In Radio 4’s series looking at ways to save the planet, this week Tom Heap asks if valuing and applying the knowledge of indigenous people groups more could help fight climate change:
BBC Radio 4 – 39 Ways to Save the Planet, Local Wisdom
Also this week, the world’s oldest continuing culture comes to Plymouth:
Songlines: Tracking the Seven Sisters – University of Plymouth
The National Museum of Australia’s award-winning exhibition comes to The Box this autumn/winter. Experience ancient stories from the world’s oldest continuing culture, told through more than 300 paintings and objects by over 100 different artists. Take an epic journey that crosses three states, three deserts and some 500,000 square kilometres. With ceramics, paintings, sculpture, installation and film, come and immerse yourself in an exhibition that uses the power of art and culture to connect us across time zones and international borders.
Songlines: Tracking the Seven Sisters | The Box Plymouth
On one level, it is a vivid treat for the eye: astonishing bursts of reds, oranges, yellows that are bound to warm up visitors during the bleak British winter months. But dig deeper and ancient stories about sustainability, community and acceptance that could hardly be better timed emerge.
After being viewed by more than 400,000 people in Australia, winning prizes and attracting rave reviews, the exhibition Songlines: Tracking the Seven Sisters opens this week at The Box in Plymouth on the first leg of a European tour that will take in Paris and Berlin.
The exhibition features more than 300 paintings, photographs, objects – plus elements of song and dance – made by more than 100 Indigenous Australians, mostly women. A “DomeLab” – an immersive video projection gizmo – will transport viewers from south-west England into Australian deserts and caves and up into the solar system.
Margo Neale, a senior indigenous curator at the National Museum of Australia and the lead curator of the exhibition, said it was driven by the desire to preserve songlines, which are hard to sum up in English but might be described as age-old paths of Indigenous knowledge and creation history, for future generations and to share them with the rest of the world.