canvas upon which the earth and all its creations spins. a practice that refuses to write out country’s more-than-human webs of life.

in the work, archie traces his lines of descent to unwind the genealogical fiction at the heart of the colonial project. his aesthetic quietly critiques the shallowness of modern timelines, by showing the expansiveness of indigenous kinship with geological time. the charting of this many generations confounds any modern, linear definition of the family tree. for what is the modern colonial family name, but an access point for property as the right of man’s descent?

in maria elena martinez’s important study, she describes the genealogical fictions that organise colonialism (2009). the spanish crown used limpieza de sangre (purity of blood) and the hierarchical caste system based on ancestry to racialise and justify the genocide of indigenous peoples. first deployed against jewish communities and muslim converts to christianity, blood descent laws were transposed to the américas to create identity according to legal descent. the history of caste, the family tree, and racial categories of segregation and distinction are the writing of genealogical fictions. to follow the heteropatriarchal white nuclear family is to descend into this representational abyss that has spawned scientific branches such as genealogy, archaeology, and dna. the western knowledge tree, like the family tree, is a colonial origin story based on mythology, whose moral is to convert land into property. and, to legitimate its thefts and extractive discoveries that emerge from ‘primitive’ accumulation.

the western knowledge tree has branches. the tools of forensics have on the one hand, supported the work of justice activists in the aftermath of atrocities, such as in chile, argentina, and guatemala after dictatorship. on the other hand, forensic technologies have reproduced colonial practices that racialise, hierarchise, and exploit first nations peoples. the human genome diversity project and the 1987 sampling of brazilian indigenous peoples in the process of recovering from a genocide are two instances in a longer history of anti-indigenous uses of genetic science. in archie’s hands, the family tree does not thingify or reproduce the colonial capture of the living. instead, it offers a tool for the otherwise. an aesthetic technology not of the western onto-episteme that abstracts knowledge from the relations of those who made it, but a way to narrate with and beyond the colonial wound. to make visible what came before colonialism. to render its brutal and beautiful afterlives. for indigenous life worlds upon what is called australia can be traced back and forward for more than 65,000 years.

genealogical fictions abound in the making of the colonial anthropocene. alternative uses of forensics and usages of dna must be unearthed and unspooled as they are in archie moore’s artwork. not only an archive of erasure, but an elemental form of ancestral mapping that is as deep as it is broad. a re-recording of the history of the web of connection. a horizontal and vertical grid of interwoven relation.

from blackness we are born and into blackness we will go. into blackness is the mirror of the self as the other.

archie’s reflective pool is a powerful memorial that is dedicated to indigenous peoples who have been captured, killed, and maimed by the british australian carceral state. the more than 270 massacres committed during the british invasion that extended into australian modernity. the forced removal of children from their ancestral kinship. the ongoing anti-indigenous legislation as non-representation in governance. the state-controlled reservations. the vast network of genocidal practices that reflect and mirror the settler’s inheritances.

look in the mirror. what do you see within the void space that lies within you? who is the figure that gazes back? the black, wet mirror that is the self and one’s own relations. your and my implication in the ongoing war against the earth that continues to rage against indigenous peoples. a war that must be stopped and accounted for. a war that takes women, children, and the other-than-human hostage without an apology or effort to move towards right, just, and ethical forms of living.

blackness, too, as potential. a space to dive into that is yet unmade beyond extinction. a liquid pluriverse where the potentiality of country offers ceremony as the life force against the death cult of settler murders.

i was once drawn to archaeology precisely to study the missing link. as an exile and child of empire always looking for home, the void space to belong lies somewhere deep inside. a place that i can’t always access, but that lurks there unsettled. in college, i took courses and learned that buried in the genes of hominids was something called the ghost species.

this is that ‘x’ spot or hidden history within human dna that links all the way back to the ‘first humans’. hiding even further within the genetic code is what archaeologists call the missing-link territory. this place of the original ancestors. the ancient peoples on ancient lands, mirrored in an interior geography that is the yet-unfound chain for the human species. there are many abstract theories of the connection to origins. archie’s is an indigenous visual theory of origins.
what does it mean to lose and mourn all that comes from being born into the colonial anthropocene?

archie’s blackboard and chalk practice is a work of kith and kin. although written in the impermanent material, it honours and creates a cosmography of his origins. in the work is the labour of his fingers. tracks, marks, erasures. the rubbed-out space to show the violent geography of witness to the colonial practice of eradication. a work that doesn’t look away but demands the viewer to gaze further within the vastness of its disappearances. archie shows us how we are all bound to the tree of speciesism. and through the power of this ancestral tracing, how to escape the haunting of its ghosts.

to look, gaze upon, and ponder. to account for. a way to seek and find the starlight of a genealogical cosmography.