Experiences of Australia can be complex and unexpected or uncertain, often creating the feeling of the familiar transposed into unfamiliar space. Freud identified the experience of a familiar/unfamiliarity as the condition of the ‘Uncanny’ ‘where the home is unhomely – where the heimlich becomes unheimlich – and yet remains sufficiently familiar to disorient and disempower. The Freudian Uncanny marks shifts in perception, experience, power balances and discourse, which signals unsettlement.
Indigenous and non-indigenous Australians appear to be in a predicament where ‘all of us’ can feel that we are disempowered and precariously placed. This is another understanding of the word ‘Uncanny’; something can suddenly become less settled by the entanglement with something less familiar. ‘All of us’, in many ways seem to have become a minority, which can only then imagine itself (as minorities often do) as embattled.
The title of this work “The map is not the territory” is a phrase coined by Alfred Korzybski, metaphorically illustrating the differences between belief and reality. The analogy encourages us to look from a frame of reference (other than from the inside outward) and hopefully realize that – we cause things to happen.
By: Freya Tripp
Digital Photograph, 2017
