Column

Sophia Larigakis is writer and editor from Vancouver living in Brooklyn, NY.

##### “A new world can’t look like what we’ve seen; it can’t sound like what we’ve heard, and it can’t feel like what we’ve felt before.” — Jeremy Toussaint-Baptiste[^1]

First, there was birdsong. It had always been this loud, this constant, perhaps, but in the newly shuttered city, the trills and chirps of sparrows, blue jays, starlings, cardinals, and others were surreally amplified, and could be heard long after the sun went down. Do birds always sing in the middle of the night, or did the fresh and brief hush of the city confuse their sense of time? Nighttime in those earliest days of the pandemic in New York City was impossibly quiet—no horns blaring, no chatter from stoop barbecues, no refrains streaming out of car windows—save for the birds, who activated the darkness with their call and response.[^2]

In the early ’80s, sound artist Max Neuhaus proposed a project focusing on the sirens of ambulances, police cars, and fire engines. He wanted to replace their standard sonic patterns (divided into the “wail,” the “yelp,” and the “high low” and described by the artist as “a constant psychological irritant”) with a more locatable “set of sounds that people could live comfortably with.”[^3] Although his concerns were primarily practical—to clarify an emergency vehicle’s position in space—he was also deeply invested in rendering the city soundscape more tolerable, that is, more aesthetically pleasing.

Soon after the city shut down, the increasingly constant wails and shrieks of ambulance sirens drowned out the birdsong. Suddenly, illness and the spectre of death hit a different decibel—a new, obliterating earworm, its referent starting at $415 a ride. Sirens, always part of the ambient composition of a city, reflect the violences they signal (mortal, carceral) in their sonic form. They are almost onomatopoeic, designed to annihilate everything else, to send the body into high alert the same way pain does. The desire to render sirens palatable is simultaneously a wish to muffle what their peals tell us about our current conditions, and a diversion from the deeper work of abolishing the state of emergency in which they, and we, are implicated.

Sound waves, unlike water, do not wash over every body equally. They comply to social topographies, forming rivulets and desire lines, hitting dams shored up by those who wish to—who can—stay dry. As it does with every part of our daily lives, capital composes the soundscape of emergency. Although for the most part invisible, sound—like beams of light and bullets and water—is controllable, directable. It is either an index, referring directly to a source, or (and sometimes and) acousmatic, asychronous, artificial— yet highly tangible, like borders and money.

The nightly applause for essential workers started around April or May 2020\. At 7pm in SoHo, Park Slope, Williamsburg, and other wealthy, predominantly white neighbourhoods, people spilled out of windows and onto stoops and clapped, banging wooden spoons against pots and pans for emphasis. It felt good, I’m sure, to be part of a collective sound, to see neighbours’ faces—perhaps for the first time, but certainly for the first time in months. It felt good, surely, to show appreciation, even if the delivery and grocery-store workers, nurses, and other invisibilized labourers were not close enough to hear it. In poorer neighbourhoods, 7pm was marked by the absence of applause, a twin silence for those areas where the ostensibly celebrated workers could not be home to clap for themselves.

On May 25, 2020, a 46-year-old Black man named George Floyd was murdered by Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin.[^4] By May 26, the city was alight in righteous rebellion, and nearly every other metropolis in the United States and beyond followed suit. “All riots,” writes Hannah Black, “emit a world-historical shine, but the George Floyd uprisings were extra radiant because they opened the doors of the world.”[^5] Swept suddenly and violently out of various forms of isolation—out of hiding from a virus we didn’t yet understand, but that we knew preyed on physical intimacy—nothing was more important than being together in the streets. As the spaces between people closed, the air was no longer loaded, poisonous. Instead it buzzed like electricity, crackling with the potential only relationality holds to destroy and to reconstruct a new way of life. Under current conditions, riots are the closest that those with no future can come to touching, to the tune of desire and chaos, a new order.

Flames licking steel skeletons and rubber tires— preferably of cop cars, their glossy blue and white shells blackened with ash—glass panes shattering into glistening webbing, chants and cheers echoing across crowds, the scraping of civilian-fashioned barricades across asphalt: these are the sounds of riot. In his introduction to Fred Moten and Stefano Harney’s _The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study_, Jack Halberstam notes that cacophony “reminds us that our desire for harmony is arbitrary and in another world, harmony would sound incomprehensible.”[^6] That sonic admixture, he continues, “tells us that there is a wild beyond to the structures we inhabit and that inhabit us.”[^7] Cacophony, those jarring and discordant intonations—rendered illegible by our ear’s inability to parse each note from its other—mimics the form of the riot. Just threatening enough to catalyze a lasting shock to the system, cacophony and the riot are defined by inescapable mutual entanglement.

Every night for a week, thousands of phones would erupt in chorus: a curfew. Without breaking step—across the Manhattan and Brooklyn bridges and along Flatbush Avenue and Broadway, roadways that we overtook again and again—we reached into our pockets and bags in unison, devices droning with an alert otherwise reserved for flash floods or hurricanes. Instead of cautioning us about life-threatening weather, the alerts warned about another kind of dark omnipresence. After 8pm, the cops could do whatever they wanted to us, even more so than usual. Just as our lives are and have been structured by town-clock tolls and alarm bells, peals to mark the contours of life and direct movement, the curfew drone reverberated out of the nowhere of structure, godlike. “Fuck your curfew”—a new chorus. Some peeled off, many kept moving.

In 2015, the artist Danny Giles made _Lyric_, an immersive work that references and revolts against Police Observation Devices (PODs), surveillance tools armed with flashing lights installed in the poorest areas of Chicago to record criminalized activities. _Lyric_ invites participants to don headphones and interact with a full-scale POD replica installed in a dark room. The work, a ready-made transmuted into a new setting, transforms the device’s menacing blinking lights into strobes. Beneath it, participants are granted control over their own soundscape, engaging in the collective and life-affirming practice of dancing joy in the face of horrific conditions. 

The Chicago Police Department’s PODs undoubtedly inspired the NYPD‘s high-intensity white floodlights, erected since 2014 outside of housing projects around the city as part of a surveillance strategy termed Omnipresence. The blisteringly bright spotlights are powered by roaring generators—a timbre from another era, reconceived for fascistic tactics in the present. Poor and predominantly Black neighbourhoods are the most heavily policed and surveilled. During last summer’s uprisings, the raging thrum of NYPD helicopters was loudest and unrelenting in those areas, even in the middle of the night, even when the protests were miles away. Sometimes they flew so low that their white-hot spotlights would illuminate my bedroom like lightning, the rotors’ _thwack-thwack-thwack_ so impossibly loud it felt like they must be hovering outside my window. And then there were drones: their buzz accompanying every step of the marches. It was impossible to know if the remote controls were manipulated by cop or comrade fingers, if we were being surveilled or surveilling ourselves. Guerrilla maps were drawn by rebels eavesdropping on the crackle of police radios, informing those on the ground of impending attack.

Developed by the United States military at the turn of the 21st century, Long Range Acoustic Devices (LRADs) are used by the NYPD, among others, as sonic weaponry. LRADs produce high-frequency, ear-splittingly loud sounds which can be directed as precisely as a beam of light. Like tear gas and other military-grade weaponry frequently used on civilians by police departments in the United States, LRADs are purportedly used for “crowd dispersal,” but the reality is much more violent: these “sound canons” can induce vomiting and cause severe and lasting ear damage. They were made, like the police itself, to control and to maim. The anticipation of sound reverberates just as potently as the sound itself. In addition to handing out snacks, water bottles, masks, and hand sanitizer—small acts of care for one another—some protestors started offering earplugs. These small, gummy objects were our only defence against the threat of LRADs, which could be deployed at any time, and therefore, following this panoptic logic, the potential for sonic annihilation—a kind of pre-emptive ringing in our ears—was present at all times. 

Fireworks shattered in the sky and reverberated in our eardrums every night in Brooklyn between Juneteenth and July 4, when they came to a deafening crescendo. They were so constant, so raucous, that conspiracy theories started circulating on Twitter. The FBI, people claimed—or maybe it was the cops— dropped crates of the explosives in front of housing projects, entrapping Black kids with thrilling and illegal ammunition. Some of us preferred to think, with better reason, of the fireworks as a stake in Black joy: a much-needed expression of ruckus and din; a form of controlled chaos; focused light and colour in air polluted by needless death and darkness.

Neuhaus’s project was never realized. It could not have succeeded—beyond the fact that art rarely intervenes tangibly, materially in life—because it is not the city soundscape that is intolerable, it is the conditions of life under racial capitalism. How long can we bear to listen to the sounds of emergency? It cannot, must not, become ambient. Our ears will keep ringing until we resist.

[^1]: Jeremy Toussaint Baptiste, “Jeremy Toussaint Baptiste on Malevich’sBlack Square and the Limits of Visibility,” Artforum, August 31, 2020, www.artforum.com/interviews/jeremy-toussaint-baptiste-on-kazimir-malevich-s-black-square-andthe-limits-of-visibility-83849
[^2]: For more on the call and response and its relation to uprisings, see, for example, Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, _The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study_ (New York: Minor Compositions, 2013), 133–37
[^3]: Max Neuhaus, as quoted in Nancy Princenthal, “The Sounds of Violence: Max Neuhaus’ Siren Project,” _Artforum 20_, no. 9 (May 1982), 70–71, www.artforum.com/print/198205/ the-sounds-of-violencemax-neuhaus-siren-project-35597
[^4]: For more on the uprisings of the summer of 2020, see Tobi Haslett, “Magic Actions,” _n+1_ 40, Summer 2021, www.nplusonemag.com/issue-40/ politics/magic-actions-2/
[^5]: Hannah Black, “Go Outside,” _Artforum_ 59, no. 3, December 2020, www.artforum.com/print/202009/ hannah-black-84376
[^6]: Jack Halberstam, as quoted in Harney and Moten, 7
[^7]: Halberstam in Harney and Moten, 7.

Writer

Maps

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Surveillance

Sound

Dovetailing with Max Neuhaus’s idea from the early 80s to re-engineer the city soundscape, Sophia Larigakis creates an aural topography of pandemic NYC, suggesting the impossibility of such an overhaul in light of the powers that undergird, define, and disseminate each note.

Composition: Cacophony and the Beyond: An Aural Topography

Coco Zhou is a writer and cultural worker living on an estuary where river meets sea, on the unceded territories of xwməθkwəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), and səlilwətaɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) peoples.

On February 18, 2021, a rover named Perseverance landed on Mars. Weeks later, NASA announced they had named the landing site after the late Octavia E. Butler, deeming her name a “perfect fit” for the mission since her protagonists “embody overcoming challenges.”[^1] Known for her contribution to Afrofuturism, Butler persistently addressed themes of racism, climate crisis, and capitalist exploitation of the working class in her books, starting in the ’70s, when science fiction largely shied away from social analysis of power. In the era of performative wokeness, NASA has appropriated Butler’s name to symbolically designate US territory on Mars, under the pretence of objective scientific interests. What can we make of this irony?

Made possible directly through the Cold War, the US space program has always been endowed with a frontier spirit echoing the civilizing missions of early modern colonists. Illustrating this desire for conquest is the iconic footage of Neil Armstrong planting the star-spangled banner into lunar ground against a vast, opaque void. The rovers Perseverance, Curiosity, and Opportunity embody this pioneering attitude in their names and in their mission to fulfil NASA’s objective of “maintaining a continuous scientific presence at Mars”[^2] —harking back to science’s primary role in the historical colonial enterprise as a tool for controlling and commercializing nature.[^3]

Invested in cultivating a broad community for sharing its research, NASA has enlisted Butler’s name presumably to appeal to a public increasingly well informed and sensitive on topics of representation. NASA’s framing of Butler’s Black women protagonists reduces them to some kind of model minority success story, divorcing the Butlerian themes of adaptation and tenacity from their crucial contexts. For Lauren Oya Olamina, heroine of Butler’s _Parable_ series released in the early ’90s, survival is a daily fight in her world, too familiar to many: a fire-ravaged California split into refugee enclaves as fascism and corporate towns take over the US. Refusing to be “God’s victim”[^4] —to remain passive in the face of oppression—Olamina creates a faith called Earthseed and gathers other refugees to achieve what she sees as humanity’s destiny: to “take root among the stars.”[^5]

Given Butler’s environmentalist politics, she was likely envisioning a non-destructive kind of migration— if a literal one at all. In a 1999 interview, the author noted that outer-space settlement, “if we ever manage \[it\],” would require us first to develop “a sustainable way of life.”[^6] Wary of those who might capitalize on the technology of space travel, she emphasized that the “few rich people who can afford to cut themselves off” will do so, choosing to “disregard” the “lives of \[their\] fellow humans.”[^7] Still, as the ultimate test of adaptation, space settlement is a key conceptual device for Olamina as the leader of a religion whose “God is Change.”[^8] With her narratives of alien contact and species transformation, Butler invites us to be enthralled by space science and its implications for humanity—in a way markedly different from NASA’s PR campaigns. Honouring her legacy would mean indulging in this exercise of science fiction, while holding the weight of colonial history and the possibility of a radically different world.

Exemplified by Olamina, Butler’s heroines do not “embody overcoming challenges” before they are brutalized by systemic violence and become wholly altered by it. With _Kindred_ (1979) and the _Patternist_ series (1976–1984), Butler situated contemporary US race and gender relations in the wake of the transatlantic slave trade. More, by filtering this history through sci-fi elements like genetic modification and interspecies mergings, these books also offer a way to look at race as a structural component of how the human species is defined by modern biology. Insofar as science, and particularly space science, strives to produce a universal theory of life, Butler’s engagement with evolutionary tropes suggests that race always factors into such attempts, whether or not explicitly acknowledged. 

As a nationalistic display of technoscientific prowess, NASA’s Mars Exploration Program has a research agenda that, on the surface, seems less politically charged: to evaluate the red planet’s “biological potential”—the likelihood that it has “hosted life.”[^9] Past tense is important, because the hypothesis is based on writings in the sand, so to speak: geological formations and the stories they tell. Scouring the rust-red terrain for traces of evaporated streams and subterranean ice, the rovers and the scientists operating them look for past water as a sign of bygone life. Trained in reading landscape features, physical geographers are essentially historians of the Earth’s surface; their eyes have become indispensable to the Mars missions because, as NASA emphasizes, Mars is a terrestrial planet that changes over time, “like Earth.”[^10] This analogy is what allows Earth scientists to put forth claims about Mars and its habitability.

If geological knowledge about Mars is rooted in the basic assumption that it looks and behaves “like Earth,” astrobiology—the hunt for alien life—similarly relies on what we think we know about earthlings. Science remains inconclusive on how life originated on a largely barren ancient Earth. Some believe the clue lies with extremophiles: semi-ancient microbes that thrive in environments inhospitable to most other life, such as deep-sea hydrothermal vents and sulphuric lakes. These unlikely habitats resemble the harsh conditions of Mars, making extremophiles attractive models or “analogues,” as astrobiologists would say.[^11] In the last two decades, research on extremophiles has already shifted how NASA scientists orient their search for Martian life, from “Follow the Water” to “Seek the Signs of Life,” as their approaches are identified on their website.[^12] While liquid water is still considered a key indicator, scientists now also look for life’s other “telltale signatures” on Mars,[^13] such as fossils or traces of gaseous bioproducts like ozone or methane.[^14] Framed through associations with particular life forms on Earth, astrobiology is limited by science’s assumptions about what constitutes life as a transcendent category, its boundaries redrawn with each so-called discovery. Biology’s definition of life, then, is similar to its past definitions of race: both culturally and historically contingent.

