The search for authenticity is one of the great directions of international tourism in recent years. After years of traveling as “tourists”, there are many who, bored of the experiences made for visitors and finally tired of closed and sterotyped worlds built to represent reality, dream of becoming “travelers”. But what is the solution? The real and unique one is to travel, letting oneself be carried away by emotions and the desire to know the world along untrodden paths, in conversation with those you meet on the way, and then enter, without even realizing it, into a different world, into a new network of events and encounters.
To do this, however, it takes not only spirit, but also time, and luck.
The other way, simplified, is that offered by tourism to participate in local experiences: cooking handmade pasta with the «grandmother of the Basilica», or as in this case «painting with an aboriginal». The risk remains: any experience, even if authentic but offered to a large number of people, could lose its naturalness and turn into a “more authentic fictional world”, ma in reality in these activities the contact between us and the other world is established, there is and and is real, and never taken for granted. This is thanks to the people, thanks to the Lucanian “grandmother” who will never lose her authenticity (and the art of her pasta) and to the aboriginal artist who tells us, a thousand miles away, her history and her culture.
All this to say that I participated in one of the experiences offered by tourism Australia, I painted an Aboriginal picture with an Aborigine, and even though I did it the way they can do these things now, in the amazing and surreal online version, it was beautiful. Discovering Australia together with the Aboriginal people is a rare privilege, which very few have had (here we told you a story that fills the heart, that of Nicola and his Aboriginal family), but even a small encounter with this culture is enough to make the journey more real, and bring us a little closer to the deep and spiritual meaning of the connection the Aboriginal people have with their land.
Tourism Australia, aware of the priceless heritage of Aboriginal culture, has prepared a series of experiences to learn more about its world: on Discover Aboriginal Experiences you can choose between bush walks in the company of an Aboriginal guide or lessons to learn how to play the digeridoo or to understand how to recognize animal tracks … (there are 185 different experiences) or, as happened to us, you can participate in a “dot painting” lesson, painting with dots of color with which to “trace” signs and drawings on the “dark earth” of a black sheet. It is also a way, that of choosing “aboriginal adventures”, to support and recognize the value of a culture that has been deprived of so much and which, finally, can be given the role they hold of “original owner“. Those who have always inhabited the Australian continent for 60,000 years. Someone who, perhaps more than others, certainly in a different way, has something to teach us about this magical place, full of stories and energy.
For this video lesson, each of the journalists who attended was in their own homes in Europe, with a small set of paint sent to us by the tourism board, a black sheet and a brush. But it will be that Zoom is now one of the few windows on the world available now, it will be that the filming in Australia of our teachers, and Joanne Cooley, artist of the Anangu people, they were so full of the colors of that place – with them sitting on the red clay of Uluru and the great monolith behind them – that it almost felt like they were there. You could feel the sun on your skin and a light breeze passing through the bush.
What did I learn in my Maruku Art Workshop? Few basic things: that the dots, of different sizes, are enough to create a world; that the stories of which one paints are always (or almost always) the stories of creation, the stories that have their origin in the “dream”, in the world of origins inhabited by strange beings and animals who have carved it in their stories. Painting does not require rationality, it is more like entering a state of meditation. The ananu painter uses dots to tell the story of her people, a circle can be water, or even fire, man is distinguished from woman by the tools he has at his side, white is salt, blue is water , brown the rocks, green the tree, yellow is a flower …
The result is a design that looks stylized but makes sense. Joanne paints and traces the history of the “Seven Sisters”, an aboriginal story but a story of the world, 7 sisters chased by a man who wants to hunt them down and who find their refuge in the sky, in the constellation of the Pleiades. Art returns to being what it has always been, beautiful and symbolic, but also instructive. Painting and looking at a painting is an ongoing narrative between people. Even among us, in a house in Milan and an aboriginal artist sitting on the red earth, between our history today and the oldest of humanity. In short, it was an emotion.
Photo: Archie Sartracom / Tourism Australia al Maruku Arts, Uluru Kata Tjuta National Park, NT
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