Column

When I was asked to write this text, I was busy packing my suitcase for a holiday. A holiday is different from a journey. It triggers very specific expectations. Almost seamlessly, everything becomes focused on rest and relaxation from the so-called “everyday,” which settles like sediment during one’s lifetime. What is beyond the everyday happens elsewhere, in another place. This “Other” is coveted and much sought-after, surrounded by uncountable ideals and visuals. It is embraced by holidaymakers as well as by the economic branch that welcomes them: they nourish and cultivate it, praise it as being manageable. 

This is very much unlike the current, returning presence of the “Other,” which is said to have been brought by all these “Others,” who particularly during the last couple of years have come to Germany as refugees, and are dealt with in current _Leitkultur_ (German hegemonic culture) debates as a problem, representing an insurmountable cultural difference. 

While planning a holiday elsewhere, one can linger in a very familiar economic logic: undertaking extensive trips and excursions through the Internet, studying rankings, prices, availabilities, supply and demand. One weighs effort, promise, cost, pleasure, safety and adventure – a region, a landscape, an entire country (with all of its inhabitants) is evaluated and categorized according to holiday-relevant criteria. 

Our decision to go to Greece was certainly influenced by the fact that the country’s continuing economic situation, and the intensifying North-South divide within Europe, suggested that a holiday would be affordable. We booked a cheap flight from Berlin to Athens – from there, we would continue to one of the many islands in the Aegean, from which we would then visit other islands. The professional tourist term for this is “island hopping,” as we learned from our guidebook. 

When we arrived in Athens, we were the only guests at a large, inner-city hotel. Although there were people around and traffic on the streets, the district appeared strangely uninhabited. And yet it seemed to be overlaid by diverse movements, separated from one another but at the same time intertwined: tourists, homeless people, migrants, business people and drug users moved through the neighbourhood as if in parallel worlds. Next to our hotel were several vacant buildings: barricaded, dilapidated houses, closed restaurants and shops. We only learned later that this neighbourhood was considered to be unsafe and thus not recommended for tourists. 

It was probably due to this other sphere – this self-contained tourist bubble – that I only realized while exploring the area that the Hotel City Plaza was quite nearby. The City Plaza is an abandoned seven-floor hotel that had remained unused for seven years until it was occupied by activists and refugees in April 2016\. Now it is a self-organized housing project for homeless refugees in the Victoria/Ag. Panteleimonas district, and accommodates 400 people. The City Plaza Refugee Accommodation Centre[^1] emerged as a response to migration policies in Greece, the EU-Turkey deal and the closure of borders, which meant that tens of thousands of refugees were essentially trapped and often homeless on the Greek mainland. 

The artist duo of Maria Iorio and Raphaël Cuomo had visited the hotel as part of the preliminary programme for documenta 14, and they told me about their encounters there. A photograph taken during their visit – showing a handwritten, multilingual announcement for a self-organized German language course stuck in a window – was later included in the exhibition \_Man schenkt keinen Hund\_[^2], which I staged with Scriptings – a project by Achim Lengerer – at the end of last year. 

For the exhibition, Iorio and Cuomo in turn taped a printout of the photograph on the window of the exhibition space, as a picture within a picture. From within, one could see a description of the origin and context of the photograph, written on the back. The piece developed an unexpected life of its own during the course of the exhibition. Residents of the multicultural neighbourhood in Berlin-Wedding were interested and inquired about the German language course, having seen the announcement. We had not anticipated this dimension of the piece when we installed it. The self-referential art-context perspective had produced its very own blind spot. Since then we have been considering how it might be possible to organize a neighbourhood language café, which would not institutionalize yet another school format, but would instead suggest a self-organized form of learning with and from one another. 

On our continued trip through the islands, we were often, as we had been in Athens, the first and only guests. The beaches and in particular the groupings of hotels bordering them were deserted and windswept. A vacancy extending beyond the winter – an idling resource of empty living space with functional infrastructure, speculating on the beginning of the new season. 

[^1]: [http://www.solidarity2refugees.gr/refugee-accomodation-center-city-plaza best-hotel-in-europe.eu](http://www.solidarity2refugees.gr/refugee-accomodation-center-city-plaza) and <best-hotel-in-europe.eu>
[^2]: _Man schenkt keinen Hund_ (You don’t give a dog as a present) is a multi-part book and exhibition project. Conceived as an open-ended research project, _Man schenkt keinen Hund_ adopts various approaches and artistic/theoretical strategies in an attempt to interrogate the identitarian discourses around the concept of “integration” and to investigate the ways these discourses are manifested in the thematic, iconographic and pedagogical presentation of teaching materials for so-called “integration courses.” The purpose of integration courses – besides teaching the German language – is to create an opportunity for the targeted transmission of values. In cases where there is an “identified need for integration,” individuals can be required by immigration authorities and job centres to attend integration courses, which since 2005 have formed the core of the federal integration program. <http://www.scriptings.net>

Writer

Land

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Economy

Environment

Cities

Travel

Migration

Surveillance

Voyeurism

This article explores the naiveté of tourism within the context of the author’s recent holiday trip to Athens, Greece and surrounding islands. The author muses on renewal, refuge, and reflection within a region facing political and economic contention, while explaining the different experiences of navigating as a tourist as well as an artist, and offering observations of socioeconomic circumstances.

On Writing: Out of Season

##### On May 9, 2016, the Canada Council for the Arts announced an exceptional funding opportunity entitled New Chapter. The program offered up to $150,000 for individuals, collaborations and artist groups or collectives, and up to $500,000 for organizations, to fund projects that would make “a significant impact in \[their\] community” or “push the boundaries of \[their\] artistic practice.” Deadlines for applications fell in July and October of the same year. In March 2017, the first accepted projects were announced via the Canada Council website, and the second round in May 2017; the websites states that 200 successful projects will receive a combined $35 million. Presented here is a selection of submissions from individuals and institutions whose projects were not accepted for funding by this program.
  
  
_221A – Other Colours_: An anti-colonial heritage project researching colour swatches from immigrant, working-class and Indigenous built histories.

_Administrations for Public Good Art Gallery of Peterborough_: _Administrations for Public Good_ marks 2017 with an exhibition, performances and workshops, educational programs, a symposium and publication. The artists and projects selected reveal how systems of power, inadequacies, and expectations presuppose and condition our encounters. This project addresses hypocrisies buried deep within our practices and explores these issues as they exist within Canada. From Stephen Harper’s formal apology in 2008 to the 94 calls-to-action recommended in the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, it is clear that there is work to be done. Paulette Regan writes “Canada’s apology was a call for settlers to take seriously our collective moral responsibility.” Administrations for Public Good accepts this responsibility on behalf of the AGP and invites artists to imagine alternate futures, for both our institution and our region.

_Are We Not Horses_: _Are We Not Horses_ is a parable for the histories, present and futures of working folk who travel from place to place, looking for a better future. An outdoor sci-fi musical for a hundred-yard field, music and giant puppets with a team of media artists and their cameras.

Art Metropole / _ASSEMBLY_: _ASSEMBLY_ is an ambitious, public-facing satellite project dedicated to the production and presentation of artists’ publishing and the discourse that surrounds it. _ASSEMBLY_ is an experiment: a publication-studio, educational tool, residency, research site and gallery — a flexible, shifting site of exchange dedicated to expanding conversations on artists’ publishing in Canada, and internationally.

_Artist Material Fund_: _Artist Material Fund_ – a service that collects unneeded materials from cultural organizations and donates them to artists.

_Connecting and Creating Accessibility through Residencies_: A series of residencies were proposed to take place in partner spaces throughout the inner-city, culturally-specific neighbourhood where the arts organization was located, highlighting a recent proposal by a developer that would significantly change the character of this historic neighbourhood, and the developer’s blatant lack of community consultation prior to appealing to City Council for support of the project.

_Dance Machine_: _Dance Machine_ is an installation that invites diverse artists and publics into a guided & facilitated immersive experience. This project proposes to present the _Dance Machine_ in various cities across Canada between May and November 2017 alongside the creation of an accompanying Manifesto and short film.

_Decoding Drake_: _Decoding Drake_ is a travelling research, production and dissemination platform which is premised on a circumnavigation of the globe by 35 artists on commercial container ships in seven phases over a 12-month period and includes over six International public programs, two Canadian exhibitions, a publication and an interactive web platform. The project will support 10-15 Canadian artists of diverse experience, among a group of 20 additional international artists to create exceptional and vital works from the unique vantage point of a commercial shipping vessel. _Decoding Drake_ is based loosely on a re-charting of the path of Operation Drake, a utopian multinational and neocolonial project, from 1978-80 in which a group of 414 YEs (Young Explorers) participants and researchers circumnavigated the globe along the original pathway of Sir Francis Drake, in commemoration of the 400 year anniversary of his journey.

_Embodied Aura_: _Embodied Aura_ is a nine-month social exhibition featuring a sculptural installation that opens in conjunction with a performance and presentation series, a risograph publication and an evolving online conversation space. The exhibition will open in the Fall of 2017, hosted by (Toronto), before traveling to other locations internationally, including Hudson, NY; London, UK; Riga, Latvia and Beijing, China. Each exhibition is presented in partnership with a local artist-run institution, facilitating a growing rhizomatic conversation that fosters collaboration between communities. Locations have been selected to represent a diverse range in the spectrum of international cities balanced with de-centred localities more removed from the international contemporary arts community. Our aim is to expand and diversify the conversation that circulates around the notions of image, body and embodiment by engaging marginalized voices in community networks both locally and internationally.

_Everybody Knows_: _Everybody Knows_ enacts a performance of betrayal by public figures who either symbolize this betrayal, or oppose this betrayal. Cohen’s words, “Everybody knows that the boat is leaking / Everybody knows that the captain lied / That’s how it goes/ Everybody Knows,” resonate, but which side is the performer on?

_The Force of What’s Possible_: _The Force of What’s Possible_ is a radio show, an exhibition and a parallel publication created by Alissa Firth-Eagland and cheyanne turions that tracks conciliation efforts that have risen up across Canada in response to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s (TRC) calls to action.

Good Women Dance Collective: Establish a national touring network for small-scale, experimental work created by late-emerging and early mid-career Canadian dance and performance artists.

_Jericho_: _Jericho_ is a feature-length documentary about noise, silence and how sound shapes humanity.

_MetaObjects Digital Commissions_: _MetaObjects Digital Commissions_ are a series of works created in collaboration with artists looking to explore new technologies, including 3D printing, VR and robotics, in their work. The project aims to enable artists to develop new knowledge and skills to expand their practice and to create a platform to address the unique considerations of creating, distributing and presenting digital works.

Four projects were proposed including works by Ryo Ikeshiro (UK), Chris Shen (UK), Katie Torn (US), Quintin Teszeri (CA).

The intention is to provide support for artists who do not have the resources to create the work and to allow them to explore a new technology they have not used before in their work.

_The Sesquicentennial Supper_: I am proposing a touring artwork and installation piece composed of a “restaurant.” This installation will have all the contents of a restaurant, but without any walls, and it will travel, place-to-place, across the countryside. It will only present itself outdoors in various landscapes; it’s location is simply Canada. It will be open to the general public, inviting them to a powerful, daring and immersive artistic experience.

_Unmaking Monuments_: _Unmaking Monuments_ acknowledges the complexities of the idea of legacy, and foregrounds the problematic nature of commemoration. The project aims to expose untold stories, and explore sites where disparate cultures and scales of time intersect.

Untitled Art Society – _City of Voices_: _City of Voices_ is a large-scale exhibition of new works by Indigenous artists to be exhibited on billboards across Calgary

Wood Land School: Wood Land School 2017 will present two performative gatherings with exceptional writers, thinkers and artists in Montreal, QC, and North Bay, ON, an innovative publication that documents the gatherings, an online intervention and outreach programming to Indigenous youth.

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Last May, the Canada Council for the Arts announced a funding opportunity that would offer exceptional payment for artists, individual or collaborative, to fund projects that would make “a significant impact in \[their\] community”. This column presents a selection of projects that were not accepted for funding by this program, many of which propose postcolonial or charitable community initiatives.

Inventory: Canada 150: An Exegesis

Currently based in Chatham, Ontario, **Pamela Edmonds** is Curator of the Thames Art Gallery, Co-Director of Third Space Art Projects and a founding member of the We Curate, We Critique Collective. More of her work can be viewed at www.pe-curates.space.

> In _Present Past: Urban Palimpsests and the Politics of Memory_, Andreas Huyssen argues that Western contemporary life has become “saturated” with memory. This phenomenon is read as a response to a growing obsession with a (potential) forgetfulness, which he sees as emerging from the temporal and spatial fracturing of globalization processes. The desire to forget always seems to grow in proportion to the desire to remember, especially when problematic aspects of a nation’s past are at stake… Memory and amnesia always exist side by side and remain part of a political struggle.[^1]

Camille Turner is an artist and researcher whose activist and transmedia practice moves through the various realms of the local, global, the diasporic and transnational to consider how Canada is spatially produced and narrativized by its forgotten histories. By excavating and uncovering buried archives and neglected stories related to both landscape and architecture, her work also explores the social dimensions of digital technology to create intercultural experiences that expose how Black Canadian geographies continue to be characterized by both an absence and presence, and by a dialectic of visibility and invisibility. 

The concept of “not-forgetting” as opposed to “memorialization” serves as a starting point that is central to articulating Turner’s creative process, which comprises deconstructing the contrived hegemony of official histories and their institutionalized documentation. She invites her audiences to imaginatively travel across time and space to engage with narratives that bring to life stories of early Black settlement across various towns, cities and neighbourhoods throughout the country (and ultimately across the universe). These interactive and immersive site-specific walking tours navigate through and unearth the forgotten and denied legacy of slavery, making evident the underlying racism, experiences of violence and death in the Black lives that linger as “hauntings” at the level of the individual and the collective. 

Turner investigates the immersive properties of sound, combined with the participatory and embodied activity of walking through space, to bring the hidden and erased histories and geographies of Black Canadians to life. Structured as interactive walking tours, often made accessible through locative media and portable listening devices, or through alternatively mapped guided tours, these site-specific, neighbourhood-based interventions or “Afrofuturist sonic walks” as she refers to them, reformulate the past from perspectives of the present and future through scripted narratives that re-imagine, re- map and re-negotiate both historical and contemporary geographies. Reviving the principle of oral tradition through not only auditory, but visual and other sensorial means, this work also articulates as Katherine McKittrick suggests, the tensions between community and preservation, absence and erasure, that scatter the Canadian landscape, illustrating how places are inflected with unexpected, unacknowledged, historical maps.[^2] 

_HUSH HARBOUR_ and _The Resistance of Peggy Pompadour_ (2013) are sonic journeys inspired by early history in Toronto’s Grange district. They tell the story of Peggy, a woman enslaved in Canada who is put up for sale and jailed by one of Ontario’s founding fathers, Peter Russell. Peggy’s plight for freedom and love is told through the time-defying travels of a young woman, Gloria Smith, who is able to access and respatialize the geographies of 21st-century metropolitan Toronto and the 18th-century town of York, encountering Peggy at the city’s King Edward Hotel, the site of Toronto’s first jail. 

_The Landscape of Forgetting_ (a collaboration with artist Alana Bartol) is a guided walk that articulates how landscape can act an effective medium for masking social and political interests by naturalizing relationships to power. Taking place on November 15, 2014, in Windsor, Ontario, as part of the Neighbourhood Spaces Symposium, the tour began at the François Baby House, also known as Windsor’s Community Museum – a site that was once used as a headquarters during the War of 1812\. Baby was a prominent and revered French-Canadian politician but, as Turner noted, none of the didactic materials about him mention the fact the he was also a slave owner. Which is why the artist set out to discover the untold stories of the people rendered invisible who lived and worked there. 

The Windsor area, located in such close proximity to the American border, is known as one of the most significant entry points to Canada for the Underground Railroad, a network of places that abolitionists used to help slaves escape to freedom in the first half of the 1800s. _The Landscape of Forgetting_’s movement continued to Dieppe Gardens in Windsor’s riverfront park, a space of crossing from enslavement to freedom. Here, Lana Talbot sung the spiritual _Wade in the Water_ at the Detroit River, a code song that contained secret messages warning freedom seekers to flee dry land for the water so that the dogs and owners chasing them couldn’t track their scent. 

By walking in their footsteps, and through the power of sound and imagination, participants in Turner’s projects continue to embody and re-envision how Black realities resist and reconfigure human geographies, opening up new ways of thinking about the politics of place, while enabling a global sense of space to emerge and be shared. 

[^1]: “Andreas Huyssen, _Present Pasts: Urban Palimpsests and the Politics of Memory_. (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003), 95.”
[^2]: “Katherine McKittrick, “Their Blood isThere, and They Can’t Throw it Out: Honouring Black Canadian Geographies,” _Topia 7_ (Spring 2002), 27.”

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Urban studies

Race

Human Rights

Mapping

Walking

Dialogue

Site-specific

Critique

This article introduces the work of Camille Turner, an artist and researcher who works to discuss spatial politics in Canada and its forgotten histories. Her guided tours of neighbourhoods in Ontario explore historical geographies, reviving them through contemporary perspectives and narratives. “The Landscape of Forgetting”, a collaboration between Turner and Alana Bartol, explores the unspoken stories of historical figures and landmarks-critiquing oppressive practices of the past and re-envisioning the realities of Black lives in public spaces.

Artefact: Landscapes of Forgetting

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Editorial

Kari Cwynar is a curator, writer and editor based in Toronto, where she is Director of Kunstverein Toronto and Editorial Director of _C Magazine_. She writes on contemporary art for publications and catalogues, contributes regularly to _Frieze_ and _Metropolis M_.

In the months leading up to the issue, the gravity of “land” has been unbearably present: the increasingly barbaric and racist policing taking place along colonial borders; water protectors at Standing Rock risking their lives in the face of capitalist and colonial interests on Indigenous land. Alarming weather patterns have become the norm. Trudeau, meanwhile, has been named a “stunning hypocrite” for espousing environmental actions in the media while supporting and continuing violent resource extraction in Canada and abroad. As printed in the _Guardian_ in April: “Canada, which represents one half of 1% of the planet’s population, is claiming the right to sell the oil that will use up a third of the earth’s remaining carbon budget.”[^1] All of this takes place amidst the “celebrations” of Canada’s 150th anniversary of settler colonialism.

Landscape is a longstanding subject for artists and writers, perhaps the most universal or ubiquitous, but this issue does not romanticize it, or ruminate on its depictions. Instead it looks at how land shapes lived experience today. With Canada 150 as an implicit background, this issue aims to consider the land upon which we are living and working, from the perspectives of artists. The texts included here make connections between land-based issues here in Canada and those stemming from ecological and political matters around the world; they consider the role art may play in provoking much-needed conversation.