Though she had no say in being inscribed onto NASA’s map, Butler’s appearance on Mars has had the unintended side effect of reminding us about the colonizing impulse of space science and its biases, about the spectral presence of race in science’s universal claims about life and humankind. Butler thought of race as a force to be shaped: to be negotiated continuously rather than deemed irrelevant, as in utopian calls for a “post-racial” future. Imagining how Martian settlement would take place, Butler predicted it would take “microorganisms that \[…\] meld the terrestrial species and the \[Martian\] species” in a symbiotic, mutually transformative manner, evoking the part-animal and cyborg humans in her fictive worlds[^15]—suggesting a deep belief in the possibilities of ethical intersubjective exchange. “The only lasting truth is Change,”[^16] Olamina instructs in the scripture for Earthseed. It is only by committing to taking care of Earth and its peoples that we have a chance at becoming what Butler had hoped for Olamina’s starfaring descendants: humans “who’ve learned to live together, and \[…\] to leave things at least as well-ordered as they found them.”[^17]

[^1]: NASA JPL (@NASAJPL), “The spot where @NASAPersevere began its journey on Mars now bears the name “Octavia E. Butler Landing.” Groundbreaking author @OctaviaEButler is a perfect fit for this mission, as her main characters embody overcoming challenges,” Twitter, March 5, 2021, https://twitter.com/NASAJPL/status/1367939549507153920
[^2]: “About the Program,” Mars Exploration Program, https://mars.nasa.gov/
[^3]: See, for instance, Sria Chatterjee, “The Long Shadow of Colonial Science,” _Noema Magazine_, March 11, 2021.
[^4]: Octavia E. Butler, _Parable of the Sower_ (New York: Grand Central Publishing, 2019), 31.
[^5]: Butler, _Parable of the Sower_, 85.
[^6]: Octavia E. Butler, as quoted in “Imagining a Sustainable Way of Life: An Interview with Octavia Butler,” interview with Susan Palwick, _Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment_ 6, no. 2 (Summer 1999): 152.
[^7]: Butler, “Imagining,” 152.
[^8]: Butler, _Parable of the Sower_, 79.
[^9]: “About the Program,” Mars Exploration Program, https://mars.nasa.gov/
[^10]: Why Mars?” Mars Exploration Program, https://mars.nasa.gov/
[^11]: Stefan Helmreich, “Extraterrestrial Seas,” in _Alien Ocean: Anthropological Voyages in Microbial Seas_ (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009), 255–56.
[^12]: The Red Planet: Astrobiology,” Mars Exploration Program, https://mars.nasa.gov/
[^13]: “The Red Planet.”
[^14]: Helmreich, 264.
[^15]: Butler, “Imagining,” 157.
[^16]: Butler, _Parable of the Sower_, 79.
[^17]: Butler, “Imagining,” 156.

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Science

Technology

Coco Zhou takes up NASA’s choice to name their most recent Mars landing site after Octavia E. Butler as a case study with which to reflect on the politics of naming and “the spectral presence of race in science’s universal claims about life and humankind.” 

One Thing: Octavia E. Butler on Mars

Tarin Dehod was born on unceded Mi’kmaq and Wabanaki Confederacy land originally known as Epekwitk and now lives and works on Treaty 6 Land that encompasses the traditional homeland of numerous First Nations, including Cree, Dene, Plains Cree, Nakota, Saulteaux, and Ojibwe, and the homeland of the Métis Nation. Since 2014, Tarin has served as the Executive Director of AKA, working to understand the role of the artist-run centre in joint ownership with communities, as a space that is created and given meaning through the actions of its users.

A year ago, I was preparing for an AGM, reading through the CRA’s basic guidelines for charities searching for a way to make quorum. We had recently lost half of our board. When I read that a non-profit was only required to maintain a minimum of three directors I realized that we could do something radical that I had been mulling over for some time: turn Saskatoon’s AKA Artist-Run back into a collective without losing our charitable status and our funding. We realized that the outdated policies, the meeting structures based on Robert’s Rules of Order (the most widely used manual of parliamentary procedure in the US), and other inherited ways of conducting governance were things we could overthrow. We needed only to meet a bare minimum of regulations, and could get rid of the rest. Staff and board members all became members of the collective, the latter given an annual honorarium and—at the suggestion of artist and former board member Ruth Cuthand—each BIPOC member would join with a mentor. We dispensed with the procedural vocabulary and processes of board meetings, and instead built group agreements to foster equitable conditions for all collective members to speak, to listen, to honour their own mental and physical needs, and to understand why they show up. The change was so simple, but it freed us.

That’s when I started calling around, asking friends and colleagues how they negotiated the quiet work of organizational governance. I say “quiet” because it seems invisible; most ARCs don’t make much mention of how—or _if_—their boards work. From my experience both with arts and other non-profit boards, the board model is dysfunctional, requiring an immense amount of performative, often immaterial, and uncompensated labour from staff and volunteers. Not to mention that the board is a colonial institutional model—in Canada, the foundation of the charity and non-profit was built by the church (predominantly Catholic), and later, after Confederation, came under government control as a way to systematize operations and provide selective tax exemptions—with the attendant hostility. 

In an effort to make the invisible visible, I met with roughly 20 artist-run staff and board members over the next six months. When I started, I assumed I was asking for a lot—their time, labour, knowledge— so I tried to squish my inquiries into 20 minutes, but by the end, some of the calls were up to two hours. I talked to artist-runs who were building new boards, starting from scratch, but within the same system that many of us have come up in. I learned about shifts to community-centred programming: artists, organizations, and neighbourhoods working together to reveal and engage with their histories and sincere acts of reciprocity. I talked with many about Canadian arts politics, the relevance and responsiveness of national arts service organizations (NASOs), and whether the last round of funding changes at the Canada Council (reducing NASOs to 60 percent of their total revenues) was forcing non–revenue generating organizations to become something else entirely. I talked to groups who have dispensed with staff hierarchies, working with highly involved members and others who, like AKA, continue to cross the T’s and dot the I’s of charitable bureaucracy while merging structural research with artist projects. 

After a few months, I stopped feeling like I was taking something. I understood that we were all trying to figure out what it meant to serve communities while being stripped of the possibilities for exchange and real physical connection that our work relies upon (due to COVID) amid a societal reckoning that had been a long time coming. We didn’t have the time, but needed to think together anyway. A group of us have kept talking: Ada X, AKA, Articule, Artspeak, Common Weal, grunt gallery, Hamilton Artists Inc., Ociciwan, Sâkêwêwak, The New Gallery, Video Pool, along with some independent arts workers. We are in the early stages of seeking funding for research, a national conversation series, and a living virtual resource library on the subject of alternative forms of governance—or ungovernance—and anti-racist practices. In short: a total rethink and decentralization of the commonly accepted institutional model that artist-runs sought to fit within to be legitimate, professional, and funded. 

The formation of the CCA in 1957 set a kind of bar for recognition and public value. In the late ’60s and early ’70s, first- and second-generation artist-led groups like the Professional Native Indian Artists Inc., or the “Indian Group of Seven,” the Society of Canadian Artists of Native Ancestry, Sound Gallery (one of the ARCs that made up Intermedia), Art Metropole, the Shoestring Gallery, and Ironbow collective (later Circle Vision Arts Corporation) took individual radical, grassroots action to establish space, support, and recognition for artists by artists.[^1] In 1976 the Association of National Non-Profit Artists Centres (ANNPAC), the early inspiration for ARCA, a national service organization representing ARC members, was organized with support from the CCA with the aims of enabling national dialogue and setting the course for professionalization. While the CCA and NASOs advocated for artist fees, wages, and money for spaces, professionalization also brought evolving pressure to form policy, regulations, contracts, strategic plans, every institutional step a further push away from truly artist-run beginnings. This had the effect of solidifying previously self-defining groups within a white-supremacist, colonial system—unfit, inaccessible, and for many, unsafe.[^2]

This was AKA’s trajectory; in 1971 five women came together and formed a collective in response to a lack of gathering and exhibition space in Saskatoon and, about 10 years later, incorporated in order to access funding. Now here we are in 2021 with a collective once again, attempting to unlearn institutional and colonial ways of working. Throughout this process, I was introduced to Jordan Baylon, a second-generation PilipinX artist, critic, community worker, and CommunityWise Anti-Racist Organizational Change program associate.[^3] In their seemingly boundless generosity of time and knowledge, they shared the Centre for Community Organizations’ (COCo) powerful document _White Supremacy Culture in Organizations_,[^4] identifying widely tolerated behaviours that might be hard to see, name, or admit to, and antidotes to these behaviours. “Organizational culture is powerful precisely because it is so pervasive, impacting every part of our work; at the same time, it is very difficult to name or identify.”[^5] This document and conversations with Baylon have made clear how absurd it is for ARCs to continue business-as-usual artistic programming upon a shared foundation that is antithetical to our very reason for existing.

I would guess that there are a great many of us working at fostering spaces for safe and open community and artist exchange, while going through the motions of board-led governance. We work with and program artists whose practices align with the structural challenges of our organizations, which undermine our capacity to show up for the communities we serve. So many artist practices cross into structural dialogue: racial justice and anti-oppression, stolen land, authentic histories, labour, identity politics, radical kindness, power dynamics; the list is unending. Ironically, we are forced to adapt our organizations—with equity work and progressive values increasingly being made a condition of grant funding—without any real funding for the time, internal, and external labour to do so. So we have no choice but to channel the work through our programming. I’m curious how covert we are about it. When grants are due, I find myself in some kind of hypnosis; no matter how resolute I am in AKA’s agency and self-determining work, I also fear too much risk—which is to say, asking for our current ideal: a break in artist projects to make time for the collective and staff to shift the organization, and to include fees for our non-staff collective and community members to co-author AKA’s reinvention. 

I can’t say this next bit without acknowledging that artist-runs are in perennial cycles of renewal and questioning. In the final issue of _FUSE_, in the article “Art, Austerity and the Production of Fear,” an anonymous group of arts workers collaboratively wrote: “New projects and possibilities are everywhere, but it is imperative that current administrators envision new models and configurations and work closely with the councils to make them possible. This is how artist-run culture was born and it’s what is required to keep it alive through this awkward midlife crisis.”[^6]

Being an incorporated non-profit seems to be such a small eligibility criterion, relatively speaking, but its implications are all-encompassing. If we stay the familiar course, our insides will not match our outsides. We need to make our spaces braver, to share the power with communities, to hold space for conversations, and to take—and be given—the time to reimagine our structures. Reading through most grants, it is difficult to find any mention of money for structural change with the exception of CCA’s Sector Innovation and Development, a “component of Supporting Artistic Practice \[that\] funds Canadian groups, organizations and cultural connectors for projects targeted towards growing and improving the arts sector.”[^7] Our aforementioned group of artist-runs and collectives is working on an application. Right now, we’re in the early work of talking, sharing, and storytelling, and I suspect that the project will mirror a nationally organized form of that. 

When the group first started talking, I admitted to AKA’s collective that I felt as if I had spent this last summer with nothing to show for my work. While the process left me feeling full and good, based on my learned definitions of productivity—the ones at the bedrock of our organizations as they stand—I struggled to perceive it as serious work. Felicia Gay, MacKenzie Art Gallery curatorial fellow, co-founder of The Red Shift Gallery, one of AKA’s collective members, and someone who has shown me a great deal of kindness and mentorship, told us that visiting was a Swampy Cree research methodology, a way of learning and working that is shared.[^8]

Everything I’ve learned over the last year is a credit to someone else.

Will the CCA or other granting bodies fund projects that seek to undercut the criteria that they judge us by—projects for structural rather than artistic innovation? Can we ask them to enable artist-runs to define their own models, instead of being beholden to the non-profit governance structures that be? How can we balance what we owe to our known and unknown communities with what is expected of us by our funders? Is there room to risk being wrong? And is not trying at all worth the risk?

---

Thank you to Jordan Baylon, Amber Berson, Jen Budney, Jesse McKee, Natasha Chaykowski; Ada X, Articule, Artspeak, Common Weal, grunt gallery, Hamilton Artists Inc., Ociciwan, Sâkêwêwak, The New Gallery, Video Pool, and AKA’s Collective: Kaetan Bonli, Kathleena ChiefCalf, Gabby DaSilva, gan/respectful child, Alexa Hainsworth, Derek Sandbeck, Lauren Warrington, and Aurora Wolfe. 

Please write to [director@akaartistrun.com](mailto:director@akaartistrun.com) if you are interested in being a part of this conversation.

[^1]: Accounts of first- and second-generation ARCs can be found in Keith Wallace, “A Particular History: Artist-Run Centres in Vancouver” in _The Vancouver Anthology,_ ed. Stan Douglas (Vancouver: Talonbooks, 1991), 23-44; and in Dana Claxton and Tania Willard, “Imperfect Compliance: A Trajectory of Transformation,” http://arcpost.ca/articles/imperfect-compliance 
[^2]: A critical part of Canadian ARC history is the initiative of Minquon Panchayat, a group that formed at ANNPAC’s 1992 gathering in response to artist Lillian Allen’s call to action for racial equity and ANNPAC member representation. More info about this can be found in: _Parallélogramme_ 19, no. 3; Su Ying Strang’s curatorial text and bibliography for “Pulling Back the Paper” at The New Gallery, www.thenewgallery.org/pullingback-the-paper/
[^3]: https://communitywise.net/
[^4]: Centre for Community Organizations (COCo). _White Supremacy Culture in Organizations._ Montreal: PDF file, 2019, https://coconet.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/Coco-WhiteSupCulture-ENG4.pdf
[^5]: COCo, 7.
[^6]: “Art, Austerity and the Production of Fear,” _FUSE_ 37, no. 1 (December 2013), excerpted and hosted on http://www.journeesansculture.ca/fr/2015/10/15/art-austerity-and-the-production-of-fear-fuse/
[^7]: “Supporting Artistic Practice,” Sector Innovation and Development, Canada Council for the Arts, accessed Autumn 2021, https://canadacouncil.ca/funding/grants/supporting-artistic-practice/sector-innovation-and-development
[^8]: Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, “Land as Pedagogy: Nishnaabeg Intelligence and Rebellious Transformation,” _Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society_ 3, no. 3 (2014), https://jps.library.utoronto.ca/index.php/des/article/view/22170

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Management

Activism

Artist-run centres

In the first installation of our new Tilling column, Tarin Dehod examines the colonial roots of non-profit governance structures in Canada, the complexities inherent to equity-oriented artistic programming that originates from them, and shares findings about ungovernance gleaned from an array of community members.

Tilling: Governance, Ungovernance, and Other Possibilities

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Federation of Canadian Artists 1

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Editorial

**Jac Renée Bruneau** is a writer, editor and organizer based in Toronto. She was formerly the editor of _C Magazine_.

Maya Wilson-Sanchez is a curator and writer based in Toronto.

The countless languages of maps materialize the countless ways we relate to land. Maps create relations between us and where we are, where we have been, and where we’d like to go. There are maps shared through stories; ephemeral maps drawn on the ground and erased by the wind; tactile maps made to resemble the shapes of coastlines; speculative maps of the future; and, ineluctably, maps of empire. In many cases, the function of a map is not to represent reality, but to imagine something in excess of it, and give form to _that_.

“\[O\]ur bodies’ water is the very water that forms and circulates through other human and more-than-human bodies; the Atlantic Ocean at the coast of Santa Catarina, the frosty clouds of the German winter, the snow on Mount Vesuvio’s peak… all of these waters, notwithstanding their varying physical states and qualities—other yet same—circulate literally within and between bodies, in a planetary flow, across space and time.” cristina t. ribas and paul schweizer (the latter of kollektiv orangotango, a network of critical geographers, friends, and activists who question space, power, and resistance) offer this reminder of total fluidity as a central aspect of what they are “rehearsing to call ‘hydrocartography.’” In contrast to traditional, arid mapping, which “render\[s\] land decipherable and thus controllable,” hydrocartography begins with the assumption that the cartographer is wet, indistinguishable from what they chart—and from that position, capable of dissolving the presumption of maps as static. This spirit of disruption through intimacy, association, and sensory perception runs through the issue. 

During her conversation with Kyra Kordoski, the artist Maureen Gruben shares anecdotes about navigation in Tuktoyaktuk in the Inuvialuit Settlement Region of the western Arctic—and how those practices influence her work. “\[I\]t changes all the time and it’s never the same. It’s such a slow mapping process. You notice each and every shift in the land. Some places are receding, but others are building up. It becomes more personal every time. More like home.” In _Big Hello_ (2021), a work that “pairs over a hundred second-hand cell-phone cases found in thrift stores with ‘uppers,’ the beaded tops of moccasins and mukluks that had been found at the dump or gifted \[…\] the beads create a counterpoint to the immediate data the phones’ map apps would have provided.” Again and again, Gruben comes back to the influence that modern maps have on pace, and her valuation of the opposite; “\[b\]eadwork operates on slow time.”

“The process of doing beadwork is meticulous and disciplined; it requires stillness,” writes Annette Lee—founder of Native Skywatchers, an initiative that “seeks to remember and revitalize \[I\]ndigenous star and earth knowledge” in the face of light pollution. “This stillness is echoed in the night sky,” she writes. Lera Kotsyuba’s “Star Stories and Indigenous Resistance Against Light Pollution” highlights perspectives from those advocating for ethical negotiations of space in the attempt to ensure colonial procedures on land are not replicated beyond our atmosphere, acknowledging the importance of the sky in numerous Indigenous worldviews. (Coco Zhou’s instalment in our One Thing column, about NASA naming their most recent Mars landing site after Black science-fiction writer Octavia E. Butler, corroborates the inordinately ham-fisted nature of upwards expansion.) Following conversations with Mi’kmaw astronomer Hilding Neilson (related to his work with legal scholar Elena E. Ćirković) and Karyn Recollet, an urban Cree writer, artist, scholar, and professor, Kotsyuba ultimately turns to the work of the artist Margaret Nazon. Based in the Inuvik Beaufort Delta, she renders details made visible by the Hubble Space Telescope in beads, a fruitful entanglement of traditional and modern technologies that suggests the potential for respectful, generative coexistence.

