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Mackenzie

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Review

Courtney Miller is a curator, writer, and artist with an MFA in Criticism and Curatorial Practice from OCAD University and a BFA in Visual Arts from University of the Fraser Valley. She is of Métis and settler ancestry and is a citizen of Métis Nation BC.

The subtitle for the group exhibition “Overburden” reads as “Geology, Extraction, and Metamorphosis in a Chaotic Age.” Yet, rather than descend into apathy and dread, the show retains a sense of hopefulness and social responsibility. Curated by Genevieve Robertson and Maggie Shirley, the exhibition was shown at the Oxygen Art Centre and the Kootenay Gallery of Art, bringing together 11 artists who question settler-colonial and capitalist perceptions of land as a source from which to profit. The title, “Overburden,” cites the word’s geological definition: the waste rock and soil that lies above an ore or mineral body. To challenge capitalist understandings of waste, many of the works featured in “Overburden” look for expansive meanings found in geologic layers.

In _What We Left Behind_ (2019), Gabriela Escobar Ari draws attention to the Huayna Potosí region in La Paz, Bolivia, the artist’s home country. With a background in archaeology and social studies, Escobar looks to landscape archaeology to understand how landscapes develop their biography from sustained interactions with humans. In _What We Left Behind,_ Escobar presents a series of photographs of the Milluni Lake and the Milluni Chico, located in the Cordillera Real mountain range. The work was installed in the Kootenay showing of “Overburden” in two groupings: three aerial photographs of Milluni Lake and six prints documenting the surrounding geographical area, including the Milluni grave site where striking miners were killed by the Bolivian government in 1965\. Aerial photographs show the heavily contaminated lake of Milluni Chico, a body of water sectioned off by a sealed dam, where the mining industry dumped waste. The photograph _Milluni Lake View_ (2019) depicts the severely bruised landscape; the pollution from heavy metals in the water produces colours ranging from bright orange to deep purple. Considering the definition of overburden and its association with waste, one might see this water as a “toxic wasteland.” However, such a perspective risks naturalizing the harm caused by colonial and capitalist industries. Speaking on the exhibition-related panel titled “Documenting Change,” Escobar expressed hope that through the revelation of hard evidence of environmental destruction, the mining companies in the area will be held responsible for polluting the water. Seeing this destruction presented by the Kootenay Gallery of Art also serves as a reminder of the immense presence of Canadian mining companies in Latin America (including Bolivia). After all, more than 75 percent of all of the world’s mining firms are based in Canada.

In _Mineralogues_ (2018), Randy Lee Cutler organizes multiple definitions of mining into a chart of found mineral images accompanied by mined data. Like a new kind of periodic table, data is split into four non-hierarchical categories: “songs of science,” “supernatural oracles,” “natural philosophy,” and “the underworld.” These four interpretative categories search for deeper meanings in minerals that are often used by humans. The found images printed on the posters represent social contexts ascribed to specific minerals (such as the use of crystals in fortune telling) and mineral-related phenomena (like the piezoelectric effect of compressed quartz producing an electrical charge). Cutler’s approach to science in _Mineralogues_ offers factual information about not only mineral properties, but also the environmental impact of human reliance on mineral usage. The work functions as collected evidence of varied human relationships to minerals, and the accelerated rate of extraction from the industrial age onward.

Drawing inspiration from the Fluxus movement, Asinnajaq’s _Rock Piece (Ahuriri Edition)_ (2015) is a short video depicting the artist emerging from, and then retreating back into, a stack of palm-sized rocks. While the overcast Napier shoreline where filming took place makes for a moody visual setting, sound soon becomes the most compelling sensory input. The video opens with a still figure shrouded in rocks, who begins expanding in form with visible breaths. As the waves crash and spray, the rocks gradually and progressively tumble and _click, crackle, knock_ against each other. Asinnajaq eventually unearths herself from her face-down position, crouches, and returns to the earth as the rocks envelop her body. The accompanying score for the work reads “feel the weight of the world; free yourself.” Explaining the score in “Speculative Imaginaries” (a panel that was featured in the exhibition’s programming), Asinnajaq noted that the phrase indicates cycles, repetition, and relearning.  
Through cycles of releasing and withholding a human form, the rocks of _Rock Piece_ teach Asinnajaq to learn from repeated experiences or actions. Viewing the work, I contemplate how the individual and collective weight of the rocks would feel against my own body. Circling back to the definition of overburden as rock waste, _Rock Piece_ offers another way to consider their presence, by animating the rocks as an entity with the capability to impart knowledge through human engagement.

In Genevieve Robertson’s epilogue to the exhibition catalogue, she discusses how a human under- standing of the world on a larger, geological scale is subsumed by the short-sighted metrics of capitalism: a consideration of billions of years gives way to a focus on the dollars and profits of the next financial quarter. But these settler-colonial and capitalist metrics are shallow, and forget that the land is much older than us. “Overburden” creates room for curiosity and hope. The artists in this show combine hope with research-creation to think far beyond a colonial-capitalist time frame by studying deep geologic time to imagine better futures.

Writer

Maps

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“Overburden” included work by Gabriela Escobar Ari, Asinnijaq, Patti Baileyqʷn̓qʷin̓x̌n̓, Randy Lee Cutler, Jim Holyoak and Darren Fleet, Ts̠ēmā, Keith Langergraber, Sarah Nance, Tara Nicholson, and Carol Wallace, and ran from 1 June to July 10 2021 at Oxygen Art Centre, Nelson, BC and 18 June to 21 August, 2021 at Kootenay Gallery of Art, Castlegar, BC. Curated by Genevieve Robertson and Maggie Shirley. 