The featured writers and artists address the ways in which Indigenous land has been altered through resource extraction and colonialism, and the effects of environmental degradation and of gentrification in urban areas; topics range from border issues to the relationship between immigration and language to Canada’s incarceration system. Many of the texts tell stories that are not often discussed in public forums.

The issue opens with environmental historian Mary E. Mendoza’s account of the history of border fences as tools of racial discrimination – with roots in colonial notions of property ownership, border fences transformed with attempts to stop the passage of purportedly infected cattle; only in the postwar period did they become a primary means of staying human immigration. While not explicitly art related, Mendoza’s text offers important historical context for the ways in which North American land has been divided along racial lines. Artist Nicole Kelly Westman writes a travel narrative – peppered with her images – of a journey to the Northwest Territories mining town where her family once lived. In interview, New Mexico-based collective Postcommodity and Sadia Shirazi discuss Postcommodity’s recent projects addressing the USA\-Mexico border. Other interviews include an account of the art and activist work of the Brooklyn-based collective Mare Liberum, whose boat-building and performance projects focus on New York state’s polluted and gentrified waterways and the lives thus affected; and a conversation with artist Kelly Jazvac, whose recent _Plastiglomerates_ series emerged from ongoing work with researchers and locals in Hawaii around the ecological impact of garbage in the Pacific Ocean.

In the issue’s Artist Project, Olivia Whetung presents a new body of beadworks asserting Nishinaabeg presence in the Trent-Severn Waterway. Lisa Myers’ accompanying words suggest an “emotional geography” or mapping of place, parsing Whetung’s engagement with the physical and linguistic transformation of Indigenous land. 

The built environment plays a role in this issue as well: Montreal-based artist and writer jake moore profiles Sheena Hoszko’s installations and _frottage_ drawings, which represent the physical and psychological space of carceral institutions, while the issue’s two book reviews both look closely at the relationship of art to gentrification – of rave culture in industrial urban landscapes and more specifically at Toronto’s rapid subsumption of communities into condolands, rendered in Eric Kostiuk Williams’ new graphic novel, _Condo Heartbreak Disco_. The issue closes with Pamela Edmonds looking back at three of Camille Turner’s performance projects, considering Turner’s work through the concept of “not-forgetting.” In these performances, Turner engages participants in walking as a means of activating the often-ignored histories and geographies of Black Canadians, and of slavery, in both Windsor and Toronto.

While this editorial may paint a dire picture, in many ways this issue is a celebration of the land – it is a gathering of voices who care deeply, and who are taking risks in both their personal and professional lives and practices towards imagining a different future.

[^1]: [www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/apr/17/stop-swooning-justin-trudeau-man-disaster-planet](https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/apr/17/stop-swooning-justin-trudeau-man-disaster-planet)

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Indigenous

Activism

Landscape

Editor Kari Cwynar introduces the theme of “Land” in this issue, structured specifically around Canada 150 conflicts and with consideration to the way that artists interact with land, intentionally or otherwise. 

Editorial: Land

Feature

**Mary E. Mendoza**, Ph.D. is an Assistant Professor of History and Critical Race and Ethnic Studies at the University of Vermont.

In July 2012, the town of Stanstead, QC, which sits on the Canada–USA divide, officially barricaded the last of three streets crossing into the town of Derby Line, Vermont. After an uptick in illegal entry into Canada, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police facilitated a joint-agreement with the Integrated Border Enforcement team and local officials from both towns to authoritatively block cross-border traffic on Church Street. Three years prior to this agreement, officials had closed off the other two streets using small, unimposing metal gates but opted to leave Church Street open. This was in large part because the Haskell Free Library and Opera House straddles the borderline at Church Street and has served both towns since 1904\. Residents worried that closing the street would restrict access to the historic transnational institution. To protect the library’s cross-border legacy, officials agreed to continue allowing access to the building for locals from both sides of the border with no requirement for a passport or visa. Still, the need for a barrier to mark the boundary line on the street seemed pressing. In the end, officials settled on an unimposing barricade: a row of flower pots.

This cross-border library on the Canada–USA divide is emblematic of how boundaries connect. At the point where Stanstead meets Derby Line, the Haskell Library, built to cultivate cross-border ties, brings people together to share stories, knowledge and art. Inside the library, a black line on the floor marks the place where the international boundary line splits the historic building, yet people move across it without a care as they browse books and interact with one another. The building acts as a space where international communities merge. Inside, it is almost a border-free zone. It is the ideal border community.

But borders are funny places. They are paradoxical. They connect, but they also divide. Along the Canada-USA border, one can find Indigenous lands divided and increasing concern about migration across the line. And, If you travel roughly 2,600 miles south and west from the Haskell Free Library, you’ll encounter even more disruption: a border environment where huge, metal barriers erupt from the ground, tearing through vast landscapes, marking where “the Third World grates against the first and bleeds.”[^1] These metal barriers show a darker side of border enforcement and division and, given recent events in the United States, there is no indication that the construction of large, imposing barriers intended to wall off one community from another will subside any time soon.

Fences along the USA\-Mexico border, though, are not new. The earliest border-fortification projects along the line appeared in 1911\. Built by the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) to stop the movement of wandering cattle believed to carry a disease-spreading tick to the northern ranges of the U.S, these fences served to protect the then-growing stock industry in the USA West. Years earlier, the USDA had launched an eradication campaign to rid the USA of the tick, but cattle in Mexico that wandered across the border continued to threaten that eradication program. To ensure that cattle would not cross the border without inspection, the USDA set up checkpoints and built fences along the border so that cattle entering the USA for trade could be examined and quarantined before travelling north. These first fences, then, had nothing to do with human migration.

In the 1940s, after decades of concern about cattle disease, border fortification projects transformed from efforts to control animals and pathogens into a large-scale project to control the nature of human migration. In the wake of the American entry into World War II, labour gaps in the USA caused by the departure of thousands of men and women for the war effort prompted the USA and Mexican governments to sign a bilateral agreement for a guest-worker program known as the Bracero Program (1942–1964). The declared rationale underpinning this program was reciprocity and mutual respect. First, by bringing in guest workers, the United States would gain from cheap labour to fill in gaps in the labour force, which would promote the growth of economies of the Southwest (and elsewhere). Second, Mexico would benefit from a system that created a way for Mexican officials to regulate emigration to the United States. Mexican government officials, intent on maintaining a stable workforce, hoped to limit the number of labourers leaving Mexico for the United States.

Because not all Mexicans who applied to work as part of the Bracero Program were accepted, many aspiring labourers opted to venture north on their own, hoping to earn a living working on USA soil.[^2] This resulted in a mass exodus that caused concern on both sides of the border. Within one year of the start of the Bracero Program, Mexican landholders as well as braceros themselves petitioned the Mexican government to curtail the flight of workers. Landholders in Mexico complained the cause of crop failure was a dwindling labour force while braceros in the USA argued that unsanctioned migrants were taking jobs away from them and reducing their wages.[^3] Hearing these cries, Mexican officials pressured the USA to secure its borders.

Within six months of a 1943 meeting between the two governments, the USA Border Patrol “committed itself to strengthen patrol force along the Mexican border,”[^4] with new agents focused on apprehending Mexican nationals who crossed the border surreptitiously. By the end of 1943, Border Patrol Chief William F. Kelly launched a concentrated apprehension effort and the agency began a decade-long deportation campaign, culminating with the largest official deportation effort known as Operation Wetback in 1954\. Between 1943 and 1954, the Border Patrol deported thousands of Mexican border-crossers. To supplement the work of patrolmen, the USA Department of Labor also built fences in urban areas to push migrants into rural areas where agents could more easily find them.

During the Bracero era, which ended in 1964, increasingly strict immigration guidelines and policing curtailed people’s freedom of movement, and the USA and Mexican governments began to see fences primarily as a deterrent to human migration. Notions of racial difference played a central part in this shift, as increasingly anxious white authorities looked back on public health concerns from earlier in the century that had marked Mexican stock and Mexico as filthy and diseased. The transition from bugs to human bodies came about through larger discourses about race, space and purity, and migration itself soon became a criminal act.

Fences became a focal point and the go-to tool for immigration control. In the postwar era, they grew in length and size, and increasing concerns about migration from Mexico saturated the news, dominated political debate and resulted in continued fortification to control the flow of human migration. The fence transformed from barbed wire, to chain link, then into large, metal barricades and finally into a series of metal poles placed very near to each other to mark the international line.

Fences have a long, complex history in the United States. From colonial New England to the 21st century USA Southwest, fences have demarcated spatial relationships in a powerful way. They have marked out racial territory and restricted the movement of people and animals, often significantly affecting access to vital resources. In colonial New England, fences were “the most visible symbol of an ‘improved’ landscape.’”[^5] When John Winthrop arrived in Massachusetts, he asserted that the absence of fences justified banishing Native peoples in ways that would resonate with Euro-Americans for centuries.[^6]

For Winthrop, the absence of fences left the American landscape open for settlement and meant that Native Americans were not making claim to the land they inhabited. As settlers “improved” the land by seizing it and building on it, laws and fences began to dictate the way property was defined. Settlers built fences to protect their crops. If they didn’t, then they could not make a claim in court if their crops incurred damage from other settlers’ roaming livestock.[^7]

According to Virginia DeJohn Anderson, “Livestock caused major problems with subsistence practices, land use, property rights and ultimately, political authority.”[^8] Commons grazing was standard practice in early America, but the free movement of animals also meant that there was the danger of animals wandering into planted fields and ruining crops. Anderson argues that, in New England, fences not only to kept animals in a particular place, but also to kept them out of cropland. This differed from English law, which only required fences to keep animals confined within a certain space. This dual function resulted in thousands of miles of fences across the land– and with that spread came massive dispossession of Native land.

Just as fences severely disrupted the Native American economy in New England, the same became true in the American West. Fences blocked Native Americans from hunting grounds, closed off transportation routes and displaced them from their land. As settlers bound the land, they created a checkerboard of racialized spaces across the continent. Some scholars go as far as to claim that fences were the cause of Native American ethnocide.[^9] This imposition of Euro-American ideals robbed Native Americans of their practices regarding land use. Yet fences, for settlers represented material proclamations, indicating dominion over the land.[^10] In short, fences in American history have reinforced deeply entrenched racial hierarchies in USA society.

And those divisions did not stop at Native dispossession. As fences sprouted in the developing west, they also rose out of the ground to delineate where the USA ended and Mexico began, cutting cross-border communities in two; dividing families, towns, ecosystems and economies, and blocking Latino immigrants from entry into the United States. Today, over 650 miles of fences stretch across the 1,951-mile border landscape. The fences funnel migrants to dangerous deserts or rivers where they face the harsh realities of the natural elements. Since 2000, roughly 6,000 migrant bodies have been found dead in the borderlands and there are likely countless others yet to be discovered. Border fences work to actively drive human traffic to the most dangerous places in order to prevent them from entering USA territory. These fences, too, are highly racialized.

In spite of this fraught history, fences continue to permeate and define USA society and ideas about ownership and property. In celebration of the American fence, the National Building Museum created an exhibition that, from May 31, 1996 until January 5, 1997, displayed the various kinds of fences built across the United States. Just over 10 years later, the Smithsonian used these materials to create a travelling exhibition in 2008\. Between Fences encouraged visitors to, “embrace the importance of a crucial aspect of our personal and national heritage.”[^11] Although it did ask some provocative questions about the role of the fence in creating exclusive communities, the exhibition mostly exalted fences, arguing that fences are a cornerstone of American society. In the exhibition’s publication, curator Gregory K. Dreicer wrote of fences:

Fences define, protect, confine, and liberate. They tell us where we belong and who we are in relation to others. Fences join the public and the private. Remove a fence; invite chaos. Erect a fence; you are home… Fences make space into place.[^12]

Although the publication briefly discusses fences at international borders, it does not appear to take any stand, and, in praising fences as a crucial technology in American culture, it focuses on the ways in which fences have allowed for “progress.” Later that year, when the Arizona Humanities Council agreed to host the exhibition at six different museums in the border state, it was not well received.[^13]

Two thousand six hundred and sixty-five miles from Derby Line, Vermont and Stanstead, QC lies another cross-border community – Ambos Nogales. Ambos means “both” in Spanish and it refers to what is now two distinct towns located on either side of a large fence: Nogales, Arizona lies north of the border while Nogales, Sonora lies to the south of it. Just north of one of the ports of entry to the USA along International Street, there is a small building with a noticeable but unimposing clock tower. Built in 1914, the building originally housed inmates as the Nogales City Hall and Jail. Today it is home to the Pimería Alta Historical Society. Named in recognition of the towns’ origins as the upper land of the Pima Indians, part of this building now serves as a small heritage centre and archive for both border towns. In 2008, when the local community heard that the Smithsonian’s travelling fences exhibition would make its debut in Arizona at the Historical Society, archivists, local historians and town residents mobilized to create their own exhibition to refute the celebration of barriers and to celebrate the cross-border communities. The exhibition, aptly called In Spite of Fences, consisted of local artifacts, books, oral histories and photographs, used to “tell the story of how the industrial, commercial, cultural and social world of Ambos Nogales functions as one.”[^14] It included information on migratory birds, cross-border families, ranches and Indigenous knowledge and culture that continues to traverse the border.

In an article about the exhibition, Alfred C. Holden criticized the American government’s continual efforts to divide Nogales’ vibrant border community, challenging the notion that fences led to progress. “Fences exist because far removed national governments decide they are needed,”he wrote. “While accomplishing other ends, fences on our border don’t convey harmony or friendship.” He went on to describe the transition from an open, friendly community to one increasingly marred by divisive structures:

> Now the word ambos has vanished from our local lexicon. In the old days, we could stroll on either of the parallel International Streets with an open view of the other side unimpeded by the huge American customs and immigration buildings. The first two story government building of 1964 blocked the view and destroyed our classic 1905 stone railroad depot; then again in the 1990s an even more forbidding behemoth rose, the DeConcini building, that encroaches deeper into Nogales, Arizona and so tall as to leave adjacent areas in sinister shadows. All starting with a fence.

Despite this local resistance, fences continue to divide Ambos Nogales and other communities along the USA– Mexico border.

Around the time of the exhibition, construction on a new set of fences in Ambos Nogales commenced. This iteration of construction was a part of the Secure Fence Act, signed in 2006 by USA President George W. Bush. The Act legislated that the Department of Homeland Security build 700 miles of reinforced fences in segments along the USA\-Mexico border. To date, around 650 miles of fences, built in segments, exist. And, in recent weeks, the Department of Homeland Security, under the new presidential leadership of Donald Trump, has solicited proposals from architects and contractors for a continuous, 2,000-mile wall to completely wall off one nation from the other, much to the chagrin of border residents.

For Indigenous tribes like the Tohono O’odham Nation, the proposed wall threatens their way of life. The O’odham’s traditional lands traverse the border and were severed when the boundary line was drawn in 1848\. In recent years, increasing enforcement and growing fences have kept tribal members living south of the border from entering their historic lands north of the line. Sometimes members go to the current border to conduct tribal business across the fence. The fence is now made up of posts of varying heights that are strung together by several strands of barbed wire. The different sized posts, called vehicle barriers, are designed to prevent one from balancing a ramp on the posts and driving a car over the fence. But as it stands, the fence on the reservation, although it has disrupted tribal life, is relatively small. A wall would threaten their sovereignty and way of life even more. In a recent interview, Bradley Moreno, a tribal member noted how a wall would affect tribal life, “It’s going to affect our sacred lands. It’s going to affect our ceremonial sites. It’s going to affect the environment. We have wildlife, and they have their own patterns of migration. There are just so many things that are wrong with this. The whole idea behind it is just racist.”[^15]

Indeed, border enforcement practices can reveal much about race relations in the USA and across the North American continent. Borders are funny places. Lines that connect and divide, they are unnatural and imposing to the cultural and natural lexicon of ecosystems that they slice. Marking the edges of nation states, these paradoxical locations perplex those who seek to control them. In spite of fences, people, animals, bugs and ideas continue to cross national boundaries, rendering fences powerless to stop movement, yet they remain highly symbolic of Euro-American dominance over historically marginalized peoples. 

[^1]: Gloria Anzaldúa, _Borderlands/ La Frontera: The New Mestiza_, (San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books, 1987).
[^2]: Kelly Lytle Hernandez, “The Crimes and Consequences of Illegal Immigration: A Cross-Border Examination of Operation Wetback, 1943-1954,” _Western Historical Quarterly_ (Winter 2006), 425-6.
[^3]: Hernandez, 426.
[^4]: Hernandez, 427.
[^5]: William Cronon, _Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England_ (New York: Hill and Wang, 1983), 130.
[^6]: Quoted in David J. Silverman, “‘We Chuse to be Bounded’: Native American Animal Husbandry in Colonial New England,” _William and Mary Quarterly_ Vol. 60 n. 3 (2003): 511.
[^7]: Cronon, _Changes_, 135.
[^8]: Virginia DeJohn Anderson, “King Philip’s Herds: Indians, Colonists, and the Problem of Livestock in Early New England,” _The William and Mary Quarterly_ Vol. 51 n. 3 (1994): 602.
[^9]: Olivier Razac, _Barbed Wire: A Political History_ (New York: New York Press, 2000), 17.
[^10]: David J. Silverman, “‘We Chuse to be Bounded,’” 511; and Jake Kosek. _Understories: The Political Life of Forests in Northern New Mexico_. (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2006), 35.
[^11]: [http://newsdesk.si.edu/releases/smithsonian-exhibition-explores-role-fences-america](“http://newsdesk.si.edu/releases/smithsonian-exhibition-explores-role-fences-america”)
[^12]: Gregory K. Dreicer, ed., _Between Fences_ (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2008), 9.
[^13]: Tohono O’odham Cultural Center and Museum. File: Between Fences and In Spite of Fences Exhibitions.
[^14]: Ibid.
[^15]: [https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/jan/26/donald-trump-border-wall-tohono-oodham-arizona-tribe](“https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/jan/26/donald-trump-border-wall-tohono-oodham-arizona-tribe”)

issue-134-p10-16.pdf

Cultural Studies

Politics

Nature

In this piece, Mary E. Mendoza explores the history of USA\-Mexico border security, as well as considering the evolution of the physical border, i.e., the fence in a political context. This history intersects with settler colonialism and indigenous eradication, and also speaks to the ways that the natural world- bugs, mammals, birds- navigate these intensely human constructs.