The complexities of Big Tech are at the centre of Sophia Arnold’s feature on Novi Sad–based Vladan Joler’s project _New Extractivism_, which endeavours to visualize (to attempt rigorous transparency of) the labyrinthine insides of data extraction. The artist, who’s the leader of SHARE Lab—a “research and data investigation lab for exploring different technical and social aspects of algorithmic transparency, digital labour exploitation, invisible infrastructures, black boxes, and many other contemporary phenomena on the intersection between technology and society”—at one point makes the striking remark that although he was living without a cell phone for a while, he ultimately decided that with the time he was spending trying to refuse the conveniences of today’s tech, he could be working on much more interesting problems. This issue began with close cogitation on cartography’s function as a meaning-maker, definer, namer, decider, but as we went on editing, we kept coming across these (at first surprising, and then pleasantly concordant) glimmers of reflection about time. What is it about trying to orient ourselves that gets us thinking about the ways that seconds, hours, and years are pushed around, sped up, wrinkled?

Experiences in space are of course inextricable from experiences in time, though Kat Benedict makes the joyous case for the _dis_orientation of both in their writing about Lucas LaRochelle’s Queering the Map— an online project that allows contributors to anonymously affix a narrative to any given point on the world map. A moderator screens submissions for slander, but otherwise doesn’t discriminate. There are tales of transitions, first kisses, first kinks, first admissions, heartbreaks, as well as cryptic textual abstractions that feel just as snug in this expansive (if still very abbreviated) portrait of the planet. Kicking off the piece with Alfred Korzybski’s famous one-liner “the map is not the territory,” Benedict moves through postulations from Sara Ahmed, Judith Butler, and Jean Baudrillard, to eventually frame LaRochelle’s map as _the territory itself_, providing a substrate for self-defined origins, asynchronous community, and generation over representation

Sophia Larigakis’s entry in this issue’s Composition column brings about a similar feeling of communion—but through a singular rather than collective account. Riffing on a project proposed by artist Max Neuhaus in the early ’80s to “clarify an emergency vehicle’s position in space” and make “the city soundscape more tolerable, that is, more aesthetically pleasing,” the writer creates an aural topography of pandemic NYC: from the “surreally amplified” birdsong, to the surge of ambulance sirens, the nightly clanging of pots and pans, curfew cell-phone notifications, the sonic weaponry of the police, and the “ruckus and din” of “fireworks as a stake in Black joy.”

Razan Al-Salah’s artist project _No Man’s Land_, guest curated by Dana Qaddah, takes on another topography that someone had an idea to refashion, this one much more pernicious. To look up the area known as Canada Park on any old search engine would suggest that that someone—the State of Israel—succeeded. Visitors are seen leisuring in a national park that was once home to the Arab residents of Latrun, Imwas, Yalo, and Bayt Nouba before their total expropriation as a result of the Nakba and the Six-Day War. Here, as in a number of other stolen regions in Israel/Palestine, the Jewish National Fund deployed a reforestation program utilizing “fast-growing pine trees and evergreens—non-indigenous to the region \[…\] effectively erasing traces of people and obstructing their ability to return home.” I urge you to spend a few minutes taking up Al-Salah’s invitation to counterflood the search engines with images of Palestinian protest over the loss of this site (see the QR code on the last page).

It should go without saying that the tactics of erasure highlighted in _No Man’s Land_ unfortunately have much in common with Canada’s own. And, as Mimi Gellman writes, “It is now understood that the political and cultural ramifications of mapping have implications that go far beyond the charting of unknown territories into a claiming of space and an assertion of sovereignty over Indigenous lands.” The Anishinaabe/ Ashkenazi/Métis visual artist, designer, and educator describes a shift within geography and mapping studies in the late ’80s that changed the criteria of maps— which conventionally included things like “direction, scale, coordinates, and at the very least some mimetic relationship to the landscape being discussed”—to include more encompassing definitions. Her text goes on to examine artworks by Sonny Assu, Katherine Boyer, Bonnie Devine, and Pudlo Pudlat as examples of Indigenous counter-mapping approaches—“which use cartography and maps to correct territorial injustices and disrupt the power dynamics embedded within colonial imaginaries.”

Leah Decter and Tania Willard come at the complexities of stolen land from another angle, focusing in on one of the most pressing questions in “Canada”: how settlers, newcomers, and their descendants can engage in ethical guesting, that which is “relational, respectful, and reciprocal.” Playing with the language involved in providing directions, poetic prose is interwoven with excerpts from a potent letter written in 1910 by the Chiefs of the Secwepémc, Syilx, and Nlaka’pamux Nations and presented in Kamloops, BC, to premier Sir Wilfred Laurier. “As you cross over colonially designated territories, question the lines, the borders, the power of prescribed boundaries, and maps as tools of domination. \[…\] Before your next turn, you need to tear down farm fences, yard fences, and construction fences that have become borders.” Tarin Dehod engages in this kind of close looking and attendant tear-down in the first installation of our new Tilling column, examining how colonial roots underlie non-profit governance structures, and sharing findings about ungovernance. It is “clear how absurd it is for ARCs to continue business-as-usual artistic programming upon a shared foundation that is antithetical to our very reason for existing.”

Many of the reviews extend the universe of this issue’s theme. Zannah Mae Matson’s review of Candace Fujikane’s book _Mapping Abundance for a Planetary Future: Kanaka Maoli and Critical Settler Cartographies in Hawai‘i_ discusses “how land and history are mapped together through stories that transcend the settler divisions between living and non-living.” Courtney Miller’s review of “Overburden”—an exhibition presented across two galleries in rural BC—highlights the works of artists “who question settler-colonial and capitalist perceptions of land as a source from which to profit,” and Jayne Wilkinson’s engagement with Will Kwan’s recent solo at The Robert McLaughlin Gallery takes these reflections on extraction a step further, describing Kwan’s work as being “about the economy of the land but ultimately about how the idea of nature can be marketed, bought, and sold as much as the tangible resources extracted from it.” Greta Hamilton observes that Diane Borsato and Amish Morrell’s book _Outdoor School_ (2021) “offers an encouraging vision of artistic and pedagogical responses to climate change” and Julian Jason Haladyn gives a thoughtful reading of Shelley Niro’s outdoor exhibition in London beside the Antler River. Lastly, Karina Roman Justo writes an exciting examination of Oscar Santillán and Alessandra Troncone’s new publication about quipu textiles that considers a “cartography of shadows” through Indigenous epistemologies.

Citing Ahmed’s “The more a path is used, the more a path is used,” Benedict goes on to extrapolate that, “\[i\]n other words, the path is made clearer with each use, reiterated by each passing body, begetting further use.” In yet _other_ words, the path most likely to be taken is the one that’s been left unquestioned. But everyone in this issue—in their numerous, unpredictable, motivated approaches to mapping—explores the potential of the medium as a world-making tool, and gets us thinking about taking literally any other route.

issue-150-p14-18.pdf

Mapping

Editors Jac Renée Bruneau and Maya Wilson-Sanchez reflect on the issue’s theme: _Maps._

Editorial: Maps

Feature

paul schweizer is a geographer and popular educator. As part of kollektiv orangotango, he co-conducts collective art processes in public space. He co-edited This Is Not an Atlas and curates the notanatlas.org platform. Currently he co-organizes collective mapping processes in Europe and Latin America in order to facilitate a global dialogue of critical cartographies.

cristina t. ribas works as an artist and researcher, working with collective processes in academia and self-organized cartography and improvisation workshops. She is part of the project Arquivos Táticos, alongside Giseli Vasconcelos and Tatiana Wells, and organizes the open platform Desarquivo.org.

<h5>“Nothing in the world is as soft, as weak, as water; nothing else can wear away the hard, the strong, and remain unaltered. Soft overcomes hard, weak overcomes strong. Everybody knows it,  
nobody uses the knowledge.”  
—Lao Tzu [^1]

“I am not interested in an unknowability that shadows knowledge of a colonized other, or a dangerous feminine one either, but rather an unknowability that we can learn from thinking with difference.”  
—Astrida Neimanis [^2]</h5>
  
  
Traditional, arid cartography—say, a typical school world map—could be belittingly described as the science of imposing continents and demarcated grounds onto the irrelevant in-betweenness of the world’s oceans. Waters are depicted as adverse obstacles when moving between relevant solid territories, or as mere voids, and are thus often invisibilized in traditional cartography which seems to be obsessed with the dry and static, rocks and metals. Arid cartography tends to depict water as a knowable separate element, enclosed in its rightful domains—rivers, lakes, oceans—visualized with graphic elements such as static points, lines, and demarcated surfaces. And then there’s the material fact that water, for centuries, constituted a major threat for paper maps, its mere presence posing the menace of maceration and dissolution of cartography’s sacrosanct product.

With Lao Tzu’s words in mind—“as soft, as weak, as water; / nothing else can wear away / the hard, the strong”—why not engage this watery threat, the threat of transformation and becoming other, by integrating the very materiality of water as an aesthetic force. This is what we are rehearsing to call “hydrocartography.” As Cecilia Chen, Janine MacLeod, and Astrida Neimanis [^3] suppose: “By drawing upon the reservoir of unknowability carried within all waters, we may situate ourselves in ways that challenge land-based preconceptions of fixity.” Taking any map to a walk alongside, with, and through watery bodies allows us to experiment with the liberating potential of hydrocartography—our sweating bodies, sudden rain showers, and our water-loving daughters potential accomplices in this endeavour. Understanding ethics as an enabling alternative to morality, as “becoming attuned to the complexity of the world and our immersion in it,” and thus as “actively working on and reshaping relationships,” we feel engaging an ethics of water can help us think through how we relate to each other, and the generative unpredictability of any cartographic encounter. [^4]

Since 2019, the two of us have been collaborating, divided-connected between Latin America and Europe, different yet related in the way we position our cartographic-artistic-militant practices, sharing experiences, places, comrades, and the intention to share more. Yet, we feel this kinship is not (just) some- thing between autonomous individuals—demarcated points in space. Rather, it is a condition that we share with countless others—lines between points. In fact, more than just connecting “human points,” this very condition, we feel, also connects us to more-than-human entities—multifold and aggregated points.

Since 2020, in public conversations and mapping workshops that we have held at art schools, we’ve contextualized our respective and shared mapping practices by seeing ourselves as “becoming bodies of water” [^5]—implying the overwhelming yet beautiful acceptance that our bodies’ water is the very water that forms and circulates through other human and more- than-human bodies; the Atlantic Ocean at the coast of Santa Catarina, the frosty clouds of the German winter, the snow on Mount Vesuvio’s peak… all of these waters, notwithstanding their varying physical states and qualities—other yet same—circulate literally within and between bodies, in a planetary flow, across space and time. In Neimanis’s words, we are “engaged, embedded, embodied \[…\] situated, implicated—in time, in space, in other bodies of other beings.” [^6] Taking this seriously necessarily comes with a radical realignment of modern cartographers’ self-conception. The cartographer’s gaze can no longer adhere to an external, top-down, bird’s-eye perspective—the abstract, totalizing gaze at the world as an object to be ruled. On the contrary, the hydrocartographic project acknowledges both the world’s fluid condition and the cartographer’s becoming (in) these flows. If the waters of the world flow through us, wouldn’t then the only imaginably (im)possible way to map the world be to flow with them?

Before the arid mapping starts, there is the unmapped void—an idealized blank white page. Yet to employ an ethics of water is to see that whatever site we may be mapping is far from empty, clear, devoid of influences. Shifting our eyesight from arid cartography to hydrocartography includes an emotional and subjective reflection. For us, this has been, intrinsically, part of a need to rethink our practices and ourselves. We began by mapping out instinctively and practically our own interdependent relationships, intensified by the COVID\-19 pandemic reality in different forms and weights, believing that whether living in distant continents or being distanced due to pandemic security measures, we move and are moved by common currents.

In order to open ourselves up to these other forms of mapping, in the workshops we organized, we felt that starting the mapping with meditational “inward walks” and body-mapping exercises would facilitate this process. In the former, we prompted participants to produce images from known reference spaces—be they homes, streets, districts, or other contexts. We’d begin by walking in our homes as we walk when in a rush on the street, to agitate and energize the body, then sit down with eyes shut listening to the facilitator’s inward-walking instructions, which attempt to awaken the body’s perceptions and memories of cartographic encounters: “Listen to your feet; how did the ground that they walked on feel? Was it hard, soft, cold, prickly, comforting? Feel your eyes’ memories of the territory. Interrogate your hands about their experience; what materials did they touch? How did they intervene?” With eyes shut, we can imagine the maps as manifold interfusing currents, an ocean of “pluriversal” [^7] fullness, beauty, and vitality. Hydrocartography enables us to enact this radical change of perspective. It implies map-makers’ and map users’ right to get lost in the map, to misunderstand, and to derive other meanings. Lastly, we’d draw with watery materials the images that came to us.

Hydrocartography does not participate in the partitioning, dichotomizing, and belligerent rhetoric of national and administrative maps. It is of no use at all for states’ or landlords’ purposes of rendering land decipherable and thus controllable. By mapping from within and embodying the sensibility that bodies contain water, hydrocartography doesn’t just refuse the imperialist cartographic reflex of expanding what’s known and represented. It also rejects ambitions to simplify and diminish the represented topic to a tangible, unequivocal visualization—clearly demarcated points and lines, harsh contrasts, neatly single-coloured surfaces. The sharp dividing line as a graphic element is foreign to hydrocartography. What were borders in arid maps (a clash of binary oppositions) can only be zones of confluence, commingling, and fusing—blurred, opaque, overlapped, whirled shades—that make us see complexity and multidimensionality, leaving space for diverging understandings. These confluences are, indeed, zones of becoming (one an)other; new tones appear.

This reminds us of the notion of _ch’ixi_, shared by Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui from andina Abya Yala: a form of thinking the coexistence of white and black colors, this encounter creating a sort of grey checker pattern. Cusicanqui analyzes _ch’ixi_, as well as other concepts, to set up an Aimara Indigenous epistemology, to refer to identities composed by contradictory stains, from different references in time and space, against homogeneity. [^8] Another way of conceiving of this confluent zone is through Neimanis’s notion of “ecotone”: 

> As transition areas between two adjacent but different ecosystems, ecotones appear as both gradual shifts and abrupt demarcations. But more than just a marker of separation or even a marker of connection (although importantly both of these things), an ecotone is also a zone of fecundity, creativity, transformation; of becoming, assembling, multiplying; of diverging, differentiating, relinquishing. Something happens. [^9]

In committing to the creation of ecotones—relations between diverse (territorial) experiences, identities, and imaginations—hydrocartography needs to develop new graphic expressions. We strongly encourage experimentation with streaks, confluences, and membranes as graphic elements of mapping—multiple, colourful, straight, wavy, patchy, crooked, interconnected, and interwoven. From the point of view of the cartographer’s desk, this may be hard to visualize, so let’s take a walk at the riverside. 

Walking on the margins of a river, we might notice the delicate zone of difference between the water that flows along and the soil we step on. However, our feet, pushed down by our watery body’s weight, liquidate the zone of distinction. While the river flows, taking our eyes to dive into its current’s design, our feet carry the mud, exposing the newness of this contact. We are mapping while we are walking. We are blurring the zone of contact that we just met. The riverbank might be solid, yet at any time, beautifully and fearfully, it might drop inside the river itself—a memory from the Amazon River pops up in us, accompanied by the skin’s memory of the warm humid air, the ears’ memory of the mighty torrent’s constant murmur. The river continuously transforms, composing ecotones. Its bank’s soil, the plants overgrowing, the animals inhabiting it, the air breezing, and us; we are all bodies of water, watering it. No impermeable lines divide where the same water flows through. The same is true even for those spaces in which human intervention has struggled for centuries to conceal and delegitimize lively water flows; rivers have had their courses changed. But all of a sudden, scales are reversed. What seemed controlled by machines, measurements, predictions, numbers becomes a flow. The waters show their force.

When listening deeply during mapping processes, we notice the given environment is not just the _where_, but also the _who, what, and how_. Indeed, we, our bodies, minds, and actions, are not separated from it—precise dots and lines on the map—but are connected _in, to,_ and _through_ it. We ourselves are part of it, wet bodies as wetlands: blurred stains, smeared, petered-out spots.

