COMMUNITY ARTS FOR CRITICAL COMMUNITY PSYCHOLOGY PRAXIS Towards decolonisation and Aboriginal self-determination

This chapter describes community arts practice as decolonial aesthetics that can foster cultural strengthening, as well as counter storytelling for transformative witnessing to develop empathy. The first project is a testimonio of the creative work of Wemba Wemba Gundijmara artist Paola Balla who produced "healing cloths" to capture everyday acts of survival as part of the process of documenting matriarchy, resistance and Aboriginal Healing. The second project focuses on the Bush Babies portraiture project and exhibition(s) which in providing opportunities for Aboriginal counter storytelling in public settings created possibilities for transformative witnessing. These examples are both concerned with Aboriginal self-determination and provide insight into the potential of community arts when connected with a decolonial approach to contribute to personal and collective change. We suggest that arts are a powerful medium that invokes various senses and challenge people in deep and unsettling ways, opening spaces to bear witness, with effects that last beyond the arts encounters.