The Lines of Unity project originated at the Aboriginal Festival in Alice Springs, where I first encountered the writer Cecil Fisher. After a reading of his poems, my head was filled with images that I wanted to render into short animated sequences which I would later process and edit.

The poems revolve around the world of the Aborigines but are easy to relate to our world. They deal with problems and concerns that are not so far removed from our own. And this was what I wanted to show, in both a serious and playful manner, using diverse means.

At present, reconciliation is under way in Australia, a process that hopes to ease and perhaps solve the problems between Australia’s indigenous peoples and all other Australians. To mediate a bit between them, I have used the voices of the latter to read these Aboriginal poems.

Each of the eleven poems included here has its own imagery und was generated using a different animation or compositing technique. Although the entire work forms a cohesive entity, individual clips can, of course, be screened alone or in smaller groups.

Mother is part of the Lines of Unity—Eleven Aboriginal Poems project and was created as a graduation project for the Academy of Media Arts in Cologne. I completed the visualization of this poem last, in summer 2003. It was made in collaboration with la maison, a post-production firm in Paris. It was edited with Flame.

In my adaptation of the poem Mother, the notion of a “shift in perception” was central.

About the poet: Cecil Fisher is an Aborigine and was the recipient of the “Elderly of the Year 2001” award. For many years he worked in different Aboriginal departments, where he devoted himself to the process of reconciliation. He now writes and lives near Brisbane.