RISING: Festival Opening at the Square

For three nights – to mark the opening of RISING – Fed Square transforms into an open-air canvas showcasing Cannupa Hanska Luger’s Midéegaadi.

Warm up by the fire pits and witness the call, as Cannupa Hanska Luger’s massive multi-channel video piece Midéegaadi dances in through Fed Square. There’ll be cuppas and hot chocolates to pass around. Killara Foundation will bring community together around the barbie with a reimagined sausage sizzle celebrating First Nations flavours, native ingredients, and Blak hospitality. And there are plenty of beanbags and deck chairs, so you can lean back and take it all in.

Midéegaadi lit up Times Square last year, and arrives in Narrm on Wurundjeri Country at what we now know as Fed Square. Beneath the city glow, the site becomes a place to connect – to each other, and to something larger. The Times Square iteration of Midéegaadi was an invitation to envision the regeneration and return of the North American bison and a meditation on the importance of more-than-human kin to Luger’s community and local Indigenous peoples.

For RISING, we have a new iteration of Midéegaadi and a new context – here we consider ways First Peoples globally interconnect through dance and new media which honours Ancestral knowledge. Incorporating customary dance and figures wearing newly made regalia inspired by Luger’s Ancestors and Indigenous futurisms, Midéegaadi is a statement to the power of contemporary Indigenous practice in cultural continuity and a resistance to on-going colonial attempts to diminish this.