In response to our time of ecological crisis, BETTER NATURE is an annual program of art and events that embraces the complex entanglement between human and non-human worlds. Each year, BETTER NATURE explores different ecological ideas from a more-than-human perspective, challenging our prevailing human-centric paradigm to create moments of collective clarity and hope.

Cement Fondu’s 3rd and final BETTER NATURE iteration, A Sudden Release, is guest-curated by Wiradjuri writer and curator Hannah Donnelly and explores Indigenous Futures in a world where a sudden release of ancient energy and slipstreams are life-giving. 

Our climate traumas are a colonial trauma. The First Nations artists presented in this exhibition are returning: to themselves, to Countries, to resistance, to knowledges and timelines of collective liberation from settler colonialism. The works relate to environments past, present, and all our futures. In one future land loses freshwater. In another, stone tools map generations of hands in golden constellations. Under such stars, we navigate the seas in cultural belongings created from the detritus of capitalist consumption, a transformation or reversal from ruin into use. Institutionalised skins return home to arctic resting places.  An old tree in Burramatta dies. Rematriating warriors arrive. Smoked silica dirt replicas speak back to deniers. Bodies in saltwater call our kin.

A Sudden Release reveals a world where climate apocalypse is already real for First Nations peoples and has been for some time. Indigenous techniques in speculating climate change and environmental trauma focus on the story of the trauma to Country itself. We are not individuals in our future watching the spectacle of the world ending. We are communities repairing and revitalising Country.

The works in this space each remind us that through our daily actions we return and rest in the ceremony of the long middle to vision a better future for all of us.

‘The long middle is not a condition of time; we might be nearer to the end of revolution than the beginning, we might be nearer liberation than defeat, but our experience and our actions exist within the frame we can see, the frame of the long middle. Liberation is the end, but it is a geographical end rather than a temporal one, a soil and not an hour. ’ 

   — Fargo Nissim Tbakhi 

We warmly invite you to participate in this communal conversation by joining the series of free talks, performances, workshops and readings that will take place within the exhibition as part of BETTER NATURE Art + Events.