Racialized Landscapes: Marking Territory Across North America

nicole kelly westman is of Métis and Icelandic descent and lives with the chaotic pleasures of a dyslexic mind; she is surrounded in support by the interconnected care and plurality of her community. She is most delighted to be an Aunty but is also an artist who, these days, is mostly on hiatus.

Pine Point, Northwest Territories – the town and its accompanying mine site – is named after the tamarack tree, a pine tree masquerading as coniferous. In late September, the tamarack’s needles fade to an autumnal hue, creating a jarring visual as vast fields of short, stocky pines appear to be wilting or dying rather than hibernating. Before the first snowfall, these tamaracks stand as bare as the skeletal remains of a carcass. Another mark of another summer past. 

I fell gracelessly for the abandoned terrain surrounding Pine Point. Scattered rubble and condensed crushed rock litter the earth like a floppy area rug disguising something subtly conspicuous. It was nearly three years ago that I ventured north alone, and my strongest memories pertain to my sonic relation to that place. There is a staticness in the sound, as though the organic compositions of noise were also abandoned with time. An echoing resonance, eerily comparable to the suffocated sounds of an underground parkade or the muffled dissonance of winter when the landscape is blanketed with fresh snow. Yet, it is also easy to imagine Pine Point encompassed by the hum of industry – heavy machinery moving earth, compacting piles of ore and excavating the next series of open pit mines; train cars hauling loads of minerals and the ambient rhythmics behind a blue-collar work force. 

Pine Point Mine Ltd. once boasted of extracting lead and zinc from the most plentiful deposit in Canada. The mine, however, was less transparent about its extraction of financial resources. Then Prime Minister John Diefenbaker, a Progressive Conservative who held office from 1957–63, believed that investment in corporations such as Cominco would open up exploration of Canada’s last frontier, the North.[^1] One could interpret such actions as an industrial form of colonization through socio-political gestures and financial agendas. Diefenbaker’s assertion of proprietary ownership over the North was supported by a settler ideology assuming rights to unclaimed recourses with expectations of foreseeable wealth. Diefenbaker claimed that Canada’s north was the gateway to economic stimulus through job creation. Although the careers he promised were targeted for the benefit of southern prosperity, he still proposed that this act would unify the nation. This repetition of history and its assumptions, although flawed, was reflective of the expansion of settlers West across North America. 

Surrounded by vast and rugged wilderness, Pine Point’s large deposits of lead and zinc was relatively unattractive to investors. However, in 1961, the Canadian government committed to funding The Great Slave Lake Railway.[^2] The railway was never meant to service the people or communities of the North, but contrarily intended to secure prosperity for industrial economies of the South. It was eventually decommissioned in 1993, five years after the lead-zinc mine in Pine Point was permanently closed.

A bare mound where the railway once laid runs parallel to the Fort Resolution Highway. The utilitarian relevance of this amassed body of sediment is slowly eroding as its intended function is forgotten. As Pine Point shuttered its doors and turned off its lights, it marked the end of an era of company towns in Canada. As the deposits were depleted, and the expense of production and extraction began to outweigh the revenues, Pine Point’s residents lost their jobs and were forced to relocate. This progression also marked the initial stages of Canada’s first experiments with reclamation of industrial sites. 

Today, the obvious demise of those early initiations of restoration is apparent on the low-lying horizon 92 kilometres east of Hay River, Northwest Territories. The choice of partitioning materials was shortsighted and many of the barricades have failed to withstand the elements. Barren horizons are partially blockaded by crumbling boundaries of piled ore and accumulated debris. These mounds once acted as temporary deterrents to persuade trespassers from exploring open pits or wandering onto mining roads. Collapsed chainlink fence clings pathetically to concave pillars, another signifier of the severity of nearly three decades of disregard. Yet the land retains the memories of those who attempted to conquer it. The cul-de-sacs bulb into dead ends, painted pedestrian crossways, infrastructure for parking lots that once circumnavigated the shopping centre and doctor’s office, invasive plants introduced to gardens, memorial sites and one well-maintained graveyard signify the space taken by former inhabitants. 

Through conversations and archival research, I came to realize that this company town’s blueprints mirrored the infrastructure of the industrial institution it supported. A segregation between single union workers, single upper management, union workers with families and senior management with families existed in the form of provided accommodations. The presumed hierarchies of your employment were reflected in your home life and the social spheres of the community. The town itself was branded as the most sophisticated of the Northwest Territories with a golf course, hockey and curling arena, exceptional schools and other expected southern amenities. You can still imagine the existence of each of these sites beyond the cemented sidewalks and decaying asphalt roads. 

Halfway through my self-initiated Pine Point residency, my father met me in Yellowknife; my uncle had fallen ill and we decided to drive back south together. At this point, I had been spending most of my time in Yellowknife’s Prince of Wales Northern Heritage Centre scouring through the archives for a newspaper article related to Dolly Mercredi, who was the first resident of Pine Point. He was also the only resident allowed to stay after retirement, and the cousin of my maternal grandfather. On our return to the South, my father toured me through Pine Point and provided narration pertaining to his teenage memories of the town. His first job was at the mine, changing oil and performing maintenance on small equipment. He probably lied about his age to get the job. We found the street that once housed my grandfather’s temporary company home. It stood out with its gangly raspberry bushes growing around the property’s perimeter. In this region, berries tend to crawl close to the tundra rather than grow on shrubs or bushes, so this stood out. Half of the histories surrounding this community are stored between acid-free sheets of archival paper accessible only in low-light rooms while wearing white gloves. The rest of the histories are passed down through stories, rumours or shared knowledge. 

Perhaps, the emphasis on oral histories only amplifies my fixation on the soundscape of this place. Or maybe subconsciously this attachment is due to some advice I received at the Hay River print shop. Engaged in a conversation with a retired mine worker, through either circumstance or happenstance, I mentioned my timidness around exploration, how I was fearful of being lost on the tangled back roads of the mine. In the landscape surrounding the mine, most visual cues or landmarks are camouflaged by their sameness or insignificance. The sales associate described how best to avoid losing myself in the maze of roads navigating the former mine site. She reminded me that the Great Slave Lake will always be to the north of the town, even though the town no longer exists. And that if I stop everything, and remain quiet, I will eventually hear a car travelling along the Fort Resolution Highway. Head in the direction of the highway, she advised, because at the very least, if you miss the town you’ll find the road. I received her advice as she sized up my urban-ness and questioned whether I could differentiate between an all-terrain vehicle and an automobile, although she probably said between a quad and a car. I retorted that I could. From the time I was two, I grew up in a motorsports shop; I have a fondness for two-stroke smoke and had my own snowmobile before attending grade school. Before my parents ventured into business together along the Yellowhead Highway, my father held a position as a journeyman mechanic at the Luscar Sterco Mine in Edson, Alberta. Perhaps there have been some intergenerational interests in laborious trades on my dad’s side. 

While we lived in Edson, most of my mother’s family still resided in Calgary, and together with my brother, we would drive the five-hour journey in a 1969 Cutlass Supreme. We would take the forestry trunk road that ran from Cochrane north to Nordegg. It was an unpredictable stretch of gravel highway that crossed an interior mountain pass. I would pester my mother along the way with adult concerns framed as childlike queries, “Do you know where we are going?”… “Do you have enough gas?”… “Are you sure this is the right direction?”

Travelling on these forsaken mining roads from one gleaming turquoise open-pit mine to the next, I could hear myself reiterating these childish questions, only now they were rhetorical. My insecurities grew in these unpredicted spaces as my anxieties accumulated from a wandering mind confined alone. I recognized my gender in a way I hadn’t considered since moving away from small towns – I was beginning to question my safety and to recognize my dependence on my own sovereign sensibilities and capabilities. As a woman in unfamiliar territory, you recognize the dangers of your circumstances, considering each rational and simultaneously irrational scenario. Wandering while considering the coalescence of mineral extraction and non-consensual advancement. _Did this place want to be consumed so quickly or abandoned so haphazardly? Was there ever a consideration of what this land might need?_

Auditory stimuli stored as echoic memories may be flawed by the same tropes that affect visual forms of nostalgia – a societal adherence to objective truths. We interrupt our inherent responses to create our own iteration of events and reflect with a chosen demeanour. A way of succumbing to an emphatic tone, or indulging in the past to overcome what is now. Finding another way to reconsider a fading emotion or contextualizing a dissipating memory. I ignore my tepid impositions, and choose to remember the solace of that summer’s independence. 

[^1]: <http://www.canadahistory.com/sections/documents/Primeministers/diefenbaker/docs-thenorthernvision.htm>
[^2]: <http://railways.library.ualberta.ca/Chapters-13-1>

issue-134-p16-21.pdf

Residencies

History

Work

Narrative

In this article, artist Nicole Kelly Westman chronicles her visit to Pine Point, Northwest Territories, and its accompanying mine site which, though once a thriving source of lead and zinc, is now scarcely inhabited. Through conversations with former mineworkers and locals, as well as archival research, Westman pieces together a town’s blue-collar history while also recalling her own childhood memories and connecting her history to the nostalgic surroundings of Pine Point. 

the cul-de-sacs bulb into dead ends

issue-134-p22-29.pdf

Spirituality

Installation

Sound

Language

American Southwest-based art collective Postcommodity, consisting of Raven Chacon, Cristóbal Martínez, and Kade L. Twist, are interviewed by Sadia Shirazi. The interview took place the day before the opening of their solo show Coyotaje at Art in General and then responded to a set of questions by email in between travelling to present their work at documenta14.

Postcommodity Interviewed by Sadia Shirazi

**Katherine McLeod** is pursuing a PhD at New York University in environmental history. Her research focuses on the workings of land, labour and capital in relation to USA scientific practices in South America and the Caribbean during the 20th and 21st centuries.

##### Mare Liberum is a collective of visual artists, designers and writers who formed around a shared engagement with New York’s waterways in 2007\. As part of a mobile, interdisciplinary and pedagogical practice, the collective has designed and built boats; published broadsides, essays and books; invented water-related art and educational forums; and collaborated with diverse institutions to produce public talks, collaborative exhibitions, participatory works and voyages. Mare Liberum (ML) is made up of Jean Barberis, Dylan Gauthier, Ben Cohen, Stephan von Muehlen, Sunita Prasad and Kendra Sullivan.

ML’s work bridges dialogues in art, activism and science by remapping landscapes, reclaiming local ecologies and observing and recording the overlaps of nature, industry and the polis. The collective’s projects connect divergent constituencies with shared environmental concerns, create waterfront narratives ranging from the industrial to the personal and catalyze the creation of engaged publics. Employing the methodologies of civic hacking, participation, open source, social sculpture and temporary occupations, the collective extrapolates Henri Lefebvre’s and David Harvey’s “right to the city” to include its neglected waterways.
  
  
**KATHERINE MCLEOD**: On the eve of the last election in the United States, I received an email from Kendra, an invitation to watch the election results together at the Sunview Luncheonette, a collective space in Brooklyn. In it, she wrote of water, islands and boats in a way that expressed an urgency, a feeling, a way of living with water as a physical place and as metaphor, as a response to destructive politics, economies and behaviours, and a way of coming together. These words stuck with me.

Here is an excerpt of that email:

“\_Come if you have nowhere to go\_ which is our motto. That and _stay forever, we like you that much_. Another motto is _we don’t care who you are we will hold you while you weep but only if you want it_. And when at last the “gift of tears” transforms the landscape beyond recognition, we can lower the boats from the ceiling and set out for another island _only there is no other island_. Last motto! _Let us transform what there is into what we need_.” I want to talk with you about poetry, history, time and activism; and the above passage brings this together for me. Mare Liberum feels like a response to social and environmental needs. Would you agree?

**KENDRA SULLIVAN**: The Sunview is a micro-venue in a stopped-in-time diner we started with friends in 2012, and like Mare Liberum, it emerged partially in response to gentrification, displacement and unnatural disaster (precipitated by Hurricanes Sandy and Katrina, respectively). It might be worth noting that some of our boats are _actually_ hanging from the ceiling in the Sunview, which gives you a picture of how our lives and projects are layered up due to lack of space – temporal, physical, mental, you name it!

For me, Mare Liberum is about being with people and being with water. We seed relationships with and between people and the specific bodies of water that shape their lives. If this sounds simple, trust that things get complicated very quickly. In part, this is because “relationship” immediately inspires – read: demands – response to and responsibility for collective needs, both social and environmental. But who determines collective needs? And where does the collective body begin and end when working in broadly contingent and interlocking ecosystems?

**DYLAN GAUTHIER**: We started the collective to activate a vast but largely inaccessible public space in New York City – its waterways. At the outset, the collective included myself, Stephan von Muehlen and Ben Cohen, who were both trained as industrial designers. We built boats out of plywood construction fences that had been set up to enclose lots on the Gowanus Canal in Brooklyn as part of an area-wide redevelopment and rezoning plan. This was a couple of years before the entire neighbourhood was designated a Superfund site, and our focus was on getting people in the community to look more closely at the canal.

**KS**: Our art/activist practice can only exist because of the history of what is problematically termed First and Third World environmental movements, as well as art historical movements ranging from land and offshore art to social sculpture, street theatre and happenings. These movements teach us the power of interruption, pageantry, encampment and blockades. But more, these movements teach us that human impact on the environment is differentially weighted depending upon a number of factors, including social and subject position and national identity. For instance, the destruction wrought by the elite few benefitting most from global resource extraction, settler colonialism and racial capitalism far outweighs the impact of historically colonized people, people of colour, women and the poor on the environment; but the latter populations are disproportionately affected by everything from deforestation to fossil infrastructure to ocean acidification.

**DG**: In the beginning, we were responding to the absurdity of the planned condo development. How could developers propose the building of million-dollar condos on the banks of what is effectively a two-mile-long open sewer? We thought that building boats out of the detritus of these active construction sites, and taking these boats out for tours and recreation on the canal was a way to make the absurdity legible. That said, once the EPA Superfunding was in place and the pace of the condo construction slowed – at least momentarily – we turned our attention to the conditions within society that had allowed for such a contradiction to exist in the first place, and to the water itself.

**KS**: Now we are facing historic rollbacks in EPA regulations, and we’ll be responding to new urgencies with new strategies as they arise.

**KM**: The collective’s name brings us back to the 1600s, as a reference to Hugo Grotius’ treatise of the same name on the legality of international waters. Mare Liberum’s publications bring together fictional narratives, boat-building instructions and historic context. How do you use history in your practice?

**DG**: We’re often looking at intersections between overlooked or forgotten regional histories (such as water-squatter culture and maritime trades) and material histories (such as tracing the genesis of a regional, improvised boat design from the 1600s). The name Mare Liberum, or “the free seas,” was important to us as we turned toward open waterways to escape the increasingly foreclosed-upon cityscape, circa late 2000s. We were thinking about the water as a shared space that connects rather than separates people and land, and Grotius’ treatise proposed we should all be free to travel and trade with one another without restriction. But it is also – unfortunately – the foundation of free market global capitalism.

**KS**: The materials in our practice have both a concrete identity and a sort of metaphorical use-value. Like water, history is \[an\] unstable substrate from which fluid truths emerge and sink. We skim along its surface. Trying not to reproduce it… the landscapes we study are all contested sites, and historical theft, trauma and inequity are ever-present.

**KM**: In one of your projects you proclaim, “The waters of this world cannot be contained, we all live downstream.” Why are poetry and imagination important in figuring out how to live and build towards more egalitarian ways of being?

**DG**: This quote is from a month-long advocacy voyage down the Hudson River from Troy to New York City on a fleet of 16 paper canoes. Called _Sea Change: We all live Downstream_, the journey was organized by ML in collaboration with 350.org and ended with a circumnavigation of the city in the lead-up to the Climate March in 2014\. We organized talks and workshops all along its banks, and these enabled us to think about the connections between communities along the Hudson River Valley and the extractive industries that are poised to ruin the place. Resistance is very strong and storied in that region, but new fossil infrastructure is being proposed and potentially built. Water is a linked system, so each pipeline threatens not just the local supply, but the entire watershed.

**KS**: A voyage is also an act of publication, circulating ideas about how we shape and are shaped by terraqueous landscapes through reflexive thought and collective action. Michael Warner writes that, “a public is a poetic world making.” In order to convince others to follow a new path, you have to imagine – and, more importantly, help others imagine – a meaningful lifeworld that will provide for and inspire people who join you in it. Our public voyages are – in their ideal form – an act of “poetic world making.”

More directly, and because I am a poet, the poetics of Kamau Brathwaite, M. NourbeSe Philip and Caroline Bergvall, are important to my way of thinking about water and its subtle – and not so subtle – impacts on the formation of worldviews and lifeworlds; flows of travel, trade, the commodification of human life, exile and settlement. But the poetry of the voyage is also pre-modern. In _Drift_, Bergvall connects the contemporary reader to an Anglo-Saxon poet’s “seabound” sensibility that leaves him “lost at sea,” or lost in the sea’s opacity. She writes, “They call it hafville, sea wilderness, sea wildering.” In Chaucer’s first poem, a dream vision about the brevity of life and the finality of death, he falls asleep reading Ovid’s account of the metamorphoses of Ceyx and Alcyone into birds after Alcyone is lost at sea during a storm. In Medieval literature, women especially wake up from a sleep induced by magic or malice to find themselves adrift on a rudderless boat, transported by a self-propelled vessel toward their destiny – be that exile, pilgrimage or adventure.

**DG**: Rachel Carson and others write that you’re only seeing the surface of the water, only seeing to a certain depth or distance, even when you’re in it.

**KS**: That reminds me of Robert Ashley in _Atalanta (Acts of God)_, that talks about how bodies of water simultaneously cover over and communicate present and historical social, economic and political realities.

This ability to conceal and reveal is related to the structure of the river. It is understood as both a surface and a depth in a way that land is not – except to those working in or affected firsthand by the extractive industries, for instance. But when we titrate between a surface and a depth, we are forced to take account of the impact of both the things we can see and the things we can’t see. Questions about water are always about this titration. For instance, in the popular imaginary, climate change is abundantly depicted as melting ice and rising oceans covering over coastal towns, but it is more difficult to talk about shrinking water tables that negatively impact peasant farming, forcing families of intergenerational farmers into urban centres where they might live alongside a toxic canal.

Ashley writes, “When the people of the area speak about the river their attention is always inevitably focused on the mystery of the place in the river where something strange happened – where there is evidence of a more mysterious kind of work, a complex structure hidden and closed now, closed perhaps forever or perhaps waiting only in a large plan of time.”

**KM**: Whenever I end up on a boat, one of the most striking things to me is leaving or returning to the dock, seeing the city from a different point of view. How important is this perspective change to your work?

