Fjorn Bastos

Fjorn Bastos is a visual/ sound/ performance artist, researcher/ writer, and community and event organiser. She coordinates, manages, and oversees community-based projects that cross disciplinary fields, including the facilitation of artist and socio-political workshops, advocacy campaigning, and community building/ organising projects.

Descended from South Asian and British heritages, Bastos’ socially integrated practice is principally oriented by decolonising methodologies from the position of an accomplice. Specifically, her work interrogates the aesthetics of political representation and cultural supremacy in the contemporary formation of the colony.

As an artist, she works primarily in experimental electronic sound production and narrativised performance under the name Papaphilia. She pays attention to the collective political contexts, values and interpretations of signs, respecting their potential as living relations and artefacts of epistemologies and ontologies – as opposed to being driven by agenda, style, or genre. Papaphilia’s recent full-length album Remembrance of Things to Come is a concise collection of high-intensity tracks that draws the listener’s attention back to ancestral experiences that guide embodied form and knowledge, where rhythm, voice, and emotion are worked to transmit the incredulity felt by those resisting oppressive power structures. For more about her release and music see her recent interview in Liminal Magazine – https://www.liminalmag.com/5-questions/fjorn-bastos

As a researcher, she is interested in how neoliberal forms of governance in the colony use racialised and sexualised discourses to shape the political; which then informs her writing on sound poetics and the challenge they pose to anglophone notions of sound and music as property.

She is also a director of creative sector consultancy Future Tense and co-producer of Writing and Concepts lecture series. Fjorn is currently working on a program of research and public events that take a decolonial approach, including assisting in the development of Blak Pearl – a community-led creative studio for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people residing in Collingwood/ Fitzroy – a place for the community to gather, self-organise, and heal through creative avenues.

Bastos is a writer-in-residence for our 2021 Hi-Viz Practice Exchange.