Just as we have soaked arid maps and their graphic elements, we shall commit to wet the cartographers themselves, which is to say: reject any pretension of a distanced view and, instead, accept that we are (be- coming) in this together. Hydrocartography is to take a collective walk at the riverside. It is when neither the maps nor ourselves stay the same, performing a watery movement, flowing with intuition. Situated in boundlessness. It calls us to engage in the “subject- and object-shaping dance of encounters,” as Donna Haraway [^10] puts it, to drift along the maps inside us, and to be(come) multicoloured shades dripping, scrolling across the map.

[^1]: Lao Tzu, _Tao Te Ching: A Book About the Way and the Power of the Way_ , trans. Ursula K. Le Guin. (London: Shambhala, 1998), 78.
[^2]: Astrida Neimanis, _Bodies of Water: Posthuman Feminist Phenomenology_, Environmental Cultures Series (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2017), 144.
[^3]: Cecilia Chen, Janine MacLeod, and Astrida Neimanis, “Toward a Hydrological Turn?,” in _Thinking with Water_, ed. Cecilia Chen, Janine MacLeod, and Astrida Neimanis (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2013), 8 
[^4]: “Compared to morality, ethics entails _more_ fidelity to our relations in their immediacy—to all the forces that compose us and affect us— not less.” Nick Montgomery and carla bergman, _Joyful Militancy: Building Resistance in Toxic Times_ (Chico, CA: AK Press, 2017), 281.
[^5]: Astrida Neimanis, “Hydrofeminism: Or, On Becoming a Body of Water,” in _Undutiful Daughters: New Directions in Feminist Thought and Practice_, ed. H. Gunkel et al., Breaking Feminist Waves (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012).
[^6]: Neimanis, _Bodies of Water_ , 145.
[^7]: Arturo Escobar, _Pluriversal Politics: The Real and the Possible_ (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2020).
[^8]: Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui, <em>Un mundo ch’ixi es posible</em> (Buenos Aires: Tinta Limón, 2018).
[^9]: Neimanis, “Hydrofeminism,” 107.
[^10]: Donna Haraway, When Species Meet (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007), 4.

issue-150-p18-23.pdf

Environment

cristina t. ribas and paul schweier share their concept of “hydrocartography,” which begins with the assumption that the cartographer is wet, indistinguishable from what they chart—and from that position, capable of dissolving the presumption of maps as static.

Hydrocartography: Mapping with Waters

Kat Benedict is a mad queer, non-binary artist, writer, and cyber-witch.

As long ago as 1931, Polish-born American scientist and philosopher Alfred Korzybski coined the phrase “the map is not the territory.”[^1] Inherent in this famous negation is a logic of representation that insists on the original in assessing the worth and legibility of the reproduction. As we know, the map is an authoritative record keeper, a coded, colonial tool to pursue a rational, scientific understanding of the natural and social world; Korzybski’s truism epitomizes the linear, functional perspective by which maps guide the user to a specific destination—or orientation. Reading a map requires navigating signs and symbols and thus depends on the endless repetition of norms and conventions, such as “beginning” and “end,” “real” and “copy,” “true” or “false,” “map” and “territory.” In contrast to this reading method, Queering the Map (QTM), an ongoing community counter-mapping platform by Montreal-based artist and designer Lucas LaRochelle, unfolds the possible meanings of negating Korzybski’s negation by challenging these binaries—digitally archiving LGBTQ2IA\+ memories, moments, and histories in relation to the cyber and physical worlds.

Using digital mapping technology, QTM breaks down barriers between map-maker and user, creator and spectator—map and territory—by collectively charting geographically dispersed individuals and experiences. The pale-pink and periwinkle interface preserves LBGTQ2IA\+ life by allowing users to plot their queer realities anonymously and in multiple languages. As a kind of virtual collaboration, communities of belonging and new realities emerge from a range of differ- ent but related desires. Pins range from the humorous—“this town is gayer than it seems, you just need to look closely. ;) -your ex-local lesbian”[^2] reads one in Livno, a city in Bosnia and Herzegovina—to the heartbreaking: “falling in love with a guy for the first time but he never loved me back”[^3] one says in Bandung, Indonesia. Also: declarations of trans identity in Mongolia’s capital of Ulaanbaatar—“July 2008, in the airport at 3am. I realized I didn’t want to be a man—I already was one, I just needed somebody else to believe me”[^4] —and narratives of medical transition in Linköping, Sweden: “I woke after top surgery here three years ago, aching but ecstatic because my upper body finally looked like it should have from the beginning.”[^5]

Across the globe, there remain many places that are not safe or accessible for LGBTQ2IA\+ people. As our histories and spaces continue to be contested and erased, QTM does the work of layering, synthesizing, and collapsing digital and physical realities. The result is a complex landscape, place, and site of political, cultural, and social negotiations and renegotiations between queer groups and individuals. As a map undergoing continual construction, a small moderator panel exists to screen for hateful content as the digital world grows. For the queer kid growing up in a country where homosexuality is illegal, reading through the pins dotted around their region re- veals the many people existing beside them. An icon in a small town outside of Doha, Qatar, reads: “not a great place to realize you’re gay huh. Welp.”[^6] Another pin in Yarram, Australia, simply asserts, “I’m the only queer in this town that knows how to use the internet. There’s another trans man somewhere here. Who is he?”[^7] Clusters of pins concentrate in places where governments have passed anti-gay legislation, as well as in areas where Pride marches or gay bars are mainstays. No single notion of “queer” makes its way onto the map, which gives rise to new orders of representation.

As feminist scholar Sara Ahmed writes, “The more a path is used, the more a path is used.”[^8] In other words, the path is made clearer with each use, reiterated by each pass- ing body, begetting further use. “To become straight means not only that we have to turn toward the objects given to us by heterosexual culture but also that we must turn away from objects that take us off this line.”[^9] Queer people exist outside these lines—off this path—at least in part because of their perceived lack of “origin” or “realness” within the heterosexuality matrix. Origin stories—also known as creation myths—are used to create intelligible subjectivity. Compulsory heterosexuality presumes a shared origin story until and unless something deviant enters the scene, at which point LGBTQ2IA\+ people are pressed to locate an originary moment of queer desire in themselves, the precise moment they “knew” something of it, being asked to account for their difference in logical terms. Given the often evasive origins of queerness, such regulations can create impossible situations for individuals not recognized as intelligible subjects within the heterosexual matrix.

Baudrillard offers some fruitful thinking around origins here, positing that our post-modern culture has become so dependent on models and maps that we have lost all contact with the world that preceded the map.[^10] His theory of signification reverses the semiotic relationship in which users treat signs as stand- ing for or representing other things, suggesting that the signifier, object, image, symbol, phenomenon, or experience (all of which I’ll refer to hereafter as a “model”), reproduced in mass culture, precedes the signified. In other words, signs no longer represent reality but implode in their meaning to simulate and create their own hyperreality, our reality now imitating the mod- el, which then precedes and determines the world. “The territory no longer precedes the map, nor does it survive it. It is nevertheless the map that precedes the territory—precession of simulacra—that engenders the territory.”[^11] The way this plays out, the real and the fiction seamlessly blend so that there is no distinction between where one stops and the other begins. While Baudrillard saw this as causing alienation in our capitalist reality, I’m misapplying it to think generatively about queer subjectivity; truth loses its footing, and the ability to locate an origin is lost.

Queer theorist Judith Butler extends this concept to gender, arguing that, detached from all referents, “gender is a kind of imitation for which there is no original; in fact, it is a kind of imitation that produces the very notion of the original as an effect and consequence of the imitation itself.”[^12] Thinking about the map/ territory within cyberspace and in relation to Baudrillard’s theory of hyperreality and Butler’s notions of gender performance removes the boundaries of a fixed reality, allowing gendered bodies to be fully legible in the contexts they occupy. In QTM, each body enacts an experience in a specific place and time, and each instance is itself a primary incarnation of queer activity. The platform thus proposes a new method for languaging and defining queer subjectivity that refutes the significance of an originary moment. Users can peg their experiences on this map despite not recalling precisely where a queer moment transpired; as an icon absentmindedly placed along the Amazon River remarks, “not exact, but i played a game set here that helped me realize i’m trans.”[^13] This map allows us to tell our stories outside of a “chronological chain that links the present to a fixed past.”[^14] Without the burden of the tenuous and fictional original, the indexical bond between map and territory blurs. No longer indexing a relation between original and copy, the ontological given of the map as an orientation device is destabilized; arguably, the map _is_ the territory.

This move away from the origin story is a quest to return to wholeness. To get there, LaRochelle focuses on the act of disorientation, contrasted against many cartographic and phenomenological studies whose priority is orientation. A queer phenomenological experience occurs when one’s typical perception of the world is shifted: a sense of disorientation allows us to interpret reality in a new way. The act of play constitutes a significant element of LaRochelle’s method, just as queers rough-house with heterosexual structures, trying to alter them without the objective to create new ones. As I scan the spatial data, I embark on the relational act of time travel while somehow also being in touch with where I am presently and what might unfold in the future. Each memory, each act of narration, is a manipulation of time, searching the map an experience of temporal togetherness. Discourses of trauma and healing, hope and memory, joy and loss, make for temporal drags and co-presences, anachronisms and proximities, contaminations and feelings across time and geography. In Broome, Australia, a pin recounts when the author cut all their hair off at age 15, their first step in not identifying as a woman. At a small party in San Juan, Philippines, a closeted trans man wears a suit for the first time. Another in Yokohama, Japan, recalls the moment they went by their chosen name in a professional setting. Emerging as these stories have from different time-spaces, hundreds of thousands of inverted drop-shaped icons are tied by moments identified as poignant, based on all kinds of criteria.

In a material manifestation of disorientation, the platform employs an artificial intelligence called QT.bot that uses OpenAI’s GPT\-2 text generation model and a StyleGAN trained on the textual and visual data associated with each entry. Using Google Street View-style imagery, the living archive has no search bar or algorithmic orientation method. You cannot set a destination, find a specific address, or follow a route plan. The plus and minus keys allow a user to zoom in and out, and the arrow keys and cursor assist in moving across the map’s geography. In LaRochelle’s words, “the experience of viewing the machinic narratives and environments of LGBTQ2IA\+ life that QT.bot propagates is one of disorientation— time, space, and subjectivity collapse.”[^15] The platform’s multiplicity of realities extends unto the user an experience of disorder, celebrating an innate inability to pin down meaning and making an instalment in collective efforts toward a world not defaulted to heterosexuality. QT.bot showcases applied queer theory in practice, its political dimensions possessing a worldly potential that always assumes the body as the starting point.

I zoom out to see the whole world map and am drawn to a lone black pin in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. Identical to the rest, this icon pulls me for no unique reason other than it floats alone, and I want to know more of its content. When I click, the message displays: “read stone butch blues whilst flying over the atlantic ocean. can’t believe we queered the entire atlantic ocean. iconique.”[^16] The entry refers to the historical fiction novel written by Leslie Feinberg about life as a butch lesbian in ’70s America. I am reminded of when I first read the book as a lonely teen and feel connected to this unknown soul. Each joint experience, each intimate encounter reshapes the paths that directed us here, just as each coordinate shapes the many ways we follow therefrom. The mapping criteria here are not reference and accuracy but rather generation.

In reflecting on cartography as a political technology, QTM presents alternative views of the world in a manner more equitable than cartography has historically enabled. Mapping processes require careful consideration and may be reflected on and communicated in var- ious ways, as feminist scholar Donna Haraway observes: “It matters what matters we use to think other matters with; it matters what stories we tell to tell other stories with; it matters what knots knot knots, what thoughts think thoughts, what descriptions describe descriptions, what ties tie ties.”[^17] QTM treats queer cartographies as practices of world-making. The site gives a rich vocabulary for a kind of counter-mapping praxis that searches for collaborative, symbiotic, and promiscuous material connections, fluid constellations, and configurations that engender alternatives to discipline, order, power, and compliance.

[^1]: Alfred Korzybski, “A Non-Aristotelian System and its Necessity for Rigour in Mathematics and Physics,” in _Science and Sanity: An Introduction to Non-Aristotelian Systems and General Semantics_, 5th ed. (New York: Institute of General Semantics, 1994), 750.
[^2]: “Queering the Map,” accessed September 15, 2021, [queeringthemap.com](http://queeringthemap.com)
[^3]: “Queering the Map.”
[^4]: “Queering the Map.”
[^5]: “Queering the Map.”
[^6]: “Queering the Map.”
[^7]: “Queering the Map.”
[^8]: Sara Ahmed, “Orientations: Towards a Queer Phenomenology,” _GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies_ 12, no. 4 (2006), 554.
[^9]: Ahmed, 554.
[^10]: Jean Baudrillard, _Simulacra and Simulation_ (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1981).
[^11]: Baudrillard, 10.
[^12]: Judith Butler, “Imitation and Gender Insubordination,” in _The New Social Theory Reader_, ed. Steven Seidman and Jeffrey C. Alexander (London: Routledge, 2008)
[^13]: “Queering the Map.”
[^14]: Elspeth Probyn, “Suspended Beginnings: Of Childhood and Nostalgia” _GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies_ 2, no. 4 (1995), 439-65.
[^15]: Lucas LaRochelle, “QT. bot,” [lucaslarochelle.com/qtbot](http://lucaslarochelle.com/qtbot)
[^16]: “Queering the Map.”
[^17]: Donna Haraway, _Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene_ (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016), 12.

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issue-150-p23-28.pdf

Internet

Kat Benedict writes on Lucas LaRochelle’s Queering the Map—an online project that allows contributors to anonymously affix a narrative to any point on the world map—constituting a substrate for self-defined origins, asynchronous community, and generation over representation.

The Map Is the Territory: On Lucas LaRochelle’s Queering the Map

Lera Kotsyuba lives and works on the land of the Dish With One Spoon Wampum covenant, working toward shared responsibilities and equity around the built environment, and striving for anti-capitalist systems of community. She is the Managing Editor of _Studio_ magazine and an art and architecture critic based in Tkaronto.

<h5>“Indigenous people have nurtured critical relationships with the stars, from keen observation and sustainable engineering to place-based ceremony, navigation, and celestial architecture for tens of thousands of years. The Indigenous relationship and knowledge of the sky is exceptional in that it encompasses mind, body, heart, and spirit.”

—Annette S. Lee \[1\] </h5> 
  
  
Our planet circles a sun that is at the edge of our galaxy, and on a night with ideal conditions, a radial arm of the Milky Way can be seen, swirling clouds of gas dotted with stars running from one end of the sky to the other. Observing this phenomenon has always been a shared experience across cultures, but light pollution is rendering it invisible in many places across the world. Spilling outward not only on urban areas but even toward remote communities, this whitewashing of the night sky is a “slow violence”[^2] accelerated by capitalism, colonial powers, and billionaire space-race vanity projects. “Whitening the Sky: Light Pollution as a Form of Cultural Genocide” makes the argument that light pollution is a form of active destruction of Indigenous knowledge based on observations of the sky, such as navigation, food economics, and a mnemonic for committing information to memory in order for it to be passed to successive generations over long periods of time.[^3] In 2021, Hilding Neilson, an astronomer at the University of Toronto (U of T) and member of the Qalipu Nation, and Elena E. Ćirković, a legal scholar, co-authored a paper calling for the Canadian Space Agency to address the rights of Indigenous peoples and their knowledge structures in creating policy about space exploration and colonization.[^4] Where does the Crown obligation of shared stewardship begin and end? How high do treaties reach? And what are artists, scientists, cartographers, land defenders, and elders doing to keep this knowledge alive?

In October 2020, Canada signed the NASA Artemis Accords,[^5] an international agreement that outlines guidelines for space exploration which include a commitment to preserve outer-space heritage, that is to say, “historically significant human or robotic landing sites, artifacts, spacecraft, and other evidence of activity on celestial bodies.” Notably, there is no mention of the human impacts of space debris and pollution in the pursuit of exploration. As Neilson and Ćirković write, “This definition \[of outer-space heritage\] ignores Indigenous people’s perspectives and elements of space heritage for Indigenous cultures.”[^6] How can this gross oversight be accounted for? Remarking on the violent treatment and arrests of Indigenous land defenders at the proposed telescope at Mauna Kea, Hawai‘i—under threat by the Thirty Meter Telescope proposal[^7]—Uahikea Maile, a Kanaka Maoli scholar and professor of Indigenous politics at U of T, said the conflict has been framed as culture versus science. \[8\] Under the guise of scientific progress, government decision makers and military might insist that science is inherently at odds with Indigenous knowledge systems. Neilson, who generously set some time aside to speak with me, put it plainly: to dismiss Indigenous knowledges is to dismiss Indigenous sovereignty.[^9]

The parallels in language between the narratives of space exploration and colonization are also themselves deeply troubling. “Constellations reflect the law,” states Neilson, Mi’kmaw language carrying the meaning and stories that inform laws of stewardship, responsibility, stories reflecting relationships of connection between people and the land, whereas Greek constellations—which still dominate astronomical discourse—are divorced from stories unique to North America.[^10] Neilson asserts that star maps are how Mi’kmaq navigate and interact with the land which includes the sky, and thus that light pollution is a form of dispossession, a tool of colonization.

