Higher Ground

Higher Ground

Higher Ground

With the Bengoh Dam completed and the inundation of the Sarawak Kiri River looming, the Bidayuh of Upper Bengoh had two options. They could either leave their customary lands or stay.

Duration: 20 Mins
Completed: September 2014

 

As much of Upper Bengoh is comprised of the Bidayuh’s native customary land they chose to stay. In doing so they took on the Sarawak Government, the single most powerful institution in East Malaysia complicit in the forced removal of tens of thousands of indigenous peoples from their customary lands on the island of Borneo.
Higher Ground

Crew

  • Writer, Director – Andrew Garton
  • Colour grade – Mike Wilkins
  • Music  – Bidayuh of Upper Bengoh, Andrew Garton
  • Financial Management – Auspicious Arts Projects Inc.
  • Produced in association with SACCESS

Special thanks to the Association for Progressive Communications and Mr Pang Wee for their support in the making of this film.

Media

Bamiyarra

Bamiyarra

Bamiyarra

A media art project that connected young Hazara from refugee backgrounds in Melbourne to their homelands and separated communities. Bamiyarra was a Home Lands v2 project initiated by the Cultural Development Network, La Trobe and Swinburne Universities and the City of Melbourne.

Poetry links Hazara, considered the most persecuted ethnic minority in Afghanistan, to their culture, their history, to country, to each other. In former times revered verses, or quatrains, were shared from one generation to the next. Hazara’s of today are more than likely to text their poems to each other, as did Aziz Fayaz, when he wrote the poem featured in this installation, a response to the many Hazara who had lost their lives, desperate to seek asylum from persecution, on boats that had sunk in the worlds oceans.

Bamiyarra, Casula Powerhouse Arts Centre, outer-western Sydney, Liverpool Leader, Photograph by Tim Clapin, 2013

Landlock, Casula Powerhouse, Sydney

Bamiyarra Photo Essays

Bamiyarra poster

“An installation produced by Andrew Garton is featured in Landlock, an inspiring exhibition at Casula Powerhouse.” Liverpool Leader, 10 April 2013 (Picture: Tim Clapin)

Tokyo Haiku

Tokyo Haiku

Tokyo Kaiku

A snapshot of impressions and inspirations from a three-week stay in Tokyo.

 

 

A snapshot of impressions and inspirations from a three-week stay in Tokyo whilst the earth rumbled below and the night sky lit by a nuclear-powered city.

I spent near on a month in Japan, most of it in Tokyo… It was my good fortune to have access to a bicycle on which I experienced an entirely different Tokyo… mostly of an evening I would ride, as if floating, under a low, often steel grey sky, slightly back-lit by the red pulse of the city. It was summer…

Tokyo Haiku is a snapshot of my impressions, a glimpse of what I had seen and heard. It is but a breath…

Filmed, recorded and composed in August 2008.