“Overburden” — Gabriela Escobar Ari, Asinnajaq, Patti Bailey qʷn̓qʷin̓ x̌n̓ , Randy Lee Cutler, Jim Holyoak and Darren Fleet, Ts̠ēmā, Keith Langergraber, Sarah Nance, Tara Nicholson, Carol Wallace 

Zannah Mae Matson is an Assistant Professor at the University of Guelph School of Environmental Design and Rural Development. Matson’s research and design work focuses on the histories and contemporary reinterpretations of landscapes throughout processes of colonization, violence, and state infrastructure projects.

In _Mapping Abundance for a Planetary Future_ (2021), Candace Fujikane attends to the abundant relations that connect Kanaka Maoli (Native Hawaiian) histories and place-based knowledges. These relations include the more-than-human actors who make up complex ecologies, as well as the land and water protectors who fight to defend their environment and ways of life. Capitalism relies on scarcity for its perpetuation; it therefore follows that attending to abundance is a decolonial act that refuses to succumb to the settler logics of capital. Fujikane’s text extends the possibilities for mapping well beyond Eurocentric cartographic practices, to consider resistance and abundance in the demise of capital. Although _Mapping Abundance_ is most certainly an academic book—written by an academic and published by a university press—it reaches far beyond the confines of institutionalized knowledge to support and uplift Kanaka Maoli mobilization.

The book focuses on significant sites of land and water struggles in Hawai‘i that include: a proposed industrial development colloquially known as the Purple Spot, the Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT) on the sacred mountain lands of Mauna a Wākea, and the US military’s Red Hill Bulk Fuel Storage Facility. Fujikane critiques how settler-colonial maps have designated certain areas of Hawai‘i as wastelands, to justify further decimation by colonial industrial development. _Mapping Abundance_ also centres arts-based and embodied ways of mapping that move beyond Eurocentric cartographic representations. Instead of the aerial view and subdividing logic of colonial maps and surveys, the sources in this volume extend understandings of mapping to encompass critical bus tours, perspectival maps of land and water connectivity across the _ahupua‘a_ (traditional Kanaka Maoli systems of land division), and paintings that centre resistance and cultivation practices. By predominantly focusing on the decolonial work by Kanaka Maoli to both visually construct worlds that are beyond the logic of the occupying state as well as mobilize resistance to the advances of settler development, the book emphasizes the possibility for abundant and liberated futures.

For Fujikane, the word “map” is most powerful when used as a verb. _Mapping Abundance_ draws from a wide archive to demonstrate how to map relations in a vibrant and productive way. In chapter three, “Mo‘oinanea’s Waterways on Mauna a Wākea: Beyond Settler Colonial Thresholds in the Wao Akua,” Fujikane shares how land and history are mapped together through stories that transcend the settler divisions between living and non-living. In this chapter, a community-painted mural further reinforces the ways that land can map genealogical memories, as the waters of the sacred mountain lands of Mauna a Wākea are depicted alongside ancestors Papahānaumoku and Wākea, their daughter Ho‘ohōkūkalani, her child Hāloa, and the _kalo_ (taro) plant Hāloanakalaukapalili that grew from an unformed fetus of Ho‘ohōkūkalani. This mural is set in stark contrast to TMT documents that portray the land of the mountain as an empty space to be built upon. As the mural maps the genealogies of Kanaka Maoli, it reveals the relationships between people and this sacred mountain, reaffirming resistance to the TMT’s degradation of the site. In chapter two, “Maps in Motion: Mapping Wonder in Wai‘anae on Huaka‘i Aloha ‘Āina,” we are brought along on a bus tour that maps the land of Lualualei and the Wai‘anae Valley—the birthplace of Māui—that was threatened by the colonial logic of land developers. _Mapping Abundance_ expands what it means to map, as well as what gets mapped, further challenging colonial mapping traditions.

The cartography of capital seeks to simplify and divide. Under this logic, the map and territory cannot exist in relation to each other on a one-to-one scale: the map must be abstracted, its complexity stratified into discrete layers of data. In contrast, the mapping that Fujikane focuses on calls attention to specific people and the legends told about them, restored cultivation practices, and the plants and waterways that connect sites to one another in tender webs. These deep and meaningful connections to context are integral to the ethos of mapping abundance, and fundamental to considerations of mapping as a potentially decolonial practice. In the article “Abstraction is a Privilege” (2021), scholar Fernando Luiz Lara writes that the abstraction of space has been mobilized as a tool of coloniality to delink sites from their complex networks of relationality. Instead of the abstracting impulses of cartography, Fujikane details the practices of kilo, or careful observation, that have long allowed Kanaka Maoli to respond to their environments and create life-sustaining systems connected to water and land. _Kilo_ becomes ever more salient in the face of drastic climate change, where observing and responding to changes—and even predicting the world to come—are all essential life-sustaining practices.

Throughout the book, interconnected stories of resistance and solidarities are brought to the forefront. As land and water protectors stand with arms linked to protect Mauna a Wākea from colonial construction, their actions can be understood as entangled with those of the water protectors at Standing Rock, or the land defenders at 1492 Land Back Lane. These connections highlight the communities and possibilities that exist counter to settler colonialism. _Mapping Abundance_ is a beautiful, thoughtful, and inspiring account of Kanaka Maoli sovereignty, offering glimpses of what can take root and flourish in interconnected sites of anti-colonial struggle across the world.

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 _Mapping Abundance for a Planetary Future: Kanaka Maoli and Critical Settler Cartographies in Hawai’i_ was published by Duke University Press, Durham, NC, 2021.

Mapping Abundance for a Planetary Future: Kanaka Maoli and Critical Settler Cartographies in Hawai‘i — Candace Fujikane

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