Holding Tightly: Co-Mingling, Life-Flourishing and Filmic Ecologies

ABSTRACT

Firmly emplaced within a soundscape incorporating movement, prayer, music, human-made and environmental sounds, the film Holding Tightly (2021) closely observes the performance and practice of a series of healing encounters in the Baucau Municipality of Timor-Leste. The lakadou (tubed zither) played in consort with dance in the opening and closing scenes is used by ritual specialists to communicate with the dai (ancestral nature spirit), which will eventually enable good health and more-than-human flourishing. Integral to conveying a sense of such flourishing are the sounds of everyday Timorese life which are pronounced in the film. The combination of rich and lively co-mingled soundscapes with the variety of healing modalities and exchanges depicted allows the audience to be drawn into the complexities and textures of Timorese pathways and aspirations for life-flourishing. Such flourishing emerges from forms of belief and care that are grounded in deep connections and exchanges between people and their environments. In this paper we explore the ways in which the relational sonic and visual richness of experience recorded in film opens new and productive ways of working with Indigenous knowledge and thinking about ecology.

KEYWORDS:

• Healing
• Timor-Leste
• film
• sound
• ecology
• more-than-human

Acknowledgements

This research was carried out under the auspices of an Australian Research Council Grant (ARC DP160104519). Ethics approval was by the provided by the Australian National University Human Ethics Committee (2016/098). We thank all of our long-term collaborators and interlocutors in Timor-Leste and the film’s post-production team comprising Seth Keen and Cormac Mills Ritchard at RMIT University. We also acknowledge and thank Samuel Curkpatrick for his guidance in the writing of this paper and Sarah Bacaller for her careful editing, as well as three anonymous reviewers. All errors and omissions are our own.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 See also https://vimeo.com/538947137.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Australian Research Council: [Grant Number DP160104519].

Notes on contributors

Lisa Palmer

Lisa Palmer is a professor of geography who teaches and researches on indigenous environmental knowledge and practices at the University of Melbourne. Her research is focused on south-east Asia (particularly Timor-Leste) and indigenous Australia. In addition to Holding Tightly, Lisa directed Wild Honey: Caring for bees in a divided land (2019, Ronin Films), a short film documenting a community-based nocturnal honey harvest on island Timor. She has published widely and is the author of an ethnography on people’s complex relations with water in Timor-Leste titled Water Politics and Spiritual Ecology: Custom, environmental governance and development (2015, Routledge) and Island Encounters: Timor-Leste from the outside in (2021, ANU Press). She may be contacted at [email protected].

Susanna Barnes

Susanna Barnes is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Archaeology and Anthropology at the University of Saskatchewan. Her research focuses on customary relations and land, as well as customary approaches to health and healing. She is a co-author Property and Social Resilience in Times of Conflict: Land, custom and law in East Timor, an interdisciplinary study of property relations and social resilience in Timor-Leste (2016, Routledge). Holding Tightly is her first visual methods collaboration. She may be contacted at [email protected].

Tamsin Wagner

Tamsin Wagner is a Melbourne-based editor with interests in cross-cultural collaboration and interdisciplinary environmental studies. She has held roles in non-government organisations supporting the revitalisation of Australian indigenous languages and has worked with prize-winning authors of narrative non-fiction. Tamsin may be contacted at [email protected].

Amias Hanley

Amias Hanley is an artist and researcher working at RMIT University’s School of Design and School of Media and Communication, Melbourne, Australia. Working at the intersection of sound studies and queer ecologies, their practice examines how critical listening processes give rise to the experience of ecological awareness and how sound, and the manipulation of sounds, evoke a sense of being, place and relationality. They are the author of Translating Ambiance Through Queer Ecologies: A Speculative Cartographic Imaginary (2020, Unlikely Journal) and their work has been shown by respected Australian art galleries and internationally—most recently at Ars Electronica Festival 2022, Linz AT. Amias may be contacted at [email protected].