Jazz Money — our song rising, 2026

Jazz Money’s poem opens with the words, “Nothing that can be sung will ever be lost to flames”. The burnt lettering recalls histories of violence and attempted erasure. It emerges at a time marked by the suppression of books, the contestation of historical memory and renewed attempts to silence artists, writers and communities across the world. The poem responds to this present climate through language rooted in Country. For Money, Country speaks “in a language of abundance” and is a source of knowledge where stories are carried through place and across generations. As she has written, there are “moments that need me to be gentle and others that require determined resistance”. The poem holds these two responses together in an ethic that refuses to separate care from the work of resistance.

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..