Filming jilba: Sensing beyond the exclusionary fictions of climate science

Abstract

‘Filming jilba’ makes up part of a larger practice-based research project focusing on the body as a site of climate sensitivity and perception. Investigated in collaboration with Bama colleague, Jarramali Kulka (a Kuku Yalanji-Nyungkal man from Australia's tropical Far North Queensland), and his custodial practice jilba (pronounced jil-ba), the article describes the embryotic growth of a performative practice-based methodology that leads with intimate sensing—a generative counter position to remote sensing—and grows it phenomenologically through the field work of a documentary media practice. In attempting to speak across epistemic divides, the project process addresses the exclusionary fictions that conventional climate sensing performs by attuning to ‘a world that already has its own stories’.