It’s worth noting that some efforts have been made to mitigate the issue, namely Dark Sky Preserve initiatives by the Royal Astronomical Society of Canada, whose mandate is to preserve spaces free of light pollution—remotely, as well as in planning and policy around the built environment, from streetlight covers to the control of LED lighting. Yet Neilson is critical of Dark Sky Preserves for the specific reason that they are located in national parks, yet another vestige of colonial dispossession. Karyn Recollet—an urban Cree writer, artist, scholar, and professor in the Women and Gender Studies Institute at the U of T, whom Neilson recommended I speak with—adds to that the issue of access. Who has the means to visit national parks and Dark Sky Preserves? Who do these spaces privilege? In thinking further about partial solutions: while Neilson maintains that Canada has a duty to consult Indigenous peoples when drafting space policy, he also has doubts in consultation processes, acknowledging that they can be carried out in bad faith. For example, in “greenwashing” or “consultation-washing,” environmental and Indigenous terminology surrounding access and ownership gets blatantly co-opted. Consultations do not equal consent,[^11] as Neilson points out, and if not made in good faith, false consent can be extracted to further capitalist interests.

Thankfully, there are projects like Native Skywatchers, who transform oral histories into story- telling aids. In 2007, astrophysicist and artist Annette S. Lee, whose communities are Ojibwe and D(L)akota, designed the initiative, which “seeks to remember and revitalize \[I\]ndigenous star and earth knowledge” and communicate “that \[I\]ndigenous people traditionally practiced a sustainable way of living \[…\] through a \[…\] participatory relationship with the above and below, sky and earth.”[^12] Together with a number of others, she has created many star maps and constellation books— which are artworks as much as reference materials— including ones oriented around Ojibwe, D/Lakota, and Cree perspectives. For the latter, _Ininew Achakos Masinikan_, she collaborated with Wilfred Buck (Opaskwayak Cree Nation), an elder and science facilitator at the Manitoba First Nations Education Resource Centre; Carl Gawboy (Boise-Fort/Ojibway), a distinguished artist and retired professor; and William Wilson (Lake Nipigon/Ojibway), a cultural expert and artist. The guide logs land and star stories of Turtle Island/North America, such as that of _Makinak_ (turtle) who, Buck explains, is important because turttles are a living lunar calendar used by many nations on Turtle Island.[^13] The surfaces of their shells have 13 shapes, which tell of the 13 moons within a year, and the outer ridges of their shells have 28 ridges, marking the 28 days between each full moon. “It’s important that no one underestimates the importance stars play in the daily lives of Indigenous people from around the world,”[^14] states Buck, whose efforts to bring Indigenous star stories to Indigenous youth actively disrupts Eurocentric mainstream education.[^15]

Recollet echoes that “oral histories are everything,” and names Buck as a generous knowledge holder whose work telling stories positions listeners to be receptive and open, rather than extractive— a distinction that’s incredibly important to her. To this end, she shared her ideas with me about what she calls atmospheric knowledge: the multisensory experience of a story, a layered collage of knowledge[^16] that continues the cycle of knowledge production, making spaces for joy and new ideas. Acknowledging physical mapping as “affective archives of struggle,” Recollet sees the spaces in-between definitive markers as places of possibility[^17]—something that’s also reflected in the Native Skywatchers’ projects. The importance of reorienting oneself to witness, listen, and become attuned to non-linear time structures is an aspect of what she calls “kinstellatory” relationships that begin among humans and extend to celestial beings, as a way to build relationality in tenuous spaces, like urban spaces marred by light pollution.

These ideas are at home in the work of Margaret Nazon, whose beadwork transports viewers into the vastness of the night sky, the deep dark and pin- points of light that people living in cities can only see through photography. Working from images captured by the Hubble Space Telescope, Nazon shares her perspective with the viewer through carefully selected and sewn beads, wood, bone, and seashells. I’m reminded of something Neilson said: that technology is not the issue, but its application, and that incorporating Indigenous methodology into tech could change the way we view the world. Echoing how gravity moves on a macrocosmic scale, Nazon’s work gives the impression of slow movement around a central point. _Milky Way Starry Night_ (2015–2016) directly references celestial phenomena one can see with the naked eye in ideal dark-sky conditions. Large and small clusters of beads undulate across the cotton twill fabric background, giving the impression of movement evocative of twinkling stars. Waves and wisps of interstellar gas and dust that give the distinct milky impression to the band across the sky are threaded in-between them. Nazon’s virtuosity translates the sublime wonder of looking up at the night sky and being immersed in a play of light. I’m compelled to reach out and touch—a haptic response that I don’t have with space photography. In an email exchange, Nazon tells me of her amazement with the night sky since she was a young girl, and explains that while technology has fuelled and transformed her passion, she remains grounded in her awareness of astronomical objects, and her artistic eye.[^18]

The act of beading brings to mind the great care of small stitches, endless patience, and the passage of time, stretching and contracting. From stitch to stitch, Nazon’s beads build in intensity over dark fabric; starlight travels over great distances to emerge before us in a rhapsody. Although celestial bodies follow their paths determined by gravitational forces we cannot see, the vast scale of their movement and time is, to us on Earth, a steadfast stillness. As we gaze at the night sky, we look into the past; this light has been a faithful companion to human history, stars and constellations a comfort in their immutability. I’m reminded of a sentiment from Lee: “The process of doing beadwork is meticulous and disciplined; it requires stillness. This stillness is echoed in the night sky.”[^19] It is through the imaginative work of Nazon, along with Recollet, Lee, Buck, and all the Native Skywatchers, that we can experience what light pollution takes—and will increasingly take—from us. Beyond mapping, they are storytellers who use traditional and modern technologies to gently draw us in.

[^1]: Annette S. Lee et al. “Indigenous Astronomy: Best Practices and Protocols for Including Indigenous Astronomy in the Planetarium Setting” (IPS Conference, Edmonton, August  
2020), <a href= https://arxiv.org/ pdf/2008.05266.pdf>https://arxiv.org/ pdf/2008.05266.pdf</a>
[^2]: Lee et al., 4.
[^3]: D. W. Hamacher, K. De Napoli, and B. Mott, “Whitening the Sky: Light Pollution as a Form of Cultural Genocide,” _Journal of Dark Sky Studies,_1, (2020).
[^4]: Elena E. Ćirković and Hilding Neilson, _Indigenous Rights, Peoples, and Space Exploration: A Response to the Canadian Space Agency (CSA) Consulting Canadians on a Framework for Future Space Exploration Activities_, Cornell University, arXiv:2104.07118, April 14,  
2021, <https://arxiv.org/pdf/2104.07118v1.pdf>
[^5]: Government of Canada, “A Framework for Future Space Exploration Activities: Background Information” October 26, 2020, <www.asccsa.gc.ca/eng/astronomy/moon-exploration/frame-work-future-space-explora-tion-activities-background-in-fo.asp>
[^6]: Ćirković and Neilson, _Indigenous Rights._
[^7]: Whose relevance is already called into question by the launch of the James Webb Telescope slated for December 2021.  
Chantelle Bellrichard, “Canadian Astronomers Contend With Issue of Indigenous Consent  
Over Hawaiian Telescope Project,” CBC News, Sept 27, 2020, www.cbc.ca/news/ indigenous/canada-indigenous-consent-hawaii-tele- scope-1.5738068  
Hilding Neilson in conversation with author, September 2021.
[^8]: Neilson and author, 2021.
[^9]: Neilson and author, 2021.
[^10]: “About Native Skywatchers,” [www.nativeskywatchers.com](www.nativeskywatchers.com/about.html)
[^11]: Wilfred Buck, “Makinak: The Turtle,” YouTube video, 3:29, October 3, 2020, <www.youtube.com/watch?v=2aKY198dFgM>
[^12]: Nicole Mortillaro, “‘We Come From the Stars’: How Indigenous Peoples Are Taking Back Astronomy,” CBC News, March 30, 2019, <www.cbc.ca/news/science/indigenous-astronomy-1.5077070>
[^13]: Wilfred Buck, “Atchakosuk: Ininewuk Stories of the Stars,” _First Nations Perspectives Journal_ 2, no. 1,  
(2009): 71-83, [www.mfnerc.org/ wp-content/uploads/2012/11/008\_Buck.pdf](www.mfnerc.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/008%5FBuck.pdf)
[^14]: Karyn Recollet and author in conversation, September 2021.
[^15]: Recollet and author, 2021.
[^16]: Personal correspondence, August 2021.
[^17]: Annette S. Lee, Jim Rock, William Wilson, and Carl Gawboy, “The Red Day Star, the Women’s Star and Venus: D(L/N)akota, Ojibwe and Other Indigenous Star Knowledge,” _The International Journal of Science in Society_ 4, (2013): 153-166, <https://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/2009/2009.02127.pdf>

issue-150-p28-33.pdf

Indigenous

Lera Kotsyuba highlights perspectives from those advocating for ethical negotiations of space in the attempt to ensure colonial procedures on land are not replicated beyond our atmosphere, acknowledging the importance of the sky in numerous Indigenous worldviews.

Star Stories and Indigenous Resistance Against Light Pollution

##### Giving directions is one of the first steps when inviting someone to visit. It is a hosting obligation. Following these directions is a guesting obligation. But there are so many more directions than those guiding a visitor geographically to a place—turn left here, drive until you reach such-and-such a landmark. These directions to BUSH Gallery[^1]—an Indigenous-led conceptual and real gallery space enacted as a collaborative project between artists Tania Willard, Peter Morin, Gabrielle Hill, and Jeneen Frei Njootli, as well as the land—direct the (settler) visitor to reflect on moving through the territories of distinct Indigenous Nations and Indian reserves, and ultimately entering the land as a visitor. Implicating each trip as a political and conceptual journey, the directions suggest that when visiting, settlers do not take mobility on Indigenous lands for granted. These directions draw on divergent experiences of shared histories and signal the exchange of guest-host relations. While highlighting hosting as a form of sovereignty, a relational welcoming, these directions do not let the settler visitor off the hook, instead appealing for a form of guesting that is undertaken with humility.

##### This is part of a larger creative discussion about hosting through art on sovereign Secwépemc Territory (#BUSHGallery) from Tania’s Secwépemc (and settler) perspective, and guesting responsibly on unceded Indigenous lands from Leah’s critical white settler perspective. This visiting exercise has been ongoing during the pandemic, remotely enacted through snail mail and the passing of gifts from the land: from Tania, wenéx (huckleberry) preserves from the steep slopes of Secwépemc Territory and from Leah, maple syrup from trees along the Red River where she lives in Winnipeg, Treaty 1 territory, the territory of the Cree, Oji-Cree, Anishinaabe, Dakota, Dene, and Métis Nations. Enriched by these exchanges, our discussion continues here in this first iteration of “Directions to BUSH Gallery.”
  
  
The early land-rights document _Memorial to Sir Wilfred Laurier, Premier of the Dominion of Canada_, which was issued by the Chiefs of the Secwepémc, Syilx, and Nlaka’pamux Nations and presented in Kamloops, BC, on August 25, 1910, uses the metaphor of guest and host to call for settler accountability:

> With us when a person enters our house he becomes our guest and we must treat him hospitably as long as he shows no hostile intentions. At the same time we expect him to return to us equal treatment for what he receives. \[2\]

The _Memorial_ continues:

> We expect good from Canada. When they \[white people\] first came among us there were only Indians here. They found the people of each tribe supreme in their own territory, and having tribal boundaries known and recognized by all.[^3]

Adopting the ethics of guest-host relations and visiting as a non-colonial/decolonial activation, we offer these directions as both a provocation and a disruption.

Firstly, you \[4\] must know where you are at:  
You must know who you are, where you are, and how you got there. Ask, as Chickasaw scholar Jodi Byrd suggests, what your “positions in empire”[^5] are, both historically and in the present. What are the intergenerational responsibilities that flow from these positions?  
From your relations?

> (include in relations the human and more-than-human) (include in relations your complicities and co-resistances)

What lands, territories, migrations, and journeys do you carry with you?  
What privileges and benefits?   
What struggles?  
Know that struggles ≠ innocence.[^6]

Once you know where you are starting from you can begin your trip planning.  
Note whose land you start from and will be moving through. Consider the Indigenous histories, stories, and knowledges that are unmarked in the everyday descriptions of those territories.

Next, take the highway out of your comfort zone.

You will not find BUSH Gallery on Google Maps.   
You need to be invited.  
BUSH Gallery is a home.

Tania’s great-grandfather used to talk about Indigenous and non-Indigenous people living in different worlds. This is because the Indian reserve system is literally segregated.

You will be leaving your system to enter into another realm.  
One that is not, as you are accustomed, made for you. Prepare yourself: study the unsung, the unstoried, the unheard, and the unwelcome.

> Soon they saw the country was good, and some of them made up their minds, to settle it. They commenced to take up pieces of land here and there. They told us they wanted only the use of these pieces of land for a few years, and then would hand them back to us in an improved condition; meanwhile they would give us some of the products they raised for the loan of our land.[^7]

As you cross over colonially designated territories, question the lines, the borders, the power of prescribed boundaries, and maps as tools of domination.  
Think about how colonial assumptions of unfettered access to, and mobility across, Indigenous lands have been mapped into the “Canadian” state and the state of being “Canadian.”

At your next left,  
Move on from cities and towns. You need to drive dirt roads.  
To the Indian reserve.  
You need to know the history of the Indian reserves, and that in BC we mostly don’t have treaties. BC tricked the treaty.

Arthur Manuel, the late Secwépemc leader, points out that Indian reserves make up .2 percent of the land in Canada.[^8] The _Canadian Encyclopedia_ states that Crown Land makes up 89 percent of the land in Canada. This includes the  
.2 percent of land that is Indian reserves.9  
Do the math.

> They said a very large reservation would be staked off for us (southern interior tribes) and the tribal lands outside of this reservation the government would buy from us for white settlement. They let us think this would be done soon, and meanwhile until this reserve was set apart, and our lands settled for, they assured us we would have perfect freedom of traveling and camping and the same liberties as from time immemorial to hunt, fish, graze and gather our food supplies where we desired; also that all trails, land, water, timber, etc., would be as free of access to us as formerly. \[10\]

Before your next turn, you need to tear down farm fences, yard fences, and construction fences that have become borders. 

Look as you pass towns with street names of white settlers whose racism is encoded into mapping and naming in everyday life. Notice the ways this language is repeated with ease, and the sense of innocence gained through denial.

Notice the lack of services, economies, healthcare, paved roads, clean drinking water on an Indian reserve.

Look for the crossing;  
It may be a bridge, a relation, a story, a conflict. Resist the impulse to turn away.  
Acknowledge your complicities.  
Understand that accounting for your self-in-relation is ongoing.

After a time when they saw that our patience might get exhausted and that we might cause trouble if we thought all the land was to be occupied by whites they set aside many small reservations for us here and there over the country. This was their proposal not ours, and we never accepted these reservations as settlement for anything, nor did we sign any papers or make any treaties about same. They thought we would be satisfied with this, but we never have been satisfied and never will be until we get our rights.[^11]

Consider the labour of hosting:  
Of welcoming and asserting hospitality, relationality, and inclusivity. How hosting is an act of sovereignty that comes with responsibilities.

Consider the implications of guesting:  
Of visiting in engaged and accountable ways; consciously, respectfully, and with humility.  
That this entails an obligation of reciprocity.  
Refuse the desire for mastery. Refuse the desire for emplacement.  
Consider that refusal is a generative act. \[12\]

Do not miss what is important about Indigenous rights.

> They have stolen our lands and everything on them and continue same for their own purposes. They treat us less than children. They say the Indians know nothing, and own nothing, yet their power and wealth has  
> come from our belongings. The Queen’s law which we believe guaranteed us our rights, the British Columbia government has trampled underfoot. This is how our guests have treated us—the brothers we received hospitably in our house.13

Travel with intention.   
Travel with attention.   
Travel with a tension.

Without this, you are reinforcing colonial ways in every step and breath you take;  
In the span of your travels;  
In your passages from one territory, one sovereignty, to the next; In the ease of your trespassing.

