Jazz Money – garrandarang, 2021

A spiral poem follows the concentric growth rings of a tree across the floor. In garrandarang, which means “paper” or “book” in Wiradjuri, Jazz Money traces connections between rivers and trade routes, leaves and paper, breath and atmosphere, while languages, forests and waterways are drawn into histories of extraction. “Those eyes are seeing only what can be extracted,” the poem observes, before turning towards seeds carried by the wind, forests that continue to stand and languages that persist. The poem refuses to elegise what has been destroyed, affirming instead the continued presence of Country, whose living abundance exceeds the logic of extraction.

Poetics form the basis of Jazz Money’s practice, which engages visual art, performance and moving image. Her work engages with the enduring effects of colonisation on language, narratives and bodies, approaching language as a site of dispossession as well as of reappropriation. Through strategies of repetition, address, and restraint, she interrogates forms of authority embedded in archives and systems of knowledge, as well as the silences they produce.

La Biennale de Lyon acknowledges all First Nations peoples of Australia, their Traditional Custodians of the lands, and Elders past and present. We honour the enduring strength, diversity, and richness of First Nations artistic and cultural practices. We recognise First Nations peoples as Australia’s first artists, whose creative traditions have been sustained across millennia and continue to shape the Nation’s cultural landscape today.