**DG**: It is precisely how Mare Liberum’s practice, as a collective, became environmental – which is to say concerned with the built and not-built environment. On the water, it’s hard to gauge the space between you and where you’re trying to go. While you can make out your destination at a distance, you can’t always figure out how long it will take you to get there. There are many competing forces at work – winds, tides, currents, your own strength. Riding on the surface of the water, a small wave can feel enormous. You are constantly at risk of _feeling_ swept under, even if you’re not actually at risk. Likewise, in human-powered boats, where you’re riding at the water line, you have a perspectival shift in seeing the land and the city towering above you. And the city looks incredibly strange from that vantage point.

**KM**: The collective has done a lot of work in and around large cities. Can you talk about the time the collective has spent in more rural areas?

**KS**: We focus on public waters in mostly urban areas, because those waters often represent the largest unscripted public spaces in cities. Cultural geographer Don Mitchell states that there is no political revolt without public space. In the increasingly privatized arena of global cities, such an expanse of public space is vital to political dissent and environmental activism. This is echoing the work of many – Setha Low, Neil Smith and David Harvey, Henri Lefebvre.

**DG**: We made a project in Boston in 2013 when we travelled down the Charles River from its headwaters in rural/suburban Massachusetts into Boston, looking for any kind of demarcation where a “rural” river became “urban.” It turned out it happened all at once, at a dam in Natick. But it’s really an illusion – it’s just that Natick was the first sizeable town that you hit when you’re coming down the river. Otherwise you’re running behind people’s backyards and nature preserves and you have this false sense of “nature” and “rural.” I was also looking into ways that wilderness might be depicted and/or potentially preserved using online mapping tools, or virtual presence tools such as Google Maps. We exhibited a video that was made from screen recordings of every place where Google Street View encountered the edge of a wilderness preserve in the area around the Charles River. Generally, these were either street ends or bridges, and for us the “wilderness” started wherever the pixel count started to break down – when you were zooming in beyond the data that had been recorded for any of these sites.

**KM**: What do you think gives the ocean the ability to be seen as free, from Grotius’ treatise to the existence of international waters today? What kind of free are you talking about?

**KS**: The concept of a “free seas” is problematic. In our early practice, we conceived of the water as a liberatory commons and the boat as a platform for social change. And it many ways, it has acted as such in our lives and the lives of those of have invested their time and energy in our work and travels. An activist project like _Women on Waves_, who take advantage of the fact that Dutch ships are governed by Dutch laws to practice safe and legal abortion just off-shore from nation-states where women’s reproductive rights have been curtailed, powerfully exemplifies the way in which plurinational seas might provide certain freedoms not afforded to those on uninational land. There is also a historical legacy of off-shore artists and counter-cultural icons – including Chris Burden, Bas Jan Ader and Poppa Neutrino – whose work reminds us that adventure, escapism and rejection of societal norms and nationalistic identity are also at play on the water. Ongoing work by Marie Lorenz, Mary Mattingly and Swoon offers glimpses of a more egalitarian society founded on co-operativism and feminism. Their work is also important because it implicitly critiques the trope of discovery, as well as the patriarchal, expansionist undertones present in so much land and offshore art.

**DG**: Starting the project from a design direction, we were asking, “What is the minimal effort required to build a viable boat?” We found ourselves looking at watercraft that was built out of necessity, using poor materials but often with a huge amount of vernacular knowledge that may have been passed down from generation to generation. Another practice that inspired our work –and I know this is true for Swoon and someone like Constance Hockaday, who also makes water voyages and work about the water – was the crew and family around Poppa Neutrino, who built a raft from trash they collected in New York City and successfully sailed (or drifted, really) across the Atlantic to Europe. They did this as a protest against paying rent, basically, so there was this liberatory sense that Kendra mentions.

**KS**: But as a counter to all of that, you see the flows of forced migration and exile on the ocean – people in open boats crossing the sea in dangerous conditions to escape even more dangerous conditions caused by war, famine and the deleterious effects of climate change at home. The boat is also an implement of colonial invasion, genocide and the slave trade. How can we talk about the boat and not talk about what Christina Sharpe has termed “the wake,” in her recent work _In the Wake: On Blackness and Being_? In response to the ongoing and continually-unfolding-in-the-present trauma of chattel slavery and the Middle Passage, Sharpe discusses modes of “wake work,” by which care and recuperation might breathe life back into enslaved peoples who died in the holds while also providing radical care for the living. Her work has changed how we understand the metaphor of the boat as operating in different publics.

**KM**: What is Mare Liberum working on now?

**DG**: This year the collective turns 10\. We were invited to participate in the exhibition _Traversées_, curated by Géraldine Gomez who curated _Hors Pistes_ in the Centre Pompidou in Paris this past February. This spring and fall, we’re co-organizing, with the Cape Cod Modern House Trust, an artist-scientist residency collaboration with NPS visiting scientists in Cape Cod National Seashore, and we’re participating in a triennial of water-based art called _Works on Water_, which opens in June here in New York, curated by Nancy Nowacek, Eve Mosher and Sarah Cameron Sunde. Each of the collective’s members \[also\] has their own individual art practices, but Kendra’s and my practice crosses over a lot with the collective and with each other.

**KM**: How does teaching work with the collaborative methods of Mare Liberum, and why is this important to what you do?

**KS**: Building a boat lends the builder a sense of personal agency and efficacy that cannot be duplicated. Unless perhaps you build an airplane. We have never built one of those. Dylan did just turn his attention to kites, though.

**DG**: I guess if we did, it might look something like Chris Burden’s _The Flying Kayak_ (1983)… We talked about this a bit earlier but the workshops are as much a performance, as a platform for collaboration, as a way to get from Point A (no boats) to Point B (the voyage).

**KS**: Somewhere, Hannah Arendt talks about the “public” in a functioning democracy being something like the kitchen table. We gather people around the idea of boat – not yet built – with paper, epoxy and power tools. They distract our hands in ways that make it easier for intimacy to develop between strangers who will very soon come to need and rely on each other. More broadly, the boat is the object that allows us to bring together citizens, non-citizens, scientists, activists and craftspeople to think about how to build something much bigger than a boat together– a more equitable and sustainable society. 

issue-134-p30-38.pdf

Time

In this interview, Katherine McLeod speaks with the multidisciplinary collective Mare Liberum. The collective, comprised of Jean Barberis, Dylan Gauthier, Ben Cohen, Stephan von Muehlen, Sunita Prasad and Kendra Sullivan, integrates visual artists, writers, and designers and works to create dialogues in local ecologies, promote audience participation, and observe nature in urban contexts.

Mare Liberum Interviewed by Katherine McLeod

**Weiyi Chang** is a curator and writer currently based in Vancouver.

##### In February, my partner and I scoured the rocky beaches of Vancouver Island for a perfectly smooth stone. We sifted through countless contenders, debating the merits and demerits of each, gradually distilling the parameters of the prize. One tempting find was a smooth rock with a perfectly round hole neatly bored into the top, its deceptive lightness revealing a hollow interior. We briefty considered taking it home before returning it to the ocean to serve, we imagined, as a home to another inhabitant.

##### Beachcombing is a popular activity, evocative of summer vacations and communal gatherings. But artist Kelly Jazvac’s beachcombing excursions in Hawaii have yielded another, more tragic, invocation in the form of the plastiglomerate. The name designates a type of aggregate in which plastic waste has bonded with a mixture of sand, shell, coral and other natural materials to produce a new type of stone. Exhibited as both readymade sculptural objects and as objects of scientific research, the stones were collected as part of a collaborative effort between Jazvac and geologist Patricia Corcoran, who was invited to research the stones at the behest of oceanographer Charles Moore. Plastiglomerates have captivated both art audiences and scientists, indexing the entanglements between petro-capitalist economies, oceanic currents and human activity, and animating the forces at play between globalizing forces and local reverberations.
  
  
**WC**: Can you describe your initial reactions when you arrived at Kamilo Beach, and how the stones have impacted your perception of the relationships between disparate locales? What has been your experience working with local communities, and what are their thoughts on the situation at Kamilo Beach?

**KJ**: I’ll start by describing the nature of our fieldwork there. We didn’t just show up with our cameras and notebooks looking for something shocking. This work was the result of a long activist relationship that oceanographer Charles Moore had with local individuals and environmental groups. Charles asked Patricia Corcoran to talk to members of the Hawaii Wildlife Fund, and locals Ron and Noni Sanford have led remarkable clean-up efforts on this beach. Through those conversations, this work began.

My initial reaction when arriving at Kamilo Beach was both sadness at the pollution, but also profound respect for the tremendous clean-up efforts of local organizations and individuals. A huge amount of plastic debris from the North Pacific Gyre washes up directly on this specific beach. Literally tonnes of plastic have been removed by volunteers. Hawaii has no petrochemical industry; a lot of the debris on this beach was clearly coming from elsewhere, as evidenced by the different languages written on it and more precise locators, such as plastic fishing tags that pinpoint the source of a piece of plastic to a specific region. There is an interesting 2014 study by Yong, Chang, Yang et al[^1] that found that most of the plastic beach debris on six beaches in Korea came from the ocean, not the land. This has huge implications. And, like Kamilo, demonstrates how the people of one place can find themselves awash in other peoples’ trash.

Ron and Noni were frustrated because they were constantly dealing with this. Noni is a second-generation beachcomber, and describes the extreme shift in what was washing up on the beach, starting in the 1960s, when plastics became a commonly used material. I learned a lot from her. As an outsider, I had trepidations with this fieldwork – this is not my land or country. And yet Noni showed me debris that she collected that _was_ from my country – objects she found washed up on a beach near her home. I recently wrote a paper called “Noni Knows,” for a publication edited by Maggie Groat published by Kitchener-Waterloo Art Gallery – it describes the extensive local knowledge that existed before the authority of science came in to study it, and how the two can possibly collaborate to productive ends.

**WC**: The stones seem to straddle a discontinuous territory, as both artistic objects and scientific artifacts, and as neither wholly industrial nor natural entities. Can you tell me how their reception has changed in different contexts? I also wonder about your thoughts on the liminal position the stones occupy, and how they intersect with current discussions about climate change and ecological crisis?

**KJ**: They have mostly been exhibited as objects in art contexts. Their life as scientific objects has revolved around the data that they generate. I think that art exhibition contexts can offer an important contribution – the opportunity to have a moment with an object, framed in a setting that suggests it has an extended and poetic meaning. Art contexts remind us that a physical, bodily experience of an object is also a site of knowledge. Natural history contexts can often set up a scenario where you see the thing, read the panel and then leave feeling like \[you\] “got” it. Art resists a simple reading.

In 2015, Patricia Corcoran and I had a display in the American Museum of Natural History at the Smithsonian in Washington D.C., in a section of the museum called “Q?rius.” We had the samples on a table, along with other information, images and data about plastics pollution. Our audience was mostly kids and their parents. What struck me in that context was how ready the kids were to deal with something real. Often the parents were not, shuffl 湻\*怀롰怀弁敭?翾 羍 湻åing their kids along saying things like, “That’s why we recycle!,” which is a way of shutting down the conversation pretty quickly. Meanwhile, kids kept wandering back with more questions. I was at a plastics pollution youth summit in Long Beach in February and none of the youth there would tell you that recycling is a solution to plastics pollution. They were way more invested and informed: “Refuse and reuse and lobby government” was their call to action.

I hope the plastiglomerates’ liminality acts as evidence that environmental harm doesn’t stop at a geopolitical border. That a fishing tag from Canada could end up on a beach in Hawaii because of ocean currents; or, as I learned from artist Gautam Garoo, plastic motherboards sent from a company in Canada to a company in India to be separated from their salvageable metals doesn’t absolve Canada when that melted plastic (and its toxins) ends up in the water. A scientist at \[the\] Smithsonian, Odile Madden, told us that she was often battling misconceptions from Americans about other countries’ role in climate change. She found people were quick to blame countries like China and India for pollution without considering their own nation’s driving role and complicity in the problem.

There’s been so much useful writing about the dysfunction of nature/culture binaries and the power structures they reinforce – it’s been very helpful to me in thinking through these objects.[^2] The idea that nature exists outside of humans – that it is there to be controlled or used by humans – is an idea central to modernity that is deeply damaging and thus being challenged on many fronts.

In terms of how liminality intersects with dialogues about climate change and ecological crisis, I think there is evidence everywhere for how climate change work requires us to think outside of established categories: Scott Pruitt as head of the EPA \[Environmental Protection Agency\]; Justin Trudeau’s approval of more pipelines; government muzzling of scientists; Trump’s grotesque glee in his own power to reinstate the Dakota Access Pipeline. These events clearly illustrate that this is a complex crisis that involves extreme and structurally biased imbalances of capital and power. Because of this, we need to start talking, in an accessible way, about the nature of knowledge, including ethics, borders, territories, science, economics, politics, education, ethics, race, gender and colonialism.

As an artist, I’m on the lookout for objects and materials that embody these entanglements.

**WC**: The aestheticization of anthropocentric interventions in the land, such as photos of melting sea ice and images of open pit mines, have been used to represent the actual, tangible realities of ecological crisis. What kind of social and political possibilities do you think the aestheticization of plastic pollution and climate change opens up?

**KJ**: This is a very important question for artists to be asking themselves. It’s fraught, but also full of possibilities. I think artists need to be careful and specific about how they put objects out into the world. It’s been very productive for me to learn the science behind the geology. The deeper I get into this research, the more I realize how much misinformed cultural production is out there, and how that can be unproductive or even damaging. I feel like the stakes have never been higher and it is my responsibility to inform myself as extensively as I can. As an artist, I’m not beholden to the facts in the same way a scientist is, which is a relief because straight-up illustrations of science rarely make good art. But I do think that I should know the facts in order to make my work.

I think aesthetics can play a very productive role here. I say that based directly on my experience of how people have had a sustained intellectual engagement with a plastiglomerate because they found it visually compelling. Everyone has seen plastic garbage before, but not this other object that stretches their understanding of “rock” and “trash.” I think that that is an intellectually active place. There has been a lot of talk of “charisma” in relation to environmental issues, fully realizing that charismatic objects can buy more time from their audiences. I think this can be productive as long as the artist is informed about the potential risks and pitfalls of aestheticization. This includes being ready to adjust when new problems present themselves. 

[^1]: Y.C. Jang, J. Lee, S. Hong, J.S. Lee, W.J. Shim, and Y.K. Song, 2014\. “Sources of plastic marine debris on beaches of Korea: more from the ocean than the land”, _Ocean Science Journal_ 49 (2), 151–162.
[^2]: See, for example, Bruno Latour’s _We Have Never Been Modern_ (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993).

issue-134-p38-44.pdf

Sculpture

Found a

Collections

Earthworks

In this interview, artist and researcher Kelly Jazvac discusses the findings of her beachcombing excursions in Hawaii -plastic waste bonded with stone and other natural constituents, named “Plastiglomerates”. Jazvac’s found works bring light to the global connectivity of plastics pollution and create dialogues about climate change and the entanglements of nature and culture.

Kelly Jazvac Interviewed by Weiyi Chang

“Florida” is a 2006 Galaxy Grey Mazda MPV minivan. Artist Sheena Hoszko’s brother found the vehicle listed on Kijiji in Mont-Laurier, QC, about a three-hour drive from Montreal. Though already several years old, Florida had exceptional appeal as she had only been driven in winter, but not during the harsh and overly salted seasons of Quebec. Florida spent winters in her namesake state as the vacation vehicle of a snowbird, the name for those who retreat to the south when the cold and harsh weather truly arrives. This colloquial naming after migratory birds remarks on this community’s ability to relocate across borders to more hospitable environs at will and is evidence of privilege not necessity. Hoszko named the van Florida out of awareness of the mobility the vehicle would allow her, as well as an understanding of how objects operate symbolically well beyond their utility. Vital connections between mobility, location, agency and justice play out in Hoszko’s mediating of objects, actions and interventions. Though best known for minimalist sculptural interpretations of carceral spaces within gallery confines, Hoszko is now revealing another stratum of the processes she undertakes to make spaces of incarceration in Canada visible to publics not directly affected by them but fully implicated in their existence. She bought Florida last year and promptly learned to drive, for the first time, in her early thirties. (Each decision in Hoszko’s daily life is directly tied to a larger praxis of art-making and organizing work.) This particular decision was prompted by her project _35+ Prisons in Quebec_, in which she set out to visit all 35 sites of forcible confinement in the province. It was a research tour to document each place and to create an archive of their locations intertwined with her experience of them, which will lead to new works. In _35 + Prisons…_ Hoszko’s visitations speak of just how far and how shockingly near and abundant, the architectural tools of isolation are from her own position. While her iPhone photographs of the sites and her pencilled notations serve as mnemonic devices, it is _frottage_ that lets her know where she has been and will be what she ultimately shares with us. Frottage is the French word for rubbing and an artistic technique named by French Surrealist Max Ernst. It is described as an automatic form of art making, much like automatic writing, wherein the artist or author does not prefigure in the mind what will come to the page but simply unleashes into action their hands and mark-making devices. The resulting inscriptions amplify what was supposedly already there. Hoszko’s tour notes read as poetry, or automatic writing; all signs unsettled to allow for fresh meaning.

> Driving from Percé to Îles-de-la-Madeleine

Tim Hortons Tim Hortons

Stop for gas you didn’t

want to run out 

My skin is clammy from 

the ocean air and

the near mist rear end

Distracted by a fleet of motorcycles

Smoke Smoke

Check itinerary

East Coast beef jerky 

Upon Hoszko’s arrival at each site, she takes a rubbing of the land on which the building sits. Depending on the environment – be it urban core or rural conditions, she must act distinctly. She describes the difference between the behaviour allowed around a minimum security and a “supermax” prison, making clear that their physical control and disciplinary functions exceed their walls. When her minivan arrives in a location not searchable by GPS, the surveillance cameras respond urgently. Hoszko describes faking car trouble more than once. She quickly drops to the ground, places a piece of Strathmore 50lb paper between her and it, and then rakes across the sheet with charcoal, conté or litho crayon with just enough pressure to transmit the surface of the earth to the surface of the medium.

These rubbings move beyond the traditional picturing of prisons as illustrations of their power, with either imposing external architecture or disenfranchised bodies on display, to suggest an important reconsideration of just what we are seeing when we look at sites of incarceration. As filmmaker and geographer Brett Story states, in both her doctoral thesis[^1] and her genre-defying documentary film _The Prison in Twelve Landscapes_, we must understand carceral space as a mental state. Drawing on the work of geographer R.W. Gilmore, Story insists we think of the prison “not as a discrete or exceptional edifice over there, but rather as a set of relationships.”[^2] Hoszko extends this approach as necessary to understanding Canada, a land that is occupied as a colonial state, meaning it is itself refigured as a place of containment and privation for its original inhabitants. In Canada, where Indigenous peoples dominate prison populations, these buildings become monuments, to the colonial methods of displacement of original inhabitants in order to separate them from their lands, and, containers, for a population viewed as surplus within colonial capitalism. The frottages, then, are indexes of those lands now that serve equally as sign and measure. It is a way of picturing a set of relationships that Hoszko wants to make visible. Hoszko is well aware of the tensions between her relatively easy movement between these multiple sites of incarceration, and it’s this part of the situation she wishes to put into high relief. Her spatial practices reveal the multiple and simultaneous conditions of experience, and her artistic methodologies work to literally make _things_ different through her direct handling of materials. The _things_ of her practice are the institutions and their measurements as well their reconstitution as different forms; of fencing, drapery or drawing. This shifts the _things_ from how they have been understood most often. Through displacing and repositioning objects, herself, and us the political potential of the work is put into volley. Hoszko’s methods also make information corporeal, asserting that knowledge as sentient experience or presence is critical to understanding the absence or presence of bodies in contemporary life. Her gestures extend into what scholar David Garneau names the _extra-rational_ activity of artmaking as “a space of difference, even resistance, where people can find refuge from the ideas that otherwise rule them.”[^3] yet Hoszko does so through an almost hyper-rational artistic practice that uses order to disrupt control. When imaging the built carceral environment in her installations, Hoszko works with a strict conceptual rule – her practice “examines sculptural materiality as it relates to institutional power dynamics by mapping geographic and architectural sites on a 1:1 scale.” In her exhibitions _Toronto Immigration Holding Centre (total perimeter: 1164 feet)_ (2015), exhibited at A Space Gallery in Toronto; _Central East Correctional Centre_ (2016) in Artspace Gallery, Peterborough; and _Centre de prévention de l’immigration de Laval / Laval Immigration Holding Centre (Périmètre total: 572 pieds / total perimeter: 572 feet)_ (2014) at Centre Clark in Montreal, rented security fencing equivalent to the perimeter of each site is presented as sculptural form. The fence is thus transformed from a useful method of containment into something somehow more solid, less penetrable and yet also deeply aesthetic. Susan Buck-Morss has articulated that the “original field of aesthetics is not art but reality – corporeal, material nature,” working through the word’s etymological origins in _aisthitikos_ meaning “perceptive by feeling,” and _aisthisis_ or the “sensory experience of perception.”[^4] In 1992, Buck-Morss was arguing for a reinvestment of the capacity for both knowledge and political power in the sensory and even pleasurable experience of aesthetics that has been gaining theoretical traction today, though art is still most often considered inadequate as a political gesture. Hoszko takes up this complexity and refuses to place one outside the other; her work is intra-relational with politics. Entering the exhibition _Centre de prévention de l’immi- gration de Laval / Laval Immigration Holding Centre (Périmètre total: 572 pieds / total perimeter: 572 feet)_, I experience a complex intimacy as the materiality of the work, interlocking metal grid fencing, already occupies most of the space. My body is relegated to the narrow spaces between the temporary architecture Hoszko has assembled into a mass and the gallery wall. If I wish to see the whole thing I must push up against one or the other, which feels violent. I can see through the overlapping grids, painted an institutional green, though often chipped through persistence of use, to reveal their metal cores. It is a density and repetition of that most modernist of forms – the grid – until their presence is almost audible to me as a kind of insistent demand to _not_ be read as logic or content, a kind of contradiction of their exceptional and contained order. It is here that the work becomes hyper-rational as it makes clear the stakes of our engagement; we are ever-negotiating space for our bodies and making active decisions about the methods and distribution of spatial occupation. The grid is analogue to the crosshairs of surveyors’ transit levels and the road system of the Dominion Land Survey, which pinned down the prairies with square mile increments to make clear the locations of parcels of lands, gifts for settlers, defined. Among the artists that Hoszko claims as influences are Mary Miss, Agnes Martin and Eva Hesse, but also Adrian Piper, Martha Rosler and Kate Craig, as she sees her exhibition projects as a form of performance documentation. Hoszko’s performances are her methods of measure. It is difficult to get specific information about the kinds of spaces that become the base material of her exhibition practice. Often, she comes to know their dimensions by transcribing oral histories, or via access-to-information requests, but Hoszko also measures these spaces with her body by walking their perimeters and counting her steps. She then transposes the number of steps she has taken into feet and inches, processing space through her body. The performance is not only her physical effort but also the seeking out of information that describes the material nature and spatial limitations of incarceration. She understands well that data, like space, is not empty, but revealing of its social construction, multiple histories and ethical positioning. I’m reminded of Karen Barad’s statements on measurement:

> (m)easurements are agential practices, which are not simply revelatory but performative: they help constitute and are a constitutive part of what is being measured. In other words, measurements are intra-actions (not interactions): the agencies of observation are inseparable from that which is observed. Measurements are world-making: matter and meaning do not pre-exist, but rather are co-constituted via measurement intra-actions.”[^5]

Hoszko’s objects become documents of the performance of individuation that is necessary to maintain distinctions between the inside and outside, to forming an “us” and a “them.” She brings these proxemics into full physical tension with her transposition of sites of containment into objects of display. Hoszko also uses her practice to point to the power inherent within the Western art historical canon. With its conceptual foundation, Hoszko’s practice evokes, at least on the surface, the practices of Robert Smithson, Donald Judd, Mel Bochner, Robert Barry and, particularly, Dan Graham. She works from the lineage of Conceptual and Minimalist practices yet retrieves the political within them through her own systems of acknowledgments and reciprocities. Her artistic labour often assumes the role of project manager: coordinating permits, arranging the delivery of ready-made components and their rental along with the hiring of professionals licensed to perform the work associated with heavy lifting and impermanent installations in galleries or public spaces. In his essay, “Conceptual Art _1962-1969_: From the Aesthetic of Administration to the Critique of Institutions,”[^6] art historian Benjamin Buchloh associates the bureaucratic bias within Conceptual Art practices as an aesthetic of indifference and that the systems assumed for production for most of the works is aleatory – these are simply chance operations. This suggestion sutures this work backwards to Duchamp and also made a comfortable bed for John Cage. While Buchloh identifies the intense and quotational relationships between many of the artists he names, he fails to observe how affective and social this patrilineal structure was. This is both a method of de-politicizing artists’ practices and a deep disservice to the male artists he has named. Minimalism and Conceptualism began in an effort to refute commodification and to evade the production of objects as both congealed and concealed labour. When Buchloh fails to mention the women working contemporaneously within his list, it is an active erasure of the role feminism and its analysis of the role labour and biopower played in the development of contemporary art practices. In curator and writer Lucy Lippard’s much earlier description of certain Conceptual artists’ practice as akin to office work,[^7] her discussion was one of the economies of care, pointing to the labours most women were allowed and identified with as being themselves forms of expression. Hoszko extends that line as she takes up the occupation of space made possible through organization, personal contacts and maintenance, as well as exceptional observation and the subsequent amplification of minutia. In a recent interview with Leah Sandals for _Canadian Art_, Hoszko articulated clearly her own position; “As a sculptor, I work with space, and prison and incarceration is almost the endpoint of power and space,” with endpoint defined as “the final stage of a period or process, the end of a line or interval, the point of which a reaction is complete.”[^8] Carceral spaces are meant to be closures, voids and erasures but Hoszko’s aesthetic engagement makes matter of them that demands engagement. I echo curator cheyanne turions in her belief that, “…aesthetic forms make important contributions to the broad project of decolonization, a belief that hinges on the conviction that exhibition spaces are civic spaces, and that artistic and curatorial practices are political gestures.”[^9] Hoszko further activates public space with information sheets and flyers that bring her long-term participation in anti-prison struggles into the gallery as not only a site of contemplation but also one with potential for action. Her connection to incarceration is personal – she has family members who have been incarcerated and others who work within the carceral system. With this proximity to the structures and effects of such systems, she shows us how reality is produced; the spaces she creates are actual, experienced, lived, as well as being deeply unsettling. In fact, they are uncanny. Hoszko’s sculptures point to the unnatural and vampiric structures of settler colonialism where land is the object of plunder. If one views the land as a subject there can be no exchange nor method of trade that will ever be just. Hoszko’s ratio of 1:1, then, is more about the methods of measure as themselves indicative of power and how the spaces put through such calculations can never be reconstituted as the same thing. So, when you say _Cowansville_ it can be both “farmland” and a “perimeter patrol.” Even Hoszko’s notations are spatializations seeking equivalency; it is their failure to resolve that she wants us to see.

> Cowansville 

> Farmland   
> Subdivisions and homes   
> corn fields   
> residential   
> road offshoots to the left and the right   
> a path amongst crops   
> SUVs zoom by   
> Fire in the fields 

> Three fires in the fields   
> Controlled burns by farmers 

> well  
> manicured  
> lawn  
> not sure for who  
> training centre   
> blue sky   
> the length of   
> a perimeter patrol 

[^1]: Brett Story, “Dis-placing the Prison: Carceral Space, Disposable Life, and Urban Struggle in Neoliberal America” (PhD diss., University of Toronto, 2015).
[^2]: Ibid., 20\. Story is following the work of prison and race scholar, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Director of the Center for Place, Culture, and Politics and professor of geography in Earth and Environmental Sciences at City University of New York.
[^3]: David Garneau, “Extra-Rational Aesthetic Action and Cultural Decolonization,” _FUSE Magazine_, vol. 36 no. 4 (2013): 15-16\. (I am grateful to cheyanne turions for pointing me to this text.)
[^4]: Susan Buck-Morss, “Aesthetics and Anaesthetics: Walter Benjamin’s Artwork Essay Reconsidered”. _October_, Vol. 62 (Autumn, 1992), 3-41.
[^5]: Karen Barad, “What Is the Measure of Nothingness? Infinity, Virtuality, Justice”, 100 Notes, 100 Thoughts: _Documenta Series 099_.
[^6]: Benjamin Buchloh, “Conceptual Art 1962-1969: From the Aesthetic  
of Administration to the Critique of Institutions”, _October_, Vol. 55 (Winter, 1990), 105-143.
[^7]: Lucy R. Lippard, _Six years: the dematerialization of the art object from 1966 to 1972_ (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997).
[^8]: Leah Sandals, “Building Prisons  
In Order to Destroy Them,” _Canadian Art Online_, January 25, 2017, http:// canadianart.ca/features/sheena-hoszko/; accessed February 25, 2017
[^9]: cheyanne turions, “Decolonization, Reconciliation, and the Extra-Rational Potential of the Arts”, http://artsevery where.ca/2016/03/23/1218/

issue-134-p44-52.pdf

Conceptual

Infrastructure

Minimalism

This article discusses Sheena Hoszko’s creative practice, documenting her recent project “35+ Prisons in Quebec” in which Hoszko visits all 35 detention centres in the province and archives her experiences through poetics, frottage, and note taking. Hoszko’s relationship with minimalism and conceptualism is discussed, as well as the nuances of psychogeography in her practice.

Florida is Galaxy Grey

Editor

Designer

Publisher

Artist Project

**Olivia Whetung** is anishinaabekwe and a member of Curve Lake First Nation. She completed her BFA with a minor in anishinaabemowin at Algoma University in 2013, and her MFA at the University of British Columbia in 2016\. Whetung works in various media, including beadwork, printmaking and digital media. Her work explores acts of/active native presence, as well as the challenges of working with/in/through Indigenous languages in an art world dominated by the English language. Her work is informed in part by her experiences as an anishinaabemowin learner. Whetung is from the area now called the Kawarthas, and presently resides on Chemong Lake.

null

[^1]: See Jonathan Lockyer, _tibewh_ (Peterborough: Artspace, 2017), 1\. This brochure accompanied the exhibition _tibewh_ at Artspace in Peterborough from March 3 to April 22, 2017\. This exhibition presented the entire suite of beaded designs depicting each lock along the Trent–Severn Waterway, Ontario, which is 368 kilometers long and connects Lake Ontario to Georgian Bay. Parts of this waterway are man-made canals while others expanded and altered existing rivers.
[^2]: This information came from a conversation with the artist on March 18, 2017 that was continued through email correspondence with the artist on April 16, 2017\. Olivia Whetung learned the term \_wenji-bimaadiziyaang from this book: Brenda J. Child, _My Grandfather’s Knocking Sticks: Ojibwe Family Life and Labor on the Reservation_ (St. Paul: Minnesota Historical Society Press, 2014), 23.
[^3]: See Lisa Myers, “ozhichige” In _Slip the Snare: UBC Master of Fine Arts Graduate Exhibition 2016_ (Vancouver: Belkin Art Gallery, UBC, 2016), 26.
[^4]: James T. Angus, _A Respectable Ditch: A History of the Trent-Severn Waterway, 1833-1920_ (Kingston: McGill University Press, 1988), 5.

Artist

issue-134-p52-58.pdf

Textiles

Whetung’s practice combines traditional material practices, performance, and navigation of language, heritage, and land. In her most recent series, “tibewh”, Whetung created bead-embroidered pieces representing portions of the Trent-Severn Waterway, exploring the alienation of Anisshinaabe history and reassigning significance to colonized waters.

tibewh

Lisa Myers is an independent curator and artist who works as an Assistant Professor in the Faculty of Environmental Studies at York University. She is a member of Beausoleil First Nation.

Olivia Whetung’s art practice asserts a visual vocabulary of place and presence by deriving bead designs from sounds, words, phrases, the built environment and infrastructure. Her earlier work involved weaving intricate designs and large beaded pieces on looms, referencing her community at Curve Lake First Nation as well as her efforts to become ftuent in anishinaabemowin. Performance is also part of Whetung’s practice, and her collaborations with Jeneen Frei Njootli this past year used beads as resonant beings making and responding to sound. Her most recent work uses bead embroidery, where beads are sewn onto a surface material that provides a background and support for the design.

Navigation is something I think of when I talk to Olivia Whetung about her most recent beaded series, _tibewh_. Each bead-embroidered design represents one or two locks from the Trent–Severn Waterway as portrayed in bird’s-eye-view images from Google Maps. Whetung collected the images by entering Parks Canada coordinates for each of the 45 locks.[^1] Therein a strange sense of navigation took place between the coordinates and the experience of a place. More than the abstraction of a site, these maps and coordinates implicate the authority of Parks Canada and the water-way’s designation as a National Historic Site expressed through latitudinal and longitudinal points so alienated from the history of Anishinaabeg people in this area and the emotional geography of the place. Whetung depicts the water using beads with distinct, bottleneck-tapered forms dictated by constructed shorelines where the locks control the level of water. Shorelines tell a story and this story has many different dimensions.

The surface for these beaded pieces is canvas – both a painting surface and the fabric used in making wall tent shelters. On 42 six-inch canvas squares Whetung has carefully tacked and sewn ftowing lines of metallic beads to represent water. _tibewh_ is an anishinaabemowin word used to refer to the shoreline if you are in the water. tibewh as an artwork represents water interrupted, yet also ftowing through each lock of the waterway. The beads are textured and raised from the canvas surface, resulting in a rippling pattern. Much like conning, which means navigating on water by reading the rise of landforms and shorelines, I read the rippled beaded design as land rather than its intended connotation as the water at each lock site. This visual play between land and water resonates for Whetung as she explains to me, and I agree, that land is not separate from water, water is also part of land. To think through this idea, she uses the anishinaabemowin term _wenji-bimaadiziyaang_, which means something close to this idea: from where we get our living or life. Using this term, the artist relates how the land and water is where our life comes from, and that the “struggle for this place is the struggle for our living/our life.”[^2] The transformation of the Kawartha Lakes, the Trent River and the Otonabee Rivers eroded and shifted the use of these waters, changing the viability of cultivating wild rice and other foods. Language also plays an integral part in this work, as place names are not incidental but descriptive. For example, I recall my grandfather explaining to me that the word _Penetanguishene_ (the name of a town in central Ontario) actually describes the shoreline and surrounding land. In English terms, perhaps I can explain this as being a toponym, a term that describes topography. This would infer that as land and shorelines change, so do their names and the relationship people have with those particular places.

As a Mississauga-Anishinaabekwe, and from Curve Lake First Nation, Whetung’s family, community and ancestors faced changing land and water, which also represented violence and challenges for First Nations communities in the face of encroachment and colonial expansion. “From 1886 to 1964, before being named _Curve Lake First Nation_, Whetung’s home community was named _Mud Lake Band #35_ and is/was part of Treaty 20\. Embodying the history of Treaty 20 includes dispossession from land and waterways.”[^3]

In the early 19th century, with no restrictions on government officials engaging in land speculation, those in power chose prime sections of property along the waterway.[^4] Clearly, in the oral and written history of the Peterborough area, the Trent Canal (later known as the Trent–Severn Waterway) meant that eventual navigation from Lake Ontario to Georgian Bay served colonial settlements and increased the process whereby land became parcelled into alienable private property. As a verb, lock means restricting, concealing, securing; as a noun, a lock’s function is also its name. Locks in waterways control and regulate the ftow of water to move boat traffic from one water level to another. Highly engineered structures of concrete with huge timber door mechanisms that hold back and control large volumes of water, each lock shifted shorelines and rerouted water ftows, sometimes ftooding areas of land. The once narrow, shallow falls or rapids of the Trent and Otonabee rivers were transformed to accommodate leisure crafts and some commercials shipping. Prior to 1833, when the first lock was established, these waters were already navigable and provided sustenance for Anishinaabe people, but in ways that were not legible through colonial vocabulary and values. In _tibewh_, Whetung continues to assert the presence of Mississauga territory and home. By mapping the water, she reassigns the physical and emotional geography of place.

[^1]: See Jonathan Lockyer, _tibewh_ (Peterborough: Artspace, 2017), 1\. This brochure accompanied the exhibition _tibewh_ at Artspace in Peterborough from March 3 to April 22, 2017\. This exhibition presented the entire suite of beaded designs depicting each lock along the Trent–Severn Waterway, Ontario, which is 368 kilometers long and connects Lake Ontario to Georgian Bay. Parts of this waterway are man-made canals while others expanded and altered existing rivers.
[^2]: This information came from a conversation with the artist on March 18, 2017 that was continued through email correspondence with the artist on April 16, 2017\. Olivia Whetung learned the term \_wenji-bimaadiziyaang from this book: Brenda J. Child, _My Grandfather’s Knocking Sticks: Ojibwe Family Life and Labor on the Reservation_ (St. Paul: Minnesota Historical Society Press, 2014), 23.
[^3]: See Lisa Myers, “ozhichige” In _Slip the Snare: UBC Master of Fine Arts Graduate Exhibition 2016_ (Vancouver: Belkin Art Gallery, UBC, 2016), 26.
[^4]: James T. Angus, _A Respectable Ditch: A History of the Trent-Severn Waterway, 1833-1920_ (Kingston: McGill University Press, 1988), 5.

issue-134-p53-57.pdf

Lisa Myers writes on Whetung’s practice, which combines traditional material practices, performance, and navigation of language, heritage, and land. In her most recent series, “tibewh”, Whetung created bead-embroidered pieces representing portions of the Trent-Severn Waterway, exploring the alienation of Anisshinaabe history and reassigning significance to colonized waters.

Water is land, Land is also water

Review

**Rose Bouthillier** is Curator (Exhibitions) at Remai Modern in Saskatoon. Previously, she was Associate Curator & Publications Manager at MOCA Cleveland.

There’s a thrumming pulse to the Whitney Biennial 2017 – a lucid, bodily insistence. Co-curated by Christopher Y. Lew and Mia Locks, the exhibition skews decidedly younger and more diverse than recent iterations.[^1] Many of the 63 featured artists and collectives have been given substantial amounts of space in the museum’s new building, with the exhibition stretching across two entire floors, the theatre, terraces and interstitial spaces throughout. Individual subjectivity, conflict and community are major threads, all pointing to larger questions about how we know (and create and fail and deny) one another and ourselves. This Biennial was developed during a protracted period of civil unrest and political hysteria, and opened during the first months of a tumultuous and divisive administration. How do you hold up a mirror to a country that has trouble recognizing itself these days? Locks asserts in her catalogue essay that the works on view remind us that we have the capacity “to consider more imaginative ways of being human together.” At times, it feels like more of a _responsibility_.

GCC’s sculptural installation _Local police find fruit with spells_ (2017) is first seen from the street as a curious yellow orb hovering over the city from the museum’s fifth-floor terrace. The work relates to a viral video uploaded by the Sharjah Police, who were called in to neutralize a washed-up melon bearing marks of black magic ritual (outlawed in the United Arab Emirates). With its foreign incantations and sketched body punctured with nails, GCC’s billboard-sized upscale of the object speaks to rising Islamophobia stoked for political gain. It’s also a false front — the side facing the museum is flat and black — in keeping with the collective’s interest in the gaps between what is outwardly presented and inwardly known.

Cauleen Smith’s opulent banners are the first works encountered in the museum’s lobby, making proclamations with resolute but ambiguous text (“Black” – “Stop” – “I cannot be fixed”) paired with blazing motifs of eyes, blood and eight balls. Satin, velvet, sparkly and embellished, they merge protest with regal celebration. Another procession of sorts, Ajay Kurian’s _Childermass_ (2017) leads viewers up the museum’s main staircase with strange, cartoonish figures clinging and dangling from ropes — a giant, puffy white toddler; chrome chameleon; moon-headed and masked adolescents. The installation calls up gym-class rivalry as a metaphor for class warfare; some of these creatures seem to fiendishly thrive on the tumult itself, while others appear resigned, defeated.

Very much of its moment, the Biennial has a strong sense of immediacy, at times laced with notes of claustrophobia. This finds intense expression in Postcommodity’s _A Very Long Line_ (2016), a four-channel video of fences lining the US-Mexico border that was shot from a moving car. Projected on enclosing walls, the piece centres viewers in a dizzying cube of containment. Pope.L aka William Pope.L’s installation Claim (2017) stands as a room apart, covered top to bottom, inside and out, with a gridded array of bologna, the slices push-pinned to the wall, weeping and curling as they cure. Each also has a dollop of paint and a small, blurry black-and-white image of a person on it. The “logic” of the piece is delivered via a framed letter-sized sheet of paper, hung next to an open bottle of Mad Dog 20/20 Habanero Lime-Arita. The 2,755 slices of bologna represent 25 percent of New York’s Jewish population; the portraits, however, are taken of random people who may or may not be Jewish, and the number is off by 2, and several slices have been removed. “When we quantify,” the statement opens, “we point with a wavering finger.” Gridded order gives way to the sticky absurdity of categorizing one another.

In the days and weeks after the Biennial’s opening, Dana Schutz’s _Open Casket_ (2016), an abstracted rendering of lynched African American teenager Emmet Till, became subject to petitions and heated debates on appropriation, exploitation, artistic freedom and censorship. In 1955, photographs of Till’s disfigured body – bravely released to the public by his mother – became a flashpoint in the civil rights movement. There are few images that convey such vulnerability, horror and historical weight, and the painting fitfully articulates its own inadequacy and trespass. I saw the protests before I read about them; a wall of young artists standing in front of the work, engaging visitors in discussion. This obscuring from view felt critical and profound, exposing the painting, and its conditions. It also stressed something about a particular mode of seeing in art galleries, of not really registering other people, a selective blindness allowing for exclusive focus on one’s own experience.

The exhibition’s violent undertones reach fever pitch in Jordan Wolfson’s virtual reality piece, _Real Violence_ (2017). Fast, brutal and terrifying, it drops the viewer in close proximity to a vicious beating (carried out by the artist) on a sidewalk in broad daylight (the victim is an animatronic doll enhanced in post-production). Part of me was expecting to discount the work as a cheap shock, but I couldn’t deny the affect it wrought: the dizziness, gutting sickness, awareness of my own body, vulnerability and reflexes. It burrows into your brain with a sharpness that also disorientates and dulls. It’s no accident that the verdant environs of Asad Raza’s _Root sequence, Mother tongue_ (2017) installation are situated immediately nearby, the warm light and humid air – suffused with customized scents – offering therapeutic comfort. Home to 26 trees of different species, the red-carpeted room is occupied by a cast of caretakers who tend to visitors as well as the trees, and who punctuate the planter boxes with their own personal belongings. There’s an affable sincerity to the room, but it verges on saccharine after Wolfson’s bitter pill. 

The Biennial features a good deal of painting, but much of it gets lost amid the boisterousness. Works by Henry Taylor are exceptions, for their sheer size, and undeniable physicality. Taylor’s towering tableaus include one of Philando Castile that seems to suspend time, to ache for its reversal (when the Biennial closes in June, not even a year will have passed since Castile was fatally shot by a police officer during a traffic stop). Some quieter moments hold their own in the fray, such as Harold Mendez’s poignant array of two and three-dimensional works. These include _Elmina Castle_ (2016), a tightly-cropped photograph of a departure port used in the slave trade, and _American Pictures_ (2016), a stump of wood, pierced by wrought iron and coated with blood-red pigment of cochineal beetles, framed by a metal grate and strewn with carnation petals. Mendez’s works distill fragility, distress, cruelty and endurance into haunting material forms.

While photography and moving images suffuse the exhibition (Oto Gillen’s _New York_ \[2015–ongoing\] and Lyle Ashton Harris’ installation _Once (Now) Again_ \[2017\]) bring personal worlds to life through steady image flows), other forms of digital technology have a lighter presence. Irena Haiduk’s slick, mirrored network tower provides access to a web app hosted on a .YU domain, through which female-identified visitors can join the _Frauenbank_ (2017) cooperative and put money towards the purchase of collectively owned land in the former Yugoslavia. Porpentine Charity Heartscape’s obscene, poetic computer games can be played in private cubicles, treating players to rollicking, hyper-textual mindfucks. Economic unease is highlighted in different ways: in the newest version of their _Debtfair_ project, Occupy Museums charts student loan delinquency, the ArtPrice Global Index and assets managed by BlackRock Inc., in a graph incised into a gallery wall. For _Public Money_ (2017) Cameron Rowland directed the museum to invest $25,000 in a Social Impact Bond, a recent development in government oversight that allows for social good programs like recidivism reduction to be privately invested in, with returns based on presumed public savings. Frances Stark’s paintings, blown up from pages of Ian F. Svenonius’ book _Censorship Now!!_ (2015), drive home home the point that “free” speech is bought and paid for in a capital-driven society. There’s clearly a mounting anxiety towards economic systems and the disparities they create, often no more glaring than in institutions that rely on free artistic labour. In the exhibition catalogue, note is made that the curators insisted, for the first time in the Biennial’s history, that all of the artists be paid – but they are clear to state it amounted to a “symbolic acknowledgement.” Why only this?

On my last day in New York, I returned to the museum to see Puppies Puppies’ _Liberty (Liberté)_ (2017), which the artist aptly describes as “a drag performance and sculpture,” on the eighth floor terrace (outside of scheduled hours on the weekends, the Statue of Liberty costume is sometimes filled by a mannequin). It was an unusually cold and windy day, and locking eyes with the person behind the stoic mask, I thought I sensed desperation (maybe only weariness?). Or perhaps I was projecting, as this moment seemed to say something so clear about all of the contradictions and compromises and aspirations of the Biennial, and the country itself.

[^1]: Lew and Locks also consulted with an advisory team, led by Scott Rothkopf and including Negar Azimi, Gean Moreno, Aily Nash (also co-curator of the film program) and Wendy Yao.

issue-134-p60-63.pdf

This is a review of the 2017 Whitney Biennial, which took place at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York. The exhibition was co-curated by Christopher Y. Lew and Mia Locks and ran from March 17 to June 11 2017.

Whitney Biennial 2017

**Alex Turgeon** is an artist from Canada. His work, research, and teaching centre around how poetry and architecture inform definitions of the queer experience as a built environment.

_Blue_, the last film ever produced by the British filmmaker Derek Jarman, depicts a single blue screen for the duration of one hour and 19 minutes. Soundscapes produced and narrated by Jarman, describing the director’s process of dying from AIDS, are overlaid onto the blue field of the screen. Blue in all dimensions, without horizon, without beginning or end, the colour engulfs the narrator and the viewer in a complete world of mourning. The film thus operates as a death mask, portraying the colour as a spiritual threshold between the transition from life into death by stating that “blue transcends the solemn geography of human limits.”[^1] A colour, as the film proposes, is used here as a tool to see beyond our very human condition, beyond our flesh and bone, into diverse spiritual dimensions.

American artist Paul Thek died of an AIDS\-related illness in 1988\. Ever since, his work has proven to be an art historical enigma. Thek made a name for himself in New York for his _Technological Reliquaries_ (c. 1964–1967), a series of sculptures depicting grotesquely convincing fantastical forms of meat and limbs produced in wax. The fictional flesh was sculpted into forms such as a bloody tiered birthday cake adorned with candles or, in collaboration with Andy Warhol, incorporated inside a Brillo Box. Thek’s work incorporates the macabre of religious iconography, myth and Catholicism, with his early works describing the body as material in the most visceral depiction of our fleshy forms. In response to a visit to the Capuchin Catacombs in Palermo, Italy, he expressed that “it delights me that bodies could be used to decorate a room, like flowers.”[^2] These bodies on display were the most realistic depictions of death; corpses venerated as objects, tokens or talismans with which to decorate the space of worship, operating as devices for communication into the afterlife.

The dual exhibitions of Jason Dodge and Paul Thek at the Schinkel Pavillon in Berlin mark the end of a series of exhibitions curated by Nina Pohl titled _Porzellan und Vulkan_ (“Porcelain and Volcano”) focusing on the subject of artistic collaboration. The exhibition series culminates at the juncture between Thek and Dodge, their practices brought together to examine “ideas of authorship, artistic subject and division of labour.”[^3] The exhibitions of their work take the form of two parallel worlds composed one on top of the other. The Schinkel Pavillon is, most recently, made of up two octagonal exhibitions spaces that maintain the building’s former GDR grandeur. The upstairs exhibition space is nearly 360 degrees of floor-to-ceiling windows that look out onto Berlin’s historic city centre, while the basement is windowless and flanked by painted wooden walls and mirrors installed inside the nave of the ceiling. A church and crypt in tandem for art’s reverence, eloquently constructed with Jason Dodge’s unnamed installation occupying the upstairs gallery and Thek’s works resting in the basement, operating as hieroglyphs inside of a tomb.

The aura of blue is sewn like a thread through the exhibition _Paul Thek Newspaper Drawings / Little Paintings_. Upon entry into the lower exhibition space, we are confronted with a panorama of blue seascapes _Untitled_ (Island series) from 1969\. Five gouache and ink paintings on newspaper hang in a row, the horizon line extending across the series at the point where the blue of the sea meets the blue of the sky. The panorama sets the constellation of the other works on exhibit awash in a blue disposition. The series depicts a lone island in the distance, a sequence of renderings describing a fleeting narrative through which the island reveals itself on the horizon, only to have it illustrated as falling further out of reach– a melancholic mirage, much like a phantom, forever alluding commitment and evading evidence. In her book _Bluets_, Maggie Nelson asks, “is to be in love with blue then to be in love with disturbance? \[…\] And what kind of madness is it anyway, to be in love with something constitutionally incapable of loving you back?”[^4] How can the dead, much like a colour, be used to render an intention? What agency do they have in collaboration? Blue only communicates in one direction; blue may allude, but never puts out. 

The upper gallery exhibits a site-specific installation by Jason Dodge made of found objects occupying the airy, classical architecture of the Pavillon. The work has no title, but is described as an ongoing organic response to the atmosphere and architecture where these artistic interventions take place. A cosmology of esoteric craftsmanship, each new and used piece of detritus is placed with pious intuition. Dodge’s intervention operates a codec of potential meaning for which the viewer, or practitioner, may define: three upright vacuum cleaners divide the space between seemingly coherent and seemingly bedraggled objects and debris; an amethyst cluster in place of the bag for a vacuum cleaner suggests a cleansing of energy, a tool employed in some sort of séance that has taken place here. An assemblage used to expunge the space of its past or to suck the spirits of the dead from distant, more abstract dimensions, back into this one.

The combination of these two artists speaks to each other’s sense of devotion, to melancholy and to mysticism. During the final stage of Dodge’s exhibition, the installation was moved downstairs to the lower gallery, making space for a reading by CAConrad, a writer with whom Dodge has worked previously as an artist and publisher. Reiterated into the basement space, the objects mirrored their former constellation upstairs, the tomb now activated by spiritual offerings for the afterlife. To describe a form of collaboration describes an equalizing consent of both parts, both intentions with which to draw upon. In the space of defining collaboration with the dead, there is only one side to the story, one perspective on how to navigate the detritus of the deceased: to be strung around the room like decorations, becoming objects for the use in someone else’s ritual of definition.

issue-134-p62-64.pdf

This is a review of the dual exhibitions of Jason Dodge and Paul Thek, both of which took place at the Schinkel Pavillon in Berlin, from February 4 to March 5, 2017.

Jason Dodge and Paul Thek

presence implicates that 

absence is channelling 

the ephemeral 

_all our days are full of breath: a record of momentum_ was an exhibition of performance-installations at the Justina M. Barnicke Gallery curated by Jenn Goodwin in collaboration with artists Jessica Karuhanga and Brandy Leary. Pairing a visual and dance artist, the evolving exhibition hosted and unseated the temporary togetherness of the performing and witnessing bodies through a refracting query of what is traced/traceable in the tasks of living and processing embodiment. Tapping into the etymological origins of curating (_curatus_ Latin, “caring for” or “curing”), Goodwin chose to work with artists whose sculptural/choreographic art practices varyingly position the body as a site for creating knowledge and surfacing history from the place of being a living, breathing trans-temporal archive. In doing so, the exhibition importantly reified discourse about the marginalized “object” of dance-performance and the “othered” body as a critical site for the transmission of knowledge through form, movement, presence and gesture. 

Skipping the shorter performances at the opening reception, I arrived on March 25 to bear witness to the first of a rotating series of three-hour simultaneous live activations in each of Karuhanga and Leary’s porously sonic and sculptural spaces.

Mafa Makhubalo, a Toronto-based South African photographer and dance artist Leary previously spotlighted at the launch of _Contemporaneity_ (“a multidisciplinary series Leary curates that seeks to re-centre understandings of the contemporary away from European or white American assumptions”) sat, paced, gumboot-danced and spoke in his native tongue from within an installation composed of 578 metal bells imported from Kerala, Gujarat and Rajasthan provinces in India. Suspended in mid-air, and intoning sounds reminiscent of the vibration of “Om,” the installation sculpturally dimensioned positive and negative space, sonically and visually presencing the architecture of an imaginary temple. A ghostly score by Nick Storring, incorporating a subtle soundscape remixing recordings of all five solos that are part of Leary’s _Ephemeral Artifacts_, added a seemingly randomized delay effect to the gumboot stomping. In this context, as I witnessed opaquely evident embodied investigations, I came into an awareness of my own thinking: of the presenting cage of the body as “layered artifact” (of not only human cultural and historical output but scientific investigation); of the loud performative Black body as an object for display/containment and the English/ unilingual-centric boredom and impatience with things it can’t understand. In midst of this, Mafa suddenly made eye contact with someone who has just entered. His warm greeting and humourous verbal engagement (in English) opened my mental gaze from passive viewer into that of a welcomed guest. 

Curious about the sense of the liveness in the solos of _Ephemeral Artifacts_, I returned a few days later for the activations of Travis Knights, a charismatic tap dancer who engaged in a speaking practice (while vacillating between tap dancing and standing), that included reminiscing and entertaining us about his embarrassing and redeeming teenage encounter with American tap idol Gregory Hines on a film set. Surmising that he had arrived at a point of active stillness and de-theatricalization, I passed him my iPhone and watched him privately enjoy the video of dance clips from TV series _Will and Grace_ (including cameos by an older Gregory Hines). Witnessing bodies waited behind lines of private curiosity. An intimate (but public) disclosure transpires between Travis and I after I speak of the death of a dear friend’s sister who passed that morning, someone who had fought and lived with cancer and who I openly honoured for choosing the path of doctor-assisted dying. In return, Travis spoke about the love for his mother who continues to battle illness. It is an unexpected moment for both of us – shared and momentary intimacy between strangers. I am grateful for the connection and for the porous structure that managed to hold these unplanned but linking threads of interaction. In hindsight, this social experience also left me yearning for the space between the artifact and the container for artifacts such as a gallery or Hindu temple, a place where the arts, economy and community can intermingle and where the secular and the sacred do not have a dividing line. 

Recentring power and community within the ethos of artistic collaboration, healing and collective embodiment forms bridges between Leary’s _Ephemeral Artifacts_ and Karuhanga’s _through a brass channel_. 

Jessica Karuhanga’s live art practice synthesized and aestheticized the performative image as a repositioning of tender vulnerability and resilience as acts of time-folding spiritual resistance. She and her collaborators sculpted time and space through the induction of simple rituals and slowly moving bodies. 

In reference to the West African Griots that recall and recount a family’s history through song, poetry and storytelling (serving as a living archive of a people’s history), _through a brass channel_’s performance rituals and shifting multivalent installation employed contemporary form to house contemporary content. The “sculpted breathing space,” performances and installations evoked both a marked symbolic sensibility as well as a zigzagging geo-logic of millennial Afro-Diasporic alterity. 

“\_…perceiving directly acts upon the present, but with one foot firmly planted in the future. Experience, on the other hand, does the contrary: you are in the present, but with one foot in the past\_” – Eduardo Chillida 

Referencing Octavia Butler’s novel _Kindred_ and the installation “\_Untitled (Night Train)\_” by David Hammons, a rope and coal installation visibly linked to the main installation: a projected cluster of self-affirming YouTube videos of diverse Afro-Diasporic women projected onto hanging cloth “sails,” evocative of cloth brought as goods to West Africa in trade for slaves. The installation created a techno-portal “black hole,” ritually contained by a ring of salt, in the centre of the East Gallery. 

In tandem with a sound installation that documented diverse Black voices speaking to yearning for escape through memory or fantasy, I read this as a spatialized inference to the construction of virtual identity, arguably prefigured upon a “master/slave” relationship, as a contemporary form of the Middle Passage. 

Taking a page from Martine Syms’ _Afrofuturist Manifesto_, Karuhanga cumulatively proposed time- travel as separable from nostalgia. In one spellbinding evening, she jointly improvised with Caribbean- Canadian writer-activist M. NourbeSe Phillip to presence the transgenerational colonial archive. Through an amplifying, echoing and embodying of words from Phillip’s book _Zong!_, they uncovered the fluidity of what Katherine McKittrick names as the “past/ present, archives/fiction, theory/everyday” as a way of corporeally accessing Black resilience. 

Examining how live performance predicates both presence and absence of the body, Goodwin alludes to a quickening conversation with Francisco-Fernando Granados by citing “how performance comes off the body.” By setting the performing and palimpsestic body as a respective filter for questions of mundane perception and intellection, both Leary and Karuhanga propose that in tracing the ephemeral, choreographing the time-body is as important as performative liveness, maybe even more important. Like breath, the transmuting body is dense and rarified with knowing and unknowing. Experiencing time is not what is left of the work, it’s the work itself. 

issue-134-p64-66.pdf

This is a review of “all our days are full of breath: a record of momentum” which was an exhibition of performance-installations curated by Jenn Goodwin in collaboration with artists Jessica Karuhanga and Brandy Leary. The exhibition took place at Justina M. Barnicke Gallery in Toronto, and ran from March 24 to April 8, 2017.

all our days are full of breath: a record of momentum

Genevieve Flavelle is an independent curator, writer and PhD student in the Department of Art History & Art Conservation at Queen’s University.

If you are a settler on this land, as I am, you may not have had to consider the ways in which you personally constitute and perform Canadian sovereignty. Indigenous artists however, often contend with the violent erasure of Indigenous history and culture upon which Canada’s sovereignty is founded. Focusing on performative “acts,” _Sovereign Acts II_ at Concordia University’s Leonard & Bina Ellen Art Gallery deals with the legacy of colonial representations of Indigenous peoples on Turtle Island through the work of seven contemporary artists.

_Sovereign Acts II_ is a revisiting by curator Wanda Nanibush of her 2012 exhibition _Sovereign Acts_ at the University of Toronto’s Justina M. Barnicke Gallery. Opening this iteration of the exhibition is Rebecca Belmore’s _In a Wilderness_ (2012). This three-channel video installation begins with a woman struggling in a pile of leaves in the woods, her hands bound and her feet bare. In the second frame, a person stands facing a tall manicured hedge, a patterned blanket draped over their head and body. In the third frame, someone offscreen is wielding a leaf blower in what looks to be the same environment as depicted in the first video, covering up the evidence of struggle in a seemingly benign clearing. The work conjures the many missing and murdered Indigenous women whose disappearances have failed to be investigated in Canada – a subject to which Belmore returns repeatedly in her work, as little progress is being made in addressing the crisis. In the accompanying wall text, Belmore recounts her memory of reading the story of a Mi’kmaq hunter who was made by French colonizers to perform hunting a deer for the French court, an act he completed with the addition of “easing himself” before the audience. Belmore pays tribute to this defiantly defecating Mi’kmaq man as “one of the first performance artists of the Americas to work internationally.”

In the adjoining room, a small television monitor plays a grainy 20-second loop of Sioux performers dancing an approximation of the Ghost Dance. Captured on film in 1894 by Thomas Edison, the moving snapshot depicts a version of the dance modified for the colonial audiences of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show. At the time, the Sioux performers were outlawed from practising cultural dances, songs and ceremonies in their own communities. However, the demand for stereotyped performance by colonial audiences was so great that these men, imprisoned after the Battle of Wounded Knee, were released on the condition that they join the road show. Here, the capitulation to perform for demanding and deathly colonial audiences is an act of survival that can be read against the grain as an act of resistance.

James Luna, considered the godfather of Indigenous performance art, has for decades interrogated the ways in which museums depict Indigenous cultures and bodies as of the past, even when they are living. Luna has made several works that attempt to inhabit and give voice to the spirit of Ishi, a Yahi man who walked into a northern California town in 1911 and was promptly proclaimed to be the last of his tribe and given a home in the Museum of Anthropology on the University of California Berkeley’s campus. In _Ishi Speaks_ (2011), Luna performs Ishi in a series of portraits that imagine what he might have said or done, acts of protest unrecorded by his observers. Mimicking the posture and facial expression of a portrait of Ishi taken by the museum, Luna speaks back to the viewer with a knee-length t-shirt emphatically proclaiming “FUCK YoU.”

Turning the exhibition’s corner, all attention is commanded by the gazes of four larger-than-life femmes. The subjects’ tattooed bodies are visible from the chest up, yet their faces are almost entirely concealed by meticulously beaded black fetish masks. The striking photographs and masks beaded with labrys and knife motifs are by two-spirit artist Dayna Danger. Recalling Catherine Opie’s lush early portraits of unapologetically queer subjects, the work is insistent in its overt expression of sexuality, identity and kink culture. The inclusion of Danger in this second iteration of the exhibition also opens Nanibush’s curatorial premise to an expanded consideration of performativity and a promising generation of emerging Indigenous artists. The work’s placement alongside Adrian Stimson’s campy performances – as Wild West alter ego Buffalo Boy in _Buffalo Boy’s Wild West Peep Show_ (2007) and a fishnet-clad, Bible-wielding residential school priest in _Onwards and Upwards_ (2005) – suggests a strong intergenerational conversation. Creating visibly queer works for decades, Stimson continues to provoke our understanding of settler colonialism as the historical and institutional root of heteronormative binary sex/gender systems.

Lori Blondeau collaborates with Stimson in revisiting the forced performances of the Sioux dancers in Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show, through the gay spectacle of _Putting the Wild back into the West_ (2004–2010). Reinserting Indigenous women into the fabled Wild West and grand narrative of Western history, Blondeau transforms herself into “Indian cowgirl” Belle Sauvage. Buffalo Boy and Belle Sauvage invite would-be spectators to join them in a romp through a culture-appropriating, colonial fantasy exploiting, drag-favouring tickle trunk. The series of black-and- white studio portraits from various public performances of _Putting the Wild back into the West_ illustrate the artists’ career-length investigations of colonial representations of Indigenous identity using humour and camp as strategies of subversion. The photos hang counter to painter Robert Houle’s series of solemnly rendered shamans. Houle’s distinctive visual style has long been challenging the erasure of living Indigenous artists. The inclusion of Houle’s work is not thematically obvious but illustrates Nanibush’s wide-reaching consideration of what constitutes performative acts.

There is a difference in tone between many of the works and some have been placed in direct contrast to each other, seemingly to provoke purposeful tension between their different strategies of representation. Additionally, the works in the exhibition are situated outside of the usual parameters of performance art and its various forms of documentation, encompassing an expansive scale of gestures that examine the role of performativity in constituting culture and identity. Sovereignty in this exhibition does not look like crest-adorned documents and high-flying flags, nor does it look like a return to pre-contact “authenticity.” Instead, the exhibition carves out space to explore what acting through self-determined agency can look like.

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This is a review of “Sovereign Acts II”, an exhibition featuring work by Rebecca Belmore, Lori Blondeau, Dayna Danger, Robert Houle, James Luna, Shelley Niro, Adrian Stomson, and Jeff Thomas. It took place at Concordia University’s Leonard & Ellen Bina Art Gallery in Montreal, and ran from January 21 to April 1, 2017.

Sovereign Acts II: Rebecca Belmore, Lori Blondeau, Dayna Danger, Robert Houle, James Luna, Shelley Niro, Adrian Stimson, Jeff Thomas

During my weeks in Mexico City, I saw several exhibitions about socio-political conditions and the structures that uphold them. As is my tendency, I looked for indications of what art in the context of its presentation platform is able to achieve. Tercerunquinto is a collective of two Mexican artists, Gabriel Cázares and Rolando Flores, who describe their practice as “institutional critique-driven” and “dedicated to investigative explorations into the dynamics of public and private spaces.” Their work is produced through analysis of and intervention into architecture and sculpture in urban environments and gallery spaces. For their exhibition _Doble fondo (False Bottom)_ at the commercial gallery PROYECTOSMONCLOVA, the artists continued their reflection on social and political commentary found painted onto public spaces in Mexico, with significant attention given to “graffiti” that responds to the disappearance of 43 Mexican students in 2014\. 

The 43 students from Ayotzinapa Rural Teachers’ College in Tixtla, Guerrero were part of a group of more than 100 headed to Mexico City to march in a commemoration of the 1968 student massacre. The college is known for leftist politics and student activism. The police violently intercepted the students on their way to the event, leading to the injury and deaths of bystanders and students and, ultimately the disappearance of 43 of the latter. Though the exact motives for the attack remain unclear, implicated in the horror are the former mayor of Iguala– where the students were stopped – his wife and a local drug gang said to have burnt the students’ remains and thrown them in the San Juan river. Corrupt officials and paramilitary gangs motivated by criminal activities such as drug smuggling are also said to have been involved.

Mexicans have marched and rallied in response, upholding the case as emblematic of the systemic impunity and corruption that avert justice and accountability in their country.

Recognizing graffiti as both popular memorial and a form of resistance within the mural tradition of Mexico, Tercerunquinto worked with archaeologists, conservators, anthropologists and archivists. Visiting sites marked by remonstration, the artists sought to develop a method to register the spray-painted texts. Using cloths to remove samples of paint, Tercerunquinto also photo documented and completed a registration form for each piece. Graffiti paint swatched onto cloths was then displayed stretched and grouped by subject matter, including feminism, anarchism, education reform, government critique, Indigenous rights and the missing 43\. An artwork layout key quotes the original texts from which the pigments were taken. Material representation of the original milieus is encapsulated in several boxed sets each containing a paint-stained cloth, photo documentation of the graffiti site and completed registration form. Reminiscent of antiseptic museum storage systems, this ordering subdues the heat of the political fire.

The divide between gallery-hung canvases and city streets feels like a chasm in Mexico City, where galleries have façades and signage as discrete as the doorbell that must be rung to gain entry to the locked spaces. The canvases and documents drew me into Tercerunquinto’s motivation and methodology, but left me with a sense of alienation and blocked urgency.

Thus far the works have been impassive. _Gramática de la tristeza (The grammar of sadness)_ is a single-channel video assembled from photo documentation of graffiti addressing the disappearance of the 43 students. However, architectural settings have been removed, leaving the texts floating against a blank backdrop to the music of Gustav Mahler’s _Kindertotenlieder (Songs on the Death of Children)_. The spare sombre work forefronts the anger, mistrust and accusations levelled at authorities. The elimination of architectural structures reflects the absence of systemic and structural accountability.

Another video, _Graffiti, Representación en grado cer (Graffiti, Degree zero of representation)_ spans three sides of the back gallery. A young man methodically applies his tag, moving from white wall to white wall while discussing his practice. The clean interior setting, together with his unconcerned pace imparts a documentary quality. The tagger, actually an amateur actor enlisted to create and perform the persona, was found through a government cultural program that involves marginalized youth in cultural training. This earlier work was filmed at the Museo de Antioquia in Medellín, Colombia. Producing the video by these means was intended to demonstrate falsity between stereotypes and reality, policy and outcomes. Its placement at the end of the exhibition comes across as an afterthought. Loosely related, the work dangles rather than punctuates the exhibition as a whole.

Throughout the main space is the foundational work that is the exhibition’s namesake. Visitors to the gallery stand upon _Doble fondo_, the concrete floor of the gallery, which has been raised an inch. The false floor buries and conceals and is difficult to distinguish – not unlike the political conditions that prevent justice.

_Doble fondo_ treats graffiti with the care given to murals in Mexico, placing it within the same lineage of political and social critique that effectively conveys complex conditions. Graffiti as a spatially connected and influenced practice endures both disruption and heightening in Tercerunquinto’s translation of the material from written in the street to abstracted in the gallery.

My experience of socio-politically themed exhibitions in Mexico City took place in elite environments. On each occasion, I was hyper-aware of the severing of inside from outside. I rarely encountered another viewer, leading me to wonder who considers themselves invited in. It is only now, approximately 15 years into my professional involvement in visual art, including Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees, institutional positions and independent projects under my belt that I feel assured that someone on the inside will allow me to enter. Though the nature of the barriers at each platform may vary, internationally the interpretation of vital themes expressed through contemporary artworks appears to be reserved for the few.

The public spaces where the imperative-to-broadcast difficult truths manifest in graffiti are within close proximity to the gallery, yet they are held distant by design. Exclusive exhibition spaces circumvent the potency of artwork’s social and political reach and preserve and intensify class divisions. If exhibitions of political art are meant to engage viewers in critical inquiry, the physical and social boundaries set out by the galleries restrict discourse through exclusion.

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This is a review of “Doble fondo (False Bottom)”, an exhibition of works by Mexican artists Gabriel Cázares and Rolando Flores, who comprise the art collective Tercerunquinto. The show was held at the commercial gallery PROYECTOSMONCLOVA in Mexico City from Febrary to March 11, 2017.

Tercerunquinto: Doble fondo (False Bottom)

**Mary MacDonald** is an artist, writer and independent curator currently residing in St. John’s, NL.

As I enter the _Afronautic Research Lab_, two otherworldly beings smile and gesture for me to sit. I am to read with the others. As the lights shift from red to green, we pour over 18th-century ads for slaves from Canadian newspapers and other texts. A voiceover and magnifying glasses help us to enlarge the details: 1734 – a Montreal slave Marie-Joseph Angélique is accused of starting a fire that burns down 46 houses in Montreal; 1791 – Black Loyalists flee Nova Scotia for Sierra Leone out of fear of recapture and sale into slavery. Our guides are descendants of the Dogon, a West African people whose advanced knowledge of the stars has led them to interstellar travel. They have returned to Earth to help us illuminate these hidden histories and challenge the dominant Canadian myth of a country free from slavery.

The _Afronautic Research Lab_ is a performance project by Toronto-based artist Camille Turner and part of the exhibition _New-Found-Lands_ at Eastern Edge Gallery in St. John’s. According to curators Pamela Edmonds and Bushra Junaid, the exhibition explores historical and contemporary connections between Newfoundland and the Caribbean diaspora. Featuring 10 artists in a wide range of media – including video, painting, installation, performance and photography – the exhibition traces 300 years of near-invisible relations between these island cultures. In addition, accompanying the exhibition were artist talks, a keynote presentation by Halifax scholar Dr. Afua Cooper and a community dinner highlighting cross-cultural culinary implications.

The history between Newfoundland and the Caribbean is often summed up in an exchange of two ingredients – salt cod for rum. This simplified narrative of early Newfoundland often includes reference to the world’s colonizers – English, French and Portuguese–fishing vastcod stocks off the Grand Banks. However, little account is made of the black slaves who worked on these ships, their labour contributing to the growth of one of the world’s first transatlantic economies. Furthermore, Newfoundlanders are quick to point out how their fish fed the world yet conveniently forget who they fed, pointing to artist Roxana Farrell’s installation title and the _6oo ooo pounds of cod a week_ (2016) that was sent to feed slave populations. _New-Found-Lands_ reveals many of these details, implicating a more complicated account of settler culture in Newfoundland and, by extension, Canada.

Sandra Brewster’s _Rum_ (2016) alludes to this imperfect practice of cultural memory. Her distressed gel transfer features an image of the Demerara River in Guyana, known as a site of rum production, obscured by a swash of brownish ink that evokes dried blood or perhaps rum itself. Playing with the veracity of the photographic image, first through its material state, then second through its treatment, the artist points to the mutability of memory but also to the bodily repercussions of labour, which turns this water into rum. Similarly, Anique Jordan’s ghostly photograph _Fish Market (San Fernando, Trinidad)_ (2015) exposes the ways in which black women have been able to make a living processing sugarcane and its by-products, menial labour that is both visible and invisible.

The connection between water and labour and the movement of black bodies on the Atlantic both past and present, is evident in many of _New-Found-Lands_ exhibited works. Alison Duke’s multi-screening installation _Reflections of Wata_ (2016) contrasts Sierra Leone, Newfoundland and the Caribbean through a contemporary portrait of Johannes Massaquoi, a medical technician who was recruited to Grand Falls, NL in the 1960s. Here Massaquoi’s own Super 8 clips, along with the artist’s footage, feature the ocean prominently. Duke also provides a physical carafe of water through which to view the installation. This sits beside Wayne Salmon’s _On the Wharf_ (2000), in which children jump in and out of the water as nameless ships wait like sharks in the distance to dock and take away goods. At Salmon’s artist talk, he struck a chord with the Newfoundland audience when he spoke of the historical exploitation of islands, places where ships are constantly coming in and taking and wharves are important sites of people and opportunities leaving in addition to goods. Both Duke and Salmon employ water as a transactional metaphor to describe the circulation of black labour on the Atlantic.

Whereas Tamara Segura’s narrative short film _Song for Cuba_ (2014) portrays a certain lingering nostalgia for a place that was, or an experience that was, Angela Baker’s painting _Ackee and Salt-Fish_ (2016) reminds us that Jamaica’s national dish grew out of necessity and economic slavery to fish merchants. A combination of both islands’ ingredients, the dish can be noted as an example of a now hybrid cultural product rather than an isolated transaction. Anita Singh’s ceramic installation _Isolated Showers_ (2016) also suggests an elemental experience with the land through small ceramic forms that mimic natural shapes and textures of a newfound environment. These works reflect broad experiences among the Caribbean diaspora and how artists are responding to a dislocated yet multi-sited present reality.

It is difficult to name an exhibition in recent memory, presented within the Newfoundland context that so fundamentally shifts the authorship of this context as New-Found-Lands does. Refreshing and honest, Junaid’s curatorial impulse to reconnect with her roots as a child of a Nigerian father and Jamaican mother growing up in Newfoundland is important. Not only does it affirm a common experience as one of few black families in a place predominately white and generally myopic about its orjgins, but the exhibition also challenges this view of history: of here-to-there migration with eyes-open multi-directional movement. Not a historical show but a contemporary working through of ideas past and present, New-Found-Lands succeeds in inscribing the presence and experience of Black persons in Newfoundland by expanding definitions of place and complicating ideas of the periphery and Newfoundland imaginary.

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This is a review of the exhibition “New Found Lands”, which featured 10 artists and a wide range of media including performance and installation and was curated by Pamela Edmonds and Bushra Junaid. The exhibition ran from September 9 to October 18, 2016 at Eastern Edge Gallery in St. John’s, Newfoundland.

New-Found-Lands: Exploring historical and contemporary connections between Newfoundland and the Caribbean diaspora

**D’Arcy Blake** is a Canadian-American writer and artist.

As I approach the entrance to Juan Cisneros Neumann’s first solo exhibition, I am greeted by the swelling sound of a live mariachi band and by the musky smell of dyed fabric and chilies simmering in a crockpot. With cardboard cut-outs of cacti hung from the ceiling, an ad hoc partition made from brightly coloured, striped _sarapes_ (Mexican blankets) draped over a clothesline and a sombrero-clad quintet belting out “Cielito Lindo,” I feel as though I’m stepping into a barrio.

Sprawling across the two main walls is a mural Cisneros Neumann has drawn with handmade crayons fashioned from beeswax and the earthy pigments of crushed green, orange and red chilies. _Third World Problems_ is at once comical and grim: it depicts three cartoonish, robot-driven bulldozers shovelling heaps of ghostly figures towards a pit crudely labelled “THE THIRD WoRLD.” Behind the bulldozers is a space free of the troubles seen on the adjacent wall, and in the safety of that area, atop a small hill, a pair of American and Canadian flags protrude. An arrow points to the hill, naming the whole thing “LA LA LAND.” Another arrow points to the wall that separates the gallery office: “THE RoBoTS ARE CoNTRoLLED FRoM BEHIND THAT WALL.” Among the humanoid figures, which all seem to be directed toward the pit of the “Third World,” are four words: “PRoBLEMS,” “NAFTA,” “MINoRITIES” and “RAPISTS” – buzzwords that have become fodder for American politicians and right-wing nationalists. _Sombrero Galaxy_, a small framed photograph of an actual galaxy nicknamed for its likeness to the traditional Mexican hat, also hangs from the wall, not immediately noticeable amid the gestural strokes of crayon.

I’m struck with sudden cinematic familiarity as I glance toward the door. I am, somehow, looking out the window at an expansive desert. After the momentary confusion, however, it becomes clear that what I’m seeing is another of Cisneros Neumann’s works, _Perpetual Sunset_, a set of posters that bear the image of windows overlooking a vast plain of cacti and mesas – presumably northern Mexico or the American southwest. But the fleeting spatial disembodiment catalyzes an awareness of placelessness that brings my surroundings into focus. Hanging overhead, _True Nopal_ – a colour offset print of a cactus – repudiates what I see through the windows/ posters, revealing the artifice of both the image of the desert outside the fake windows and the fiesta (which has the atmosphere of a backyard party) occurring within the gallery.

The precarious boundaries between inside and outside, and between domestic and public, that Cisneros Neumann’s work probes can be transposed onto concrete, lived conditions in the unstable borderlands to which his work alludes. The desert, cacti, bulldozers and walls constitute material backdrops for the militarized border region between Mexico and the United States. Here, danger and uncertainty confront in various forms, be they poverty, drug wars, vigilante border patrol “agents” or the American border bureaucracy itself. Non-American lives are treated as expendable in these locations – a fact that Cisneros Neumann invokes as an amorphous mass of citizens is bulldozed into the gaping maw of the so-called “Third World.” As the smeared hoard of crayon-drawn people – rendered in the colours of the Mexican flag – swirls around the pit, these bodies seem to transform into the shapes of cacti, inverting distinguishability from human beings to vegetative backdrop. Far from new, however, this dehumanization is fundamental to the project of colonial modernity. As feminist philosopher María Lugones reminds us, the “distinction between human and non-human was imposed on the colonized in the service of Western man.”[^1] Echoing Lugones, Cisneros Neumann’s message is clear: the robots will callously bulldoze masses of dehumanized bodies to exonerate their own tactics of expansion. That these drivers are also non-human is irrelevant – it merely illuminates the necessary disassociation between the settler-colonialists and the objects of their colonization.

Resistance, however, can and must be enacted through measures of resilient optimism. _Ricos Tacos_, another floor-to-ceiling mural that Cisneros Neumann has humourously illustrated in a manner typical of Mexican political cartoons, enacts this resistance. Gouged deep into the paint and drywall, the image depicts a taco vendor refusing service to a wealthy-looking man. The customer – elegantly dressed in a suit, a hat and dress shoes – looks perplexed as he holds up two fingers in a gesture of peace, while the taco vendor, his head encircled by flies, waves the man away, saying, “Sorry, no service.” The defiant and self-determining act of refusal to participate in the businessman’s game also indicates an unwillingness to compromise cultural integrity for financial gain. Although the cartoon playfully conveys its message, it also asserts its permanence, both with its towering stature and the deep divots carved into the wall.

On the opposite wall, however, _Third World Problems_ awaits imminent destruction: halfway through the exhibition’s duration, Cisneros Neumann will return to the gallery periodically to begin destroying the mural, periodically scraping off the crayon and white-washing the wall. And while the erasure of the inchoate accumulation of people circling the drain of the “Third World” draws obvious connections to colonial violence, displacement and destruction, the drawing that wraps around the gallery sits at jarring odds with the saccharine melody coming from the mariachi band. What better way is there to remind us, if only for a moment, that amid fear and injustice we can find strength in collectivity, mutuality and tradition? As the wax drawings are scraped from the wall, and the gouges plastered over, the imprint of what was destroyed will remain, haunting that which will survive.

When I returned several weeks later to see how the work had been altered, the mariachis were gone and the party was over: the space that felt like a once-vibrant town now abandoned – I almost expected a tumbleweed to roll by. Only a thin residue of wax penetrated through the fresh white paint that Cisneros Neumann had begun to apply.

[^1]: María Lugones, “Toward a Decolonial Feminism,” _Hypatia_ 25, no. 4 (2010), 743.

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This is a review of Juan Cisneros Neumann’s first solo exhibition “It Was Something and Then It Became Something Else”, which took place from January 27 to March 11, 2017 at UNIT/PITT Projects in Vancouver.

Juan Cisneros Neumann: It Was Something and Then It Became Something Else

Jon Davies is a Montreal-based curator and writer. He recently received his PhD in Art History from Stanford University.

On the inside back cover of Eric Kostiuk Williams’ _Babybel Wax Bodysuit_ (BWB) comic, we find a portrait of the artist. Against a background of preliminary sketches, he has drawn an iPhone mirror selfie. Kostiuk Williams’ toned torso is awash in polka dots, his perfectly coiffed hair crowning a warped face: cubic protuberances emerge from his forehead, his eyes are cold, black slits and impossibly long fangs emerge from a gaping, walrus-like mouth marked by a cleft lip.

Kostiuk Williams identifies wholeheartedly with the gender-fluid monsters that populate his comics. Through his deliriously protean drawing style, his characters shape-shift, unbounded by physical laws. _BWB_ depicts a buxom, glistening red blob in heels emerging from the primordial mire in a series of sick’ning glamour poses. She is the red wax container of Babybel cheese come to life: one moment embodying a perpetually transforming queer life force; the next, a protective casing in which to hide away from the horrors of the world. She is the id of drawing itself, malleable to suit the needs of queer and trans fantasy – and its motivating force, survival – in the 21st century.

Kostiuk Williams emerged in the early 2010s with his thrilling Hungry Bottom Comics series, collected in 2014\. They chart his transformation from what he’d later call the “depths of closeted adolescent despair” (in Ottawa) into the “slinky, self-possessed fire hazard you see today.” His sissy _Bildungsroman_ begins with his move to Toronto, where he discovers alternative queer histories, cultural touch-stones and community in a city that seems intent on bulldozing its own past. Kostiuk Williams knows the clichés of gay coming- of-age narratives well, and he self-satirizes his emerging consciousness with a disarming emotional sensitivity. He also has a fiercely catty perspective on our current political situation, with _BWB_ kicking off with a ripped, nude Justin Trudeau straddling the houses of parliament as blobs of pipeline oil check their iPhones and Klansmen ride by on giant Trump-roaches.

What is so compelling about Kostiuk Williams’ work is how he exposes his vulnerabilities as well as his anxieties about the artist’s ambiguous position within contemporary capitalism: from the maw of social media “likes” and rapacious gentrification to the pressures on artists and other “creatives” to be productive, entrepreneurial brands (“Expedite your process and the reading experience, with this efficient 9-panel grid!”). Instead, the ethos of his drawing style takes shape as a ferocious deluge of curvaceous lines and impossible figures that break free, bursting out of geometries that are powerless to contain them. Social media manifests as alien tendrils physically connecting people as they reach between the frames, while gossip is figured as an oozy, hydra-headed amphibian baring infinite teeth. As Kostiuk Williams notes in his beautiful homage to early superhero fan message boards, “The Literal Word,” it’s “as if me and web 2.0 were going through puberty at the same time.” In the face of Facebook self-love and confirmation bias, he laments, “I want to see outside myself again.”

Kostiuk Williams’ new opus, _Condo Heartbreak Disco_, leaves behind the directly autobiographical in order to dramatize the potential “end” of a near-future Toronto through the eyes of two divine femme mutants: diva totems Komio and The Willendorf Braid are BFFs who’ve settled down after an eternity spent strutting through time and space. Komio resembles a Pierrot-masked glamazon with a septum piercing, while The Braid is a ball of hair in stilettos modelled after the Venus of Willendorf. (They could have vogued straight out of the notorious Hotnuts dance party that has unleashed otherworldly drag creatures onto Toronto since 2006.) The narrative loosely picks up from the epic “Britney Jean” sci-fi story that closes _BWB_, which sees Britney Spears still dazzling fans in Vegas in 2116 as an “artificial intelligence cyborg” (billed as “the comeback that keeps comin’ back!”). Enslaved and exploited by her programmer-overlords, she comes in contact with an ancient order of women capable of intervening in the fate of the world.

Komio and The Braid live with a Jane Jacobs doppelgänger in a barely affordable apartment in Toronto’s Parkdale neighbourhood, which, as Kostiuk Williams explains in a potted history of the one-time village, was once an affluent, desirable enclave until the Gardiner Expressway cut off the area from the nearby waterfront. It is now the kind of centrally located, working-class neighbourhood ripe for condofication. Our two queens brunch at queer hub The Beaver and face down a legion of yoga moms jogging strollers filled with mewling babies, who resemble saber-toothed Starbucks lattes. Shady Komio earns money in this “‘spensy” town by exacting revenge on aggro bros who victimize women, while The Braid offers “guidance and solace” to tortured souls. Without revealing too much of the wildly imaginative plot, the duo encounter a scheme to raze what is left of Parkdale– and beyond – for hyper-accelerated condo construction, after the developers track an Instagram feed by a “trendy stylist/photographer” (who goes by the name of aphextwink), who has taken to creeping Parkdale’s dispossessed to generate glib comments and algorithmic attention. (Of course the developers brand their blight as “Readymade Art Condos.”) Is Toronto doomed to become a dystopian ghost town of empty glass towers?

Kostiuk Williams’ sinuous, bendy lines and libidinal energy fuse his sci-fi super-diva narrative with the textures of everyday queer life gleaned from years spent observing his adopted home. Throughout, there is a wistful sense of how great the city could be were it to value its underground, subcultural bustle rather than reaching up to the sky.

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This is a review of “Babybel Wax Bodysuit”, (Retrofit Comics (Philadelphia) and Big Planet Comics (Washington, DC) 2016), and “Condo Heartbreak Disco” (Koyama Press (Toronto) 2017), both authored by Eric Kostiuk Williams.

Babybel Wax Bodysuit and Condo Heartbreak Disco by Eric Kostiuk Williams

Esmé Hogeveen is a writer based between Tkaronto/Toronto and Tiohtiá:ke/Montreal.

In Nav Haq’s _RAVE: Rave and Its Influence on Art and Culture_, we get a decentralized portrait of a community of outsider insiders. The term “outsider insiders” may sound incongruous, but, as the reader learns, rave is founded upon myriad internal contradictions. Haq explains: “As a movement, \[rave\] enacted a desire to be autonomous, and possessed many other social facets… curiously embodying both dystopian and utopian impulses simultaneously, part neo-hippy romanticism, part blithe hedonism.”[^1] Encompassing first-person accounts, interviews, essays and extensive documentation of artist projects about rave, the book’s contents are decentralized in the sense of presenting necessarily divergent narratives of a complex and ongoing movement.

Haq, a curator at M HKA[^2] in Antwerp, explores rave’s post-industrial origins and its evolution, including the cross-pollination of rave’s many subgenres. It seems appropriate that a book about rave, especially one taking into account its visual, aural and social implications, would host a variety of perspectives and Haq’s approach as editor reflects his multi-disciplinary experience. Mixing interviews – including with fashion designer Walter van Beirendonck and Renaat Vandepapeliere, owner of the independent Belgian label R&S Records – with profiles of artists whose work responds to rave culture, the reader is offered an overview of rave’s late 1980s and 1990s heyday. Though allusions are made to North American technical and artistic influences, in particular the acid house scenes of Detroit and Chicago, the book’s focus is essentially post-industrial Great Britain and Europe.

The texts, scans and photo documentation that comprise RAVE depict the titular movement as at once intensely inclusive and exclusive. This tension between openness and secrecy is manifest, too, in Haq’s attention to artistic decisions about anonymity and access. Underground events, illegal venues, purposefully inscrutable album covers – lacking either artist or album name – and ever-changing DJ monikers demanded a kind of direct engagement from audience or listener. When asked by Haq about the freedom of using different identities, electronic musician and producer Wolfgang Voigt replies:

When people \[went\] to their local independent record stores, they \[stood\] in front of a wall, full of black records with no names on them. No names and no pop stars behind them that were really well known. And they would come in, put the record on the headphones and decide if they liked it or not, only through listening to the music. They didn’t care where it came from. It could be from the neighbourhood, or from the other side of the world. I found that it was really a great thing in the sense of the freedom of music. And that was one of the reasons that I decided to use different monikers – not to push the person behind it, but just as a project name. And the other thing is that if you fail, if you don’t like this project anymore, or if nobody else likes it, you can stop it the next day.[^3]  
Much of _RAVE_ focuses upon the purported freedom of identity and expression available to rave artists and attendees alike. Haq discusses political resistance and insubordination in 20th-century rave in relation to the default means of mass connection today: the Internet. With reference to Mark Fisher’s essay “Baroque Sunsets,” Haq contextualizes 1980s and 1990s rave culture as a means of critiquing neoliberal accelerationism and its effect on contemporary cultural engagement.“Parallels could also easily be drawn,” Haq contends, “between the suppression of the rave moment and the current attempts to control the cultures of the ‘open’ Internet, often described by net activists as the second enclosure of the commons.”[^4]

As photography and video works engaging individual and crowd identity (such as by Andreas Gursky, Rineke Dijkstra and Mark Leckey) make clear, the factors contributing to working-class dissolution and reactionary cultural output varied widely between physical locations before and after 1989.[^5] Nevertheless, common oppressive features, such as government austerity and the increased policing of activities that could mobilize working-class resistance, contributed to a sense of universal struggle. In post-Soviet regions, youth culture was being negotiated differently than in places like London and Paris, which had been steeping in their own punk and new wave histories and subsequent disenfranchisement. _RAVE_ provides an overview of these distinctions, focusing specifically on rave’s immersive aesthetic.

Many of the featured artist projects reflect efforts to interpret the identity of a generation engaged in rave subcultures: acid house, gabber, hardcore, new beat, break beat, drum and base, jungle, trance, techno, et cetera. Intriguingly, attempts to holistically interpret European rave’s “influence on art and culture” turn out to be largely reliant on the self-identification of its practitioners. The interviews in _RAVE_ provide opportunities for Haq to push pioneers to reflect on their own cross-disciplinary influences.

Within the text, attention is rarely afforded to the ways in which rave failed to be truly universal; the lack of BIPOC and female-identified artists leads the reader to desire more comprehensive histories. The notion, however, that cheap, accessible technology could catalyze the existence of relatively spontaneous and non-hierarchical spaces – what anarcho-theorist Hakim Bey calls “Temporary Autonomous Zones” – is compelling, especially for the contemporary reader who scrolls their iPhone waiting for ever-withheld catharsis. Reflecting upon covert analog and early-digital systems used to circulate artistic content and event information has the potential to inform today’s conversations about offline networks and the protection of DIY spaces and projects.

Rather than spectacle, the reader is led to see rave culture as primarily about gathering, an activity with renewed viability in the present. Refreshingly, Haq doesn’t force the political parallels, but provides the reader with opportunities to draw their own conclusions, sparking, along the way, questions about festival culture, arts tourism and commercialization. The many scans of legal restrictions on rave-related activities in the final “Legislature” chapter reminds us that the freedoms at stake in early rave may have more in common with challenges faced in other arts sectors than one might expect.

[^1]: “Introduction: The Electro-Chemical Black Swan,” _RAVE: Rave and Its Influence on Art and Culture_, ed. Nav Haq (London: Black Dog Publishing, 2016), 12.
[^2]: The Museum of Contemporary Art in Antwerp, Belgium is commonly known as the M HKA or MuHKA. 
[^3]: “Without Borders: Interview with Wolfgang Voigt,” _RAVE_, 172.
[^4]: “Introduction: The Electro-Chemical Black Swan,” _RAVE_, 14.
[^5]: Within rave history, 1989 is often termed “the second summer of love” in reference to the hippie movement of 1969\. “Glossary,” RAVE, 37.

issue-134-p73-74.pdf

This is a review of Nav Haq’s “RAVE: Rave and Its Influence on Art and Culture” (Black Dog Publishing, 2016).

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C Mag

Issue 134