> We condemn the whole policy of the BC government towards the Indian tribes of this country as utterly unjust, shameful and blundering in every way. We denounce same as being the main cause of the unsatisfactory condition of Indian affairs in this country and of animosity and friction with the whites. So long as what we consider justice is withheld from us, so long will dissatisfaction and unrest exist among us, and we will continue to struggle to better ourselves. Hoping you have had a pleasant sojourn in this country, and wishing you a good journey home, we remain

Yours very sincerely,

The Chiefs of the Shuswap, Okanagan, and Couteau or Thompson tribes

Per their secretary, J.A. Teit[^14]

Once you have arrived, remember:  
Guest-host relations still exist on these uneven terrains that span the territories of sovereign Indigenous Nations across Canada.

As you continue to journey ask yourself what it might look like if you were aware of and followed the protocols and laws of all the Indigenous Nations who are hosts in the territories you pass through and visit. What would it be, as a guest, to reciprocate for access to these lands and the generosity of the human and more-than-human hosts?

You will not find BUSH Gallery on Google Maps. BUSH Gallery is a home.  
You need to be invited.

These directions point you toward markers—markers on the land, on bodies, on spirits—but you are tasked with your own trip planning.

[^1]: For more info see: <bushgallery.ca>
[^2]: Chiefs of the Shushwap, Okanogan, and Couteau Tribes, “Memorial to Sir Wilfred Laurier,” 2010, <www.sfu.ca/~palys/OpenLetterToWilfredLaurier-1910.pdf>
[^3]: Chiefs of the Shuswap, Okanagan, and Couteau Tribes.
[^4]: We use the word “you” throughout to address the settler visitor to BUSH Gallery. While this is written from our collective voice, we acknowledge that the “you” we are addressing includes Leah as a white settler who inherently benefits from and is complicit in systems of settler whiteness, even as she works to activate her intergenerational responsibilities; Tania has some white ancestry too and acknowledges her work is also about finding home.
[^5]: J. A. Byrd, _The Transit of Empire: Indigenous Critiques of Colonialism._ (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011), xxx.
[^6]: “The metaphorization of decolonization makes possible a set of evasions, or ‘settler moves to innocence,’ that problematically attempt to reconcile settler guilt and complicity, and rescue settler futurity.” Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang, “Decolonization Is not a Metaphor,” _Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society_ 1, no. 1, (2012), 1–40.
[^7]: Chiefs of the Shuswap,Okanagan, and Couteau Tribes.
[^8]: Arthur Manuel, Naomi Klein, Ronald M. Derrickson, and ProQuest (Firm), _Un-settling Canada: A National Wake-Up Call_ (Toronto: Between the Lines, 2015).
[^9]: _The Canadian Encyclopedia_, s.v. “Crown Land,” updated December 16, 2013, <ahref=www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/crown-land>www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/crown-land</a>
[^10]: Chiefs of the Shuswap, Okanagan, and Couteau Tribes.
[^11]: Chiefs of the Shuswap, Okanagan, and Couteau Tribes.
[^12]: A. Simpson, _Mohawk Interruptus: Political Life Across the Borders of Settler States._ (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2014). See also: L. B. Simpson, _As We Have Always Done: Indigenous Freedom Through Radical Resistance_ (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017).
[^13]: Chiefs of the Shuswap, Okanagan, and Couteau Tribes.
[^14]: Chiefs of the Shuswap, Okanagan, and Couteau Tribes.

issue-150-p33-38.pdf

Leah Decter and Tania Willard approach the complexities of stolen land by focusing on one of today’s most pressing questions in “Canada”: how settlers, newcomers, and their descendants can engage in ethical guesting, that which is “relational, respectful, and reciprocal.”

Directions to BUSH Gallery

Mimi Gellman is an Anishinaabe/ Ashkenazi/Métis visual artist, designer, and educator with a multimedia practice in architectural glass, drawing, painting, and conceptual installation. She currently teaches as an Associate Professor in the Faculty of Culture + Community at Emily Carr University of Art + Design in Vancouver, Canada.

##### “\[P\]art of what fascinates us when looking at a map is in inhabiting the mind of its maker, considering that particular terrain of imagination overlaid with those unique contour lines of experience. \[…\] The coded visual language of maps is one we all know, but in making maps of our world we each have our own dialect.”  
—Katharine Harmon[^1]
  
  
In this era of radically accelerated and instantaneous communications, when ideas and images are proliferated worldwide by the mere touch of an iPhone screen, and when we can circumnavigate the globe by plane in a mere 42 hours, it is not surprising that the world has suddenly become a smaller place—a place that we erroneously believe we know. What does it mean _to know_ a place and what social, political, cultural, spiritual, or geographical perspectives contribute to this knowing?

For decades now, visual artists have been addressing questions of place through the implementation of mapping as an aesthetic expression and form. The well-known maps in the works of Jaune Quick-to-See Smith, Ai Weiwei, Guillermo Kuitca, Nancy Graves, Jasper Johns, and Nancy Holt come to mind. These artists have taken up mapping as a means of signaling geopolitical instability and the shifting dynamics of power and influence that are a current reflection of postmodern times. This is equally true for contemporary Indigenous artists, who have embraced mapping as a creative act of self-representation and visual sovereignty, as well as an assertion of Indigenous presence and belonging.

It is important to understand that mapping and other modes of cartography are culturally based forms and systems that vary widely from culture to culture, producing diverse forms of mapping projections and embodying particular spatial and placial relations. Maps are dependent on and arise from particular ontologies and cosmologies that predicate how one sees, values, and engages with the land. In a more normative and deleterious sense, they can also be forms of a colonial infrastructure implemented to carve up, divest, and dispossess Indigenous peoples from their lands and resources.

According to geographers JB Harley and David Woodward, the pre-1987 disciplinary criteria that established conventional maps must include direction, scale, coordinates, and at the very least some mimetic relationship to the landscape being discussed. This criteria shifted in 1987, when the field of cartography was opened up and further expanded upon by Harley and Woodward in a more encompassing definition: “Maps are graphic representations that facilitate a spatial understanding of things, concepts, conditions, processes or events in the human world.”[^2] This new definition allowed many heretofore excluded Indigenous artifacts and mapping forms to be recognized as cartography. And this is where it becomes interesting. Historically, Indigenous maps have been widely misinterpreted through this singular lens that presumes that they can be read through these disciplinary criteria alone, without a deep understanding of the Nation-specific languages, worldviews, or senses of place of the map-makers. The field of Indigenous cartography has a wide range of modalities, including terrestrial maps created to delineate territories, assist with seasonal migrations, navigate river systems, and locate animals for hunting. These maps have also been created for more cerebral endeavours: to stake out social or diplomatic positions, to clarify cross-cultural arguments, as mnemonic devices for memory enhancement, and as a means of symbolizing complex spiritual relationships with families, clans, Nations, and the cosmos.

In Inuit artist Pudlo Pudlat’s _The Settlement from a Distance_ (1982), Pudlat draws his village as situated on an undulating landscape and also unexpectedly places it within the overhanging clouds. Without intimate knowledge of this landscape, his image might read as a delightfully fanciful work. But this is not the case. Pudlat is painting an extraordinary environmental experience which occurs in frozen landscapes. As writer Robin McGrath attests, under certain conditions when the clouds are hanging low to the ground, the clouds reflect the shifting surfaces of the landscape, bodies of water, changes in flora, and the presence of villages that are too far in the distance to be seen from the perspective of someone looking out to the horizon.[^3] In order to gauge how far a village might be—or a herd of Caribou, for example—a traveller would look to the clouds to see the landscape across a greater distance. Rather than creating an imaginative image, Pudlat was illustrating the deeply personal knowledge of his territory that he gained through an intimate experiential relationship and years of perceptive observation.

The concept of one’s consciousness being directional is key to many Indigenous ontologies in North America and assists us in the understanding of many historical Indigenous maps as they were not oriented in terms of the four cardinal directions. There would often be a variation in scale which would indicate areas of significance for the map-makers, which they would explain orally along with additional descriptions of the landscape. Possessing knowledge of the local Indigenous language was also key to an accurate appraisal of these maps, as is indicated by linguist Michael Fortescue, who discovered the complexities in language when researching the structure of words for directions in the Arctic, Greenland, and Alaska. “If you want to get to a particular place and you have to go north, the word for north describes a prevailing wind. But if you pass over a big body of water, the wind actually reverses direction, so the same word means the opposite,” he writes.[^4] Indigenous languages in Canada and the United States express and embody their societies’ understanding of the inherent mutability and relationality found in their universe.

Counter-mapping is a common strategy used to contest the truth of a particular map and correct it. Many Indigenous mapping artists have also employed counter-mapping strategies which use cartography and maps to correct territorial injustices and disrupt the power dynamics embedded within colonial imaginaries. In the digital print series _The Paradise Syndrome_ (2016), Ligwilda’xw of the Kwakwaka’wakw Nations artist Sonny Assu addresses the colonial theft of land and the forcible confinement of the Kwakwaka’wakw within an area that is now a fraction of their former ancestral territory. Assu scanned mariner charts from a set of spiral-bound navigation books inherited from his grandfather. While working with these charts, he was flooded with nostalgia as he recognized the beaches that he had once combed and the bays and inlets where he had once anchored with his grandfather. In _The Paradise Syndrome, Voyage #30_, two significant images appear: a large bird’s head drawn in formline which hovers centrally over the chart along with a broken copper shield that is counter-mapped in the top left corner. The bird’s head serves as an important symbolic presence for Assu, who situates it over the demarcated landscape as a means of communicating the realm of Kwakwaka’wakw cosmology. The copper shield, an important symbol of wealth and status in the potlatch ceremony, is drawn with the outline of his reserve, We Wai Kai, at Cape Mudge on Quadra Island. Assu included the shape of a broken copper shield to indicate the land that the government took away from the Kwakwaka’wakw and to signal the broken relationship that the Canadian state continues to have with these Nations. As Assu states, “Pre-contact, the Ligwilda’xw, the Kwakwaka’wakw and the other Pacific coastal First Nations once had full reign over their respective territories. As I looked over these charts, reliving my childhood on the water, I couldn’t help but think of what the government had left us and what harm this has done. Scanning the vast land and water base, I saw the origin place of the Ligwiłda’xw and was able to trace our move south. I saw where the Ligwiłda’xw, once gathered food. Where the Ligwiłda’xw gathered in times of war, and in times of ceremony, with their neighbours.”[^5]

For Métis/settler artist Katherine Boyer, mapping became a vehicle for understanding and honouring her family’s Métis history in the land now known as Manitoba. In _Red River Trails_ (2014), one of a large series of beaded works, Boyer tracks the migration of her family from the Red River settlements to Turtle Mountain and the Souris Valley. In this series, Boyer only chose locations where her family lived, worked, or travelled, narrating their journey across space and time. The media that she uses for this series—seed beads, fur, birch bark, and shroud cloth (a trade item with a significant history in Métis clothing and adornment)—were chosen for their material nature, their affect, and their direct relationship to traditional Métis culture.

From the late 1800s onward, in a cruel and calculated tactic, the colonial government of Canada moved the Métis from their traditional territories to road allowance lands (places that were destined for new railways and industrial development) and to lands designated by the Métis scrip (a government system that issued documents redeemable for land in exchange for their territorial rights). These scrip lands were specifically chosen by the government to separate family farmlands from each other, and Métis in general from their traditional hunting and fishing grounds. In contemplating these issues, Boyer employed the slow and meditative act of beading to deeply reflect on her lineage and on the love and the losses that her family felt for their lands. The artist has remarked that this series was also a means of inspiring other Métis youth to explore their own histories of belonging.[^6] Boyer believes that the land has its own voice, expressing the idea that in order to fully understand the shared responsibility, self-governance, and agency of Métis people, the land must be understood from a deeply embodied experience.

It is interesting to note that users seldom, if ever, question the authority of their maps. As a result, they often fail to appreciate a map’s influence over political, social, and economic perspectives, attitudes, and power dynamics. In a powerful and evocative multimedia installation, _Battle for the Woodlands_ (2014–2018), Anishinaabe artist Bonnie Devine alters an early 19th-century map of Upper and Lower Canada to reflect an Anishinaabe worldview. For Anishinaabeg, the psychic geography of place establishes the Earth as our mother, and it is through our relationship to the land that we recognize our true nature as a non-binary experience deeply connected to place… we _are_ nature. In _Battle for the Woodlands_, Devine transforms the Great Lakes into animate animal-beings, revealing a world of mutual reciprocity that reflects her understanding of the coherence and boundaries of an Anishinaabe cosmic life. In this mapping installation, the artist narrates the westward migration of people and animals fleeing from colonial land appropriation and the negative forces of industrialization. Also included in this installation is _Objects to Clothe Warriors_, three painted hide cloaks representing Tecumseh, Chief Pontiac, and Crazy Horse—Indigenous warriors who fought for the territories surrounding the Great Lakes and battled to hold the colonizers back. The three woven basket-figures, _Anishinaabitude_, placed at the centre of the installation, represent the First Nations of Serpent River, the people of Walpole Island, and the Mississaugas of New Credit who are the contemporary peoples that have the responsibility now to stand against these ongoing colonizing forces. Devine’s deeply personal and political work resituates the land and waters of the Great Lakes as more than a territory to circumscribe and plunder. It reveals a profound and ongoing responsibility to the lands and waters that gave her birth and that offered the Anishinaabeg both home and sustenance.

We are within a significant moment in the history of the Canadian nation-state—a time of deep public reflection and rising awareness of the historic and ongoing destructive impacts of settler colonialism on the bodies, lands, and cultures of peoples indigenous to this place. It is now understood that the political and cultural ramifications of mapping have implications that go far beyond the charting of unknown territories into a claiming of space and an assertion of sovereignty over Indigenous lands. As Canadian courts address Indigenous land claims, and proof of continuous Indigenous land use is sought, it is imperative that we understand the knowledge embedded within Indigenous cartographic traditions—especially if it is true, as many disciplinary cartographers attest, that colonial conquest has been largely based on the notion that the land belongs to those who draw the maps.

Pudlat, Boyer, Assu, and Devine—among so many other contemporary Indigenous artists—remind us of the significance of place to Indigenous people and, most crucially, that an implicit understanding of Indigenous ontologies, histories, and languages is required in order to read these maps accurately. They require an interlocutor (a living Indigenous person) to unpack the knowledge embedded within them, to bring them to life and to give them voice. Unlike Cartesian maps, which are largely projections of conceptual territory and the power relations that they embed, these Indigenous map-works are embodied agents of knowledge that explore lived experiences and alternative realities, both materially and metaphysically. These maps stand as powerful and poetic representations of the ways in which Indigenous artists challenge the status quo, bring to light Nation-specific narratives, and highlight the ongoing devastation that this colonial government continues to perpetrate against Indigenous peoples and Nations.

[^1]: Katharine Harmon, _You Are Here: Personal Geographies and Other Maps of the Imagination_ (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2004).
[^2]: _The History of Cartography_, ed. JB Harley and David Woodward, vol. 1 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 16.
[^3]: Robin McGrath, “Inuit Maps and Inuit Art,” in _The Inuit Art Enthusiasts Newsletter_ 45 (Spring 1991), 2.
[^4]: British linguist Michael Fortescue, as quoted in McGrath, 2.
[^5]: See Sonny Assu’s artist statement in Mimi Gellman, “Between the Dreamtime and the GPS/ The Metaphysics of Indigenous Mapping” (PhD diss., Queen’s University, 2019), 161.
[^6]: See Katherine Boyer’s artist statement in Mimi Gellman, “Between the Dreamtime and the GPS/ The Metaphysics of Indigenous Mapping” (PhD diss., Queen’s University, 2019), 169.

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Mimi Gellman undertakes close readings of artworks by Sonny Assu, Katherine Boyer, Bonnie Devine, and Pudlo Pudlat, all of whom “use cartography and maps to correct territorial injustices and disrupt the power dynamics embedded within colonial imaginaries.”

The Poetics of Indigenous Carto-Activism

Sophia Arnold is a writer based between Sleaford, England and Montreal, Canada. She is currently pursuing her MA in Art and Politics at Goldsmiths College, University of London, with a specific research focus on surveillance capitalism, critical interface art, and activist art practices.

Whatever the nomenclature, one fact is ubiquitous: the personal data underworld “wants your bloodstream and your bed, your breakfast conversation, your commute, your run, your refrigerator, your parking space, your living room, your pancreas”[^1] to fuel new economies of extraction, hidden from public knowledge, almost unmappable. Individuals are constantly traced, tracked, and analyzed by the platforms they use, masked by the interface; concepts such as Shoshana Zuboff’s “shadow text”[^2] on hidden surveillance exploitation, Frank Pasquale’s “black box society”[^3] on the concealed financialization of society, and Benjamin H. Bratton’s “black stack”[^4] on new modes of governance and political realities formed through the digital, only theoretically outline the opacity of Big Tech’s operations. These concepts take form in Vladan Joler’s digital counter-map, New Extractivism (2020). Engaging with it implores the user to embody and enact a resistance to neoliberal exploitation of the individual, the environment, and society as whole.

_New Extractivism_ is “one big messy assemblage of different concepts and ideas, assembled into one semi-coherent picture or let us say a map, a worldview”[^5] —an outline of the “machine-like superstructure” that is extracting from every corner of our perceivable world. Aesthetically, it resembles a scrollable architectural blueprint, with an accompanying guide and footnotes supplying contextual analysis. Joler places Facebook, Amazon, and Google as the apex of this operation and, throughout the work, explores the multitudinous ways the user is confined, surveilled, and forced to labour—in digital spaces as well as in the planetary-scale supply chains that fuel our personal _Truman Show_ (a fictional world catered and presented to you as truth, in this case by algorithms online). The map begins from the illustrated point of an anonymous individual slowly falling into the black hole of any of the major corporations that govern the digital space and gradually charts what is happening on either side of the interface. This allows the viewer to understand how their digital behaviours create profound new economies—of scale, scope, and action—in which they have no stake.[^6]

From the black hole onward, in the “Forces and Caves” and “Factory” segments of the map, Joler extrapolates how embedded structures of power and subjugation thoroughly undermine the principle of self-determination. He underlines the importance of the creation of what Deleuze calls the dividual: “a physically embodied human subject that is endlessly divisible and reducible to data representations via the modern technologies of control”[^7] —and further, establishes that the data body is “the fascist sibling of the virtual body, a much more highly developed virtual form, and one that exists in complete service to the corporate and police state.”[^8] To help convince the viewer of the accuracy of this assessment, Joler shows how we are willed into this dynamic, fusing Plato’s allegory of the cave and Jeremy Bentham’s idea of the panopticon into what he refers to as the “Platopticon.” Here, the “prisoner \[stands\] in the middle of the cave facing the interface” that masks the “shadow text” of data extraction and behavioural modification, where “\[e\]ach user detained in their own cave is exposed to a designed play adapted only to them.”[^9] Joler points out that the cell also “carries out the function of a factory hall and a resource extraction apparatus. The prisoner/worker performs their three-fold function as a worker, a resource and a product,”[^10] essentially summing up what Zuboff has named “instrumentarian power.”[^11] She notes, “\[t\]otalitarianism was a political project that converged with economics to overwhelm society\[, whereas\] \[i\]nstrumentarianism is a market project that converges with the digital to achieve its own unique brand of social domination.”[^12] This rhizome of extraction architecture, algorithmic lenses, and behaviour-manipulation mechanisms left me feeling vulnerable and defenceless, writhing in my skin. 

In the third and final segment of the map, “Extraction Fields,” the idiosyncratic worldview presented in _New Extractivism_ expands out from the individual, employing a plethora of academic and anecdotal references to denote the wider implications of these processes on phenomenology, deep time, ecology, global labour practices, and governance structures. Joler’s significant threads of exploration here include things like:

“\[m\]illions of years of nonhuman labor have been burned for just two hundred years of industrial spectacle”; 

“\[e\]very click or swipe we make online creates one little hole in the ground, filled with toxic waste and toxic clouds”; 

“\[s\]lave work in mineral extraction in Congo, primitive accumulation and absolute surplus-value production at Foxon in China, body shopping of Indian ICT workers, an army of ghost micro workers behind Mechanical Turk platform, Amazon distribution center workers in the cage, unpaid users and the Google labor aristocracy are all part of the evolved triangular trade system within the planetary scale factory”; and, 

“\[t\]raditional colonial practices of control over critical assets, trade routes, natural resources and exploitation of human labor are still deeply embedded in the contemporary supply chains, logistics and assembly lines of digital content, products and infrastructure.”[^13]

After having scrolled through the whole map, I felt a residual empathy with the small dividual in the “Beyond the capture” illustration who has stepped away from the system to reflect on their possibilities: “Is there any word or meaning that is not captured by this gigantic meta-structure and the millions of synthetic spiders and sensors recording multiple aspects of reality?” and “How do we care for and cultivate ecologies that exist beyond the border of capture?”[^14]

James Bridle, in his book New Dark Age, describes the cloud—that “central metaphor of the internet”—as “a global system of great power and energy that nevertheless retains the aura of something noumenal and numinous, something almost impossible to grasp.”[^15] He theorizes that to reclaim a sense of power within unabridged economic, political, and technological systems, “\[w\]hat is needed is not new technology, but new metaphors: a metalanguage for describing the world that complex systems have wrought.”[^16] By laying out in plain text this age of capitalism that “reaches into the furthest corners of the biosphere and the deepest layers of human cognitive and affective being,”[^17] Joler does just that.

Joler is a professor of New Media at the University of Novi Sad, Serbia, and the leader of SHARE Lab, a “research and data investigation lab for exploring different technical and social aspects of algorithmic transparency, digital labour exploitation, invisible infrastructures, black boxes, and many other contemporary phenomena on the intersection between technology and society.”[^18] Beginning his career in the early aughts, in the boom of European critical media theory in and around post-war Novi Sad, Joler frequented Kuda.org—a research centre “tend\[ing\] to make and interven\[e\] in the sphere of research and artistic and social experimentation within the field of art and culture production”[^19] —where he interacted with “many wonderful and crazy artists.”[^20] After 15 years engaged in this critique and interacting with other “internet detectives” such as Joana Moll, Ingrid Burrington, Critical Art Ensemble, and Surya Mattu, Joler decided to concentrate his artistic and intellectual pursuits to unearthing systems of exploitation entrenched in technology.[^21] Not surprisingly, he has been avoidant of tech, having not had a phone for many years, and so relied on his memory, among other things, to create his maps. However, in recent years, he has become less “fanatic\[al\]” about a complete departure, more “at peace with being a slave,” citing that the time spent learning to function without these applications could be spent, he thinks, investigating something more useful.[^22]

For Joler, the investigation is the most important aspect of the artwork, reminiscent of Tania Bruguera’s Arte Útil and col – lectives such as Forensic Architecture. The applied aspect is vital; he uses the conceptual maps he creates as educational tools for his students, as opposed to artworks and projects made solely for the purpose of museum display.[^23] Prior to _New Extractivism_, he created the three-part _Facebook Algorithmic Factory_ (2016) investigation and the _Invisible Infrastructures_ (2015) series with SHARE Lab and, more recently, collaborat – ed with Kate Crawford on _Anatomy of an AI System_ (2018), a dissection of the Amazon Echo that demarcates “an exploded view of a planetary system across three stages of birth, life and death, accompanied by an essay in 21 parts.”[^24] “I like being able to play between art, science, investigation,”[^25] said Joler.[^26]

Mass societal resistance is not merely a hope for the future but an urgent necessity. In Joler’s map of the digital subterrain, he has harnessed the power embedded within the process of map-making—to “facilitate surveillance and control”[^27] —and turned it back on those who are trying to do the same to us every second. Commissioned by Digital Earth as part of the larger _Vertical Atlas_ publication, not only does _New Extractivism_ detail a coherent, nuanced consciousness of the situation, but it also materially resists surveillance capitalism in its format and exhibition space.[^28] The project resides in a single-page static HTML webpage that is “powered by wind energy, \[has\] no cookies, \[and\] no login or any authentication.”[^29] Crafted from Joler’s previous research creating ethical guidelines for website sustainability, and inspired by the ecological activism of artists like Moll,[^30] the project aims to make its impact within the behemoth supply chains of extraction as small as possible.[^31]

Further enhancing the user’s embodied subversion, _New Extractivism_ premiered on the dark web (specifically the Tor Browser) as part of the “Time Out of Joint” exhibition for the Yerevan Biennial in 2020, a space the curators explicitly chose as a “remote location at the ‘periphery’ of the internet where time operates at a slow pace and pages load unhurriedly.”[^32] The first time I experienced Joler’s work was in this setting and there was something furtive, radical, and all-encompassing about finding the map buried in the depths of internet. It was concrete evidence that there are possibilities of digital space beyond the panoptic one, outside of the constructs that preclude consent, acknowledgement, or autonomy for the user. By bringing viewers to its permanent website or its temporary place of exhibition, _New Extractivism_ obliges the user to subvert surveillance capitalism by explicitly avoiding its machinations, and opens the door to a non-hierarchical, equitable, and slowed space of engagement. As Rosa Luxemburg theorized, resistance comes in waves, and converging individual and collective resistances leave an “archive of traces” for future resistance[^33] —this project, and its wider circulation, being one such example.

The work has taken a turn to a new medium during the pandemic: the layered allegories, concepts, and didactic impacts are animated in video format. Asked to act as a passive voyeur on my own holistic reality for 17 minutes, as opposed to on the static map in which taking a break to digest is possible, this iteration affected every fibre of my being.[^34] Ironically, it is voiced-over by Amazon Polly, which required Joler to pay to input snippets of the map’s accompanying textual descriptions into the service that also tacitly teaches Amazon’s AI, therefore making the user inflict upon themselves a deeply abusive digital labour.[^35] Joler called the Amazon Polly voice the “director” of the work, monotonously spewing words out of the viewer’s device, immersing us and consequentially preventing any form of self-reflexive distance we could have from experiencing the map in its previous format. Joler also adds subtle sonic layers behind the voice to activate the given area of the map highlighted in each moment, which stemmed from he and his friend playing around with synthesizers. Thuds of heartbeats and beeps of a scanner are present, imploring us to go “deeper into our subconscious,” paralleling the processes that surveillance capitalism employs, although not to the same ends.[^36]

The pandemic has only exacerbated this behemoth system _New Extractivism_ has undertaken a review of; Apple, Google, Microsoft, and Amazon have put their methods of data capture to use for the purpose of contact tracing, enhanced workplace-safety protocols, and vaccination rollout. Individuals are constantly supplying data through ubiquitous meta-interfaces for the sake of public health but at the cost of extended tentacles of surveillance into every aspect of their daily lives, reiterating the impermeability of the relations between Big Tech and our formal democratic institutions.[^37] It feels inescapable. However, as Joss Hands notes, resistance can take place within schemes of power when people refuse not just consent but compliance.[^38] With maps like Joler’s that are not accessible without the viewer embodying non-compliance, small waves of resistance are set in place.

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Sophia Arnold offers a rigorously researched read of Novi Sad–based Vladan Joler’s maximalist project _New Extractivism_, which endeavours to visualize, demystify, and trouble the pernicious, labyrinthine insides of data extraction.

Mapping the Black Box

Kyra Kordoski’s art writing and photo documentation have been featured in periodicals including esse arts + opinions, _White Fungus, BOMB, Inuit Art Quarterly,_ CBC, and _The Globe and Mail._ She completed an MA, Cultural Studies from University of Leeds and an MFA, Art Writing from Goldsmith’s College, University of London.

##### “Home, for much of the Arctic year, is a dazzling layer—equally harsh and fragile—that exists between stars and ice.” I wrote a version of this sentence last year for a text on Maureen Gruben’s then newly completed _Aidainnaqduanni_ (2020), a documented sculptural installation on the frozen Beaufort Sea featuring polar bear rugs. The work, which is one of many we discuss below, offers a concise glimpse into a beautiful specificity of place. This is a perspective I’ve had the privilege of experiencing first-hand, having been welcomed to Maureen’s home in Tuktoyaktuk in the Inuvialuit Settlement Region of the western Arctic regularly since 2016 after meeting on a ferry crossing from Tsawwassen to W̱ SÁNEĆ. It has been by far the richest art-writing experience of my life to write not _about_ someone, but _with_ them, particularly over this long period of time. Much of Maureen’s practice is derived from attentiveness to the unpredictable encounters with diverse materials that occur throughout the course of her days. This disparate matter often becomes the physical basis of her works, in striking and uninhibited combinations. The result is a material intelligence that enriches theoretical discourses without becoming subsumed in them; that offers an embedded index of place while holding expansive potential for personal resonances. The following is a collaboratively edited text based on our conversations.

**Kyra Kordoski**: When thinking about your practice in relation to mapping, one of the first pieces that came to mind was _We all have to go someday. Do the best you can. Love one another_ (2019). The work traces an angiogram of your father’s heart onto tanned deer hide using a series of punched-out holes and embroidered knots, creating branching trails that evoke caribou migration patterns over the land. The original medical image you used is essentially a map of your father’s heart, which provides doctors with information that can help them save a life. But in _We all have to go_, the angiogram’s pattern seems more to map what makes a life worth living.

**Maureen Gruben**: When we were in the hospital with my dad, I looked at the angiogram on the computer with the doctors. They showed me exactly the part that was calcified, and right away I asked if I could have a printout so I could show it to my dad, and say to him, “Look, this is the part they are going to remove and replace.” But when we talk about his heart, his heart was here in the North, in the Arctic. He was in every community in the Inuvialuit Settlement Region; he and my mom lived a nomadic lifestyle. They followed the animals. So, I think when we talk about his life, we’re talking about this land. He believed this was the best place on Earth, that we have everything that we need to live a good life here in Tuk. We have caribou, we have geese, we have all the fish we want. And he was also very realistic about life. The title of that work is something he wrote himself on a piece of paper, and I framed that paper. 

The angiogram’s paths go in many different directions but in a set pattern, similar to how the caribou migrate. I created a set of works for an exhibition titled “TUKTUUYAQTUUQ (Caribou Crossing)” (2020) at UVic Legacy Art Gallery and I just immersed myself in the caribou, right from the hooves to the heart to the antlers. I was trying to work with the whole caribou. And it was working with the hooves—specifically, when I found the scent gland at the bottom—that things really started to become clear about how when they move and migrate, they leave their scent in the tundra. So much has to do with smell in life, you know, how we relate to each other. The smoked smell of traditionally tanned hide is a very specific smell that brings you back to Indigenous ways of knowing and making. It’s a very specific, grounding smell, so in putting the angiogram pattern onto the hide, it’s everything. It’s from the land, the animals, and us humans, right? We’re all in this together. 

**KK**: It was a really powerful experience travelling with skidoos and sleds to your spring ice-fishing camp at Husky Lakes, to see how much responsibility you had in keeping everyone in our group safe out on the ice as the spring melt slowly began. We made a few multi-day trips and every time we relied on your ability to work with a sort of living map, a navigation system based on memories of your family taking you out, on finding recent trails in the remaining snow made by other travellers, and on talking to other people at their cabins and out fishing about the ice conditions. _Moving with joy across the ice while my face turns brown from the sun_ (2019) seems to reflect the communal navigation that comes from many individualized experiences—it’s a grouping of 14 borrowed sleds installed on the ice surrounding Tuk, with each one handmade by a different local family.

**MG**: Sleds are all different sizes and builds for different reasons. It’s like having different vehicles—you have vans for a specific purpose, or buses, or little cars. Sleds work the same way.

There are so many Indigenous trails all over the world. They’re like animal trails, like how when you’re picking berries, you run into the trails made by caribou to go down to the water. We’re the same way. We know the most accessible ways to get from A to B. Over years, those trails just become the way to go; they’re the smartest way to get to where you need to be. Certain times of the year you have to shift your path a little, you have to know where to get off the main trail. 

Travelling with my dad, he really didn’t need a map, but he always had this beautiful one you could fold up that was so worn. I wish I had kept that. It had this film on it and it just lasted for so long, and he had added his own marks. Finding your own landmarks is a huge part of how you get to where you’re going without maps; the land itself marks your way. I heard a story from my dad and another elder: when you’re out on the ice at Husky Lakes and you line yourself up right in the centre of a certain pingo, straight out from Saunaqtuuq, that’s a good fishing spot.

**KK**: One of the great parts of spontaneously doing a pop-up gallery at Husky Lakes this spring was how it engaged with that kind of navigation. We installed _Big Hello_ (2021)—that pairs over a hundred second-hand cell-phone cases found in thrift stores with “uppers,” the beaded tops of moccasins and mukluks, that had been found at the dump or gifted to you—in your old canvas-wall tent. We were joking that the gallery was elite in a different way, accessible only by skidoo and to people who knew you and where your camp was, and who had the ability to get there, because Google Maps was not going to help you find it. Your niece Shaylene made it, and she commented on how much history and knowledge was embedded in each piece of beadwork, saying, “If these beads could talk…” In taking the place of phones, the beads create a counterpoint to the immediate data the phones’ map apps would have provided. 

**MG**: Beadwork operates on slow time. And that relates to the moccasin telegraph, too, which was how people used to get in touch with each other in my dad’s time, when everybody was apart. We all didn’t live in the same place then because the land doesn’t really allow for that in terms of resources. You have to kind of spread yourselves out. So, if you needed to communicate with someone you had to send people out to them with a dog team or on foot. My dad witnessed the last chief of Tuktoyaktuk, Mangilaluk, sending a runner with a dog team out to get his good friend Dowlana to come for a drum dance. 

Nowadays, Google Maps is instant and people want to get from A to B as quickly as possible. But here, it’s still a little slower. You’ve seen how slow we have to go—slow enough to watch the ptarmigan eating willow buds on tundra. Even when you go with a boat, you’re not speeding. So, I think maybe you take in things more internally, feel things more, understand a little bit more each time you go by a trail, because it changes all the time and it’s never the same. It’s such a slow mapping process. You notice each and every shift in the land. Some places are receding, but others are building up. It becomes more personal every time. More like home.

**KK**: The fact that some of the uppers for _Big Hello_ were sourced from the Tuk dump indexes your relationship to home, too. It’s been a great resource for your artistic practice; you’ve talked in the past about how the dump always has so many objects in it that clearly locate your community, like sealskin mitts, antlers, even that ookpik you found that one time. If you think of all these little material bits almost as reference points from people’s lives, the dump maybe becomes like a huge crumpled map, with all these life paths tangled together. A lot of the time the materials in your pieces are, in way, redirecting these paths, giving them new trajectories and relationships.

**MG**: I’ve been reading these stories that were gifted to me, a huge set of transcribed interviews the community did with elders in the ’80s, about their lives and memories. You just see the humongous gap from how they lived these very clean, resourceful lives where nothing was wasted, to now. And there’s almost no in-between. It’s almost like we just suddenly got dumped on with all this stuff. And we don’t even know how to handle it, what to do with it—including how to recycle it. But if you see it as a resource, the dump is wealthy. Some hunters use oven racks they find there to make the rods on their harpoons. It’s amazing how much metal is there. I’d like to see a sculptor work with it some time. 

**KK**: Your 2020 land installation, _Aidainnaqduanni_ (“we are finally home”), really delves into how these sorts of encountered materials can generate insights into a sense of place. You took three old polar-bear rugs that were gifted to you by the Museum of Anthropology at UBC and draped each one over a found survey tripod, and then brought the pieces onto the ice which had just started to form on the ocean outside your home. So, the bears were essentially back out on the sea ice again after spending a long time indoors in the South. We documented them surrounded by stars, and again in the morning when they were covered with frost. 

**MG**: We had to walk out over that freshly frozen shallow water to document the installation at night and had to use flashlights because it was completely dark except for all those lights from the stars. And we were trying not to break the thin ice that was building up around the bears, as if that was their space. So, we really thought about every step. When you look at the image, there are white frost flowers scattered across the dark ice; the stars are reflected. But when it was time to bring them in again a few days later, oh my god, they had really frozen in there. There were layers upon layers of ice. It took four of us with axes and chisels to get them out. We even broke a chisel! And we were dealing with the cold the whole time.

**KK**: It was like extreme art handling! They really did not want to leave the ice again. There are so many themes running through _Aidainnaqduanni_; stars have been used to navigate for millennia, and survey tripods are used for mapping the land, too, though differently. The ones used for this project were probably abandoned in Tuk by oil companies in the ’80s or ’90s, and in the piece, they do allude to the fact that we are dependent on the land for resources in one form or another. At the same time, the work emphasizes that every part of the land is also home for someone, for some kind of life.

**MG**: For me the piece is mostly about being able to come home. I think your body will recognize home. And it may not be just one place. Sometimes it’s beyond your control, the way life kind of leads you, and you end up in a place you’re supposed to be. You have that feeling, “I know this place. This is like home to me.” I mean, just look at the way the frost accumulated on the polar bears. Ice crystals were inside their mouths, on their eyes, everywhere. It wouldn’t have seemed right if they were in a desert or among trees. The ice flowers on the polar bear fur, it was part of who they were, like they were connected back to home. The piece is almost like a memorial. And it’s a celebration.

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Disclosure: Kordoski has been working closely with Gruben since 2015 as a writer, photographer, studio manager, and artist assistant. This conversation is one of many iterations of _C Magazine_’s commitment to interrogate, challenge, and play with hard-coded journalistic standards around “objectivity,” including considering the rich (if unconventional) potentials that arise when writers and subjects have existing relationships.

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Installation

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During her conversation with Kyra Kordoski, the artist Maureen Gruben shares anecdotes and insights about navigation in Tuktoyaktuk in the Inuvialuit Settlement Region of the western Arctic—reflecting on their influence on her sculpture and installation work.

Slow Enough to Watch the Ptarmigan Eating Willow Buds on Tundra: A Conversation with Maureen Gruben

Letter

##### Dear _C Magazine_,

The idea of community is often talked about these days as we grapple with finding or maintaining the bonds that keep us connected. But what community requires is more complex than mere commonality. Growing up as second-generation Chinese Canadian in Calgary, my city’s Chinatown was both comfortingly familiar and oddly foreign to me. I had a childhood immersed in the bustling culture of this historic alcove, yet I struggled to truly resonate with the customs and ways of living that I witnessed. I could feel Chinatown welcoming me into its space, but I did not know how to make it a space I belonged to. Reading Steph Wong Ken’s piece, “Community is Never Neutral: Placemaking in Chinatowns Across Canada,” I finally sensed a possible place for myself in a community in which I had only ever considered myself an imposter. When The New Gallery (TNG) first opened in Chinatown, I viewed it as an outsider—much like myself—to a neighbourhood with well-established traditions and heritage. However, over the years, I have indeed seen TNG evolve and grow into a community partner, using art to foster the unique, diverse, and distinctly personal stories of the people in Chinatown. The recognition that a place is, above all else, a collection of its people and their stories gives me hope that the community I always thought I didn’t belong to is simply waiting for me to find my own voice in it.

Thank you for sharing. Sincerely,

##### Angelica Ng

##### Dear _C_,

On this rainy grey day, it was delightful to be transported to summertime on Hanlan’s Point through Jamie Ross’s writing. His description of frolicking on the dunes, gay picnics, and communing with one’s own queerness made me long for the warmth—of weather and being together—of those evenings. It also reminded me of Mary Oliver’s poem “Those Days,” which begins: “When I think of her I think of the long summer days / she lay in the sun, how she loved the sun, how we / spread our blanket, and friends came, and / the dogs played.” I received a free copy of the book _Thirst_, which includes “Those Days,” along with many others poems by Oliver, from The Aesop Queer Library during Pride Month this past summer. The same month, a young man was the victim of homophobic comments and assaulted, injured to the point of needing surgery at the ferry dock near Hanlan’s Point. So 50 years later, there is enough capital for companies to pinkwash, but our community continues to be unsafe. Let us convene for more picnics within the woods and at the water’s edge of our cherished beach.

##### Ashley Culver

##### Hi _C Mag_,

Reflecting on the theme of community in the previous issue of _C Magazine_, what comes to mind is just how small the art world can be. I think of scholars and artist groups I’ve had the privilege of working with and how perfectly events have aligned for me to submit this letter. I recently attended (and intend to continue attending) events part of the “Gudskul’s Knowledge Garden Festival” at the Art Gallery of York University (AGYU). I was introduced to a new and refreshing take on what role the arts can play in the lives of artists, makers, scholars, and the public. Speaking with Amy Zahrawaan during Hanya Memberi Tak Harap Kembali (HMTHK) or To Give and Expect Nothing in Return, we discussed the benefit of sharing artwork to relationships and his admirable goal of remembering everyone he meets, including me (we initially met in 2019).

Reading Vince Rozario’s piece about how Gudskul came to be in touch with curator Emelie Chhangur (and the AGYU by extension), and about the thought process behind some of the collective’s work, deepened my understanding that despite its size, there is a general lack of connectivity in the Toronto art scene. Relatedly, the discussion of burnout in Rozario’s interview also struck a chord with me; as Geneviève Wallen says, “it’s not normal to burn out in your 20s!” I fear that maybe that’s false. Among my peers and I, hustle culture is prevalent. As artists and students, we share the mindset that if we—even for a moment— stop working, we’ll be lost in the tides of other eligible and diligent youths. Perhaps the more accurate statement is that it ought not to be normal to burn out in your 20s. Gudskul may well be putting us on a path that will ease this mindset and elevate grassroots arts organizations to be more communicative with one another than ever before; we only stand to gain from it.

##### Liz Tsui

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Letters reflecting on issue 149 “Community.”

Letters

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Artist Project

Razan Al-Salah is an indisciplinary artist currently investigating the material aesthetics of dis/appearance of places and people in colonial image worlds, breaking these thresholds of view into elsewheres here, where colonialism no longer makes sense. Her work has been experienced in community-based and international galleries and film festivals. She teaches at Concordia University in Tiohtiá:ke/Montreal.

Artist

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Razan Al-Salah brings together touristic images of Canada Park in Israel/Palestine to draw attention to one of colonialism’s many insidious tools of erasure—land use redesignation and afforestation. Accompanying text by guest curator Dana Qaddah.

No Man’s Land

Dana Qaddah (b. Beirut, Lebanon) is an interdisciplinary artist and independent curator currently based on unceded Musqueam, Tsleil-Waututh, and Squamish territory. Qaddah’s practice uses archives of personal and itinerant cultural knowledge to traverse themes of Arab futurism and storytelling, while reflecting on the condition of being abstracted from the destruction of one’s own sense of self and place.

To understand the significance of Canada Park, one must know something of its geographic history. The park is located in the area of land stretching west of the holy city of Jerusalem, overlooked by Latrun’s historic forts, castles, and monasteries, deeming it a critical line not only for transportation, but for offence and defence. Latrun alternated between Arab and Zionist control until the British Mandate expired on May 14, 1948 and the State of Israel was declared the following day, which Palestinians refer to as the Nakba, or “the catastrophe,” when around 750,000 Palestinians were expelled from their homes. Battles over control of several areas of Palestine broke out, and Jordan-controlled Latrun was an especially heavy site of conflict. In 1949, after repeated and failed attempts by Israel to invade Latrun, armistice lines were drawn and it was included within the Green Line—Israel’s international border adjacent to the West Bank, otherwise known as “no man’s land.” Consequently, Arab residents were exiled from Latrun to the eastern neighbouring villages of Imwas, Yalo, and Bayt Nouba. Less than 20 years later, in 1967, the SixDay War led to the complete capture of Latrun—as well as Imwas, Yalo, and Bayt Nouba—by Israeli forces, as part of plans to develop the “Jerusalem corridor.” After their populations were driven out to Jordan, Gaza, and the West Bank, and their villages demolished, “no man’s land” was rendered “public land” by Israel, transforming its legal status from international to national control. The area was subsequently handed over to the Jewish National Fund (JNF). 

Established in 1901, the JNF is a state-sanctioned organization propagating environmental narratives as a means to annex land, erase Palestinian geographical history, and expand Zionist settlement while refusing Arab tenancy. A beacon of eco-colonialism and discrimination, the JNF’s reforestation program deems confiscated land mistreated and needing rehabilitation. They shroud emptied villages in fast-growing pine trees and evergreens—non-indigenous to the region’s ecology—engineering a European landscape, effectively erasing traces of people and obstructing their ability to return home. Most recently in August 2021, a wildfire tore through areas of Jerusalem, revealing the legacy of centuries-old terraces built by Palestinian farmers, cloaked in Scots pine, a European species of pine tree, planted by the JNF after the Nakba. This strategy has been exercised on the ruins of some 400 villages in Palestine; Latrun, Imwas, Yalo, and Bayt Nouba fell victim to the same fate in 1969 when the JNF established Canada Park on areas from which thousands of people were expelled. The park encompasses the ruins of Imwas and Yalo; Beit Nouba was buried by the Mevo Horon settlement, and a major highway was established along Latrun, which now hosts two settlements, the “Oasis of Peace” and the “Jesus Brotherhood,” as well as an Israeli military museum and memorial site.

_During an action in protest of the Port of Vancouver allowing Israeli shipping company ZIM to dock in May 2021, a bystander confronted activists by asking how protesting in Canada will do anything for Palestine_. Canada Park—a symbol of the ongoing fraternal relationship between Canada and Israel—was largely funded by the Canadian faction of the JNF, an organization with Canadian charitable status which continues to raise $10 million annually in tax-deductible donations toward the establishment and maintenance of settlements in Israel. In 1975, former prime minister John Diefenbaker visited the park to inaugurate the John Diefenbaker Parkway, a section of the 700-hectare park with one million new trees, as well as sites for camping and picnics. In 2007, JNF Canada had raised $7 million toward restoring the park and further concealing Palestinian history with plaques acknowledging Canadian donors like the City of Ottawa and the Toronto Police Department.

Replete with springs, hiking trails, orchards, and archaeological sites from the Roman, Byzantine, and Ottoman periods, the park is a historical attraction for tourists who are not made aware that the land’s most recent history included the wilful destruction of 1,500 Palestinian homes. Annually, hundreds of thousands of visitors capture and share photographs that detail many narratives of the land, though decisively not the most recent one.

In _No Man’s Land_, Razan Al-Salah has gathered visual material depicting such tourist activity, landmarks, and military processions, in an ironic display of the Israeli “joie de vivre” which floods online search engines. In another spread, Al-Salah reminds us of the 2007 procession along the fences of Canada Park commemorating 40 years since the expulsion of Palestinians from Latrun and its domino effect which was ultimately interrupted by Israeli military force. Adjacent to this page is a visualization of the erasure of Imwas over time with sourced images which were captured from one location, years apart. 

Al-Salah sees Canada Park as the pinnacle of a colonial PR success story, the engineering of a consumable landscape also demonstrating the link between national parks and the nation-state project. _No Man’s Land_ refuses the very partition of Palestine for the establishment of a nation-state, from the activities of Israel and the JNF to Canada’s complacency regarding the expansion of Israeli settlement in Palestine—not to mention Canada’s own history of establishing green zones through the displacement and dispossession of Indigenous people within its own borders. 

By alluding to the commons of digital space as an extension of the physical, Al-Salah invites readers to participate in challenging the normalization of erasure by counterflooding [websites with Zochrot Organization’s images of the procession to Latrun](https://www.zochrot.org/en/activity/52157).

The Artist Project is supported in part by [Partners in Art](https://partnersinart.ca/).

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In this accompanying text to Razan Al-Salah’s _No Man’s Land_, guest curator Dana Qaddah elucidates the story behind the park’s name and draws unsettling parallels between Israel’s and Canada’s respective histories.

No Man's Land by Razan Al-Salah: Text

Review

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jayne Wilkinson is a writer, editor, and curator. She was formerly Editor-in-Chief at _Canadian Art_ and regularly contributes to art publications including _C Magazine_, _e-flux Criticism_, _esse arts + opinions_, _Momus_, and others. She holds an MA in Art History and Critical Theory from the University of British Columbia and is an occasional lecturer in Visual Studies at the University of Toronto.


The myth of infrastructure’s purposeful invisibility is persistent. Google Maps and Google Earth selectively determine what is visible online, and corporate landscaping constructs natural sightlines to hide infrastructures of extraction, transportation, and waste from view. Still, it’s very possible to see where our garbage piles up, to understand where our energy comes from, and to know the toxic supply chains that produce our devices. Will Kwan’s “Terra Economicus” confronts this terrain through a selection of installations and photographs spanning the past decade. The work builds an unexpected but direct relationship between the politics of class and colonization in India, Canada, and Hong Kong through integrated critiques of the “wellness” movement, environmental racism, and the habits of a leisure class who retreat from polluted, hot cities to find solace in mountaintops and lakesides.

In the title work, _Terra Economicus_ (Superior) (2017–2020), Kwan piles a dozen wooden Muskoka chairs (a style of chair popular in cottage country) to form a barrier in front of a video projection; the chairs are painted in the palette of Lawren Harris’s painting _Lake Superior_ (c. 1924), transposing representations of one region to another, Superior to Muskoka. The video shows drone flyover views sourced from realtor websites designed to show off the valuable assets of expensive lakefront vacation properties. Kwan’s careful editing produces a horror-film effect, with short, timed clips revealing just enough information to sense that something terrible has happened. Some are sunny scenes with wide, fisheye views, and others are cropped closely as though you are walking through the space yourself, but none have people in them. A loud buzzing with alternating silences accompanies each clip, and the persistent pace through lavish, empty homes is unsettling. Everything is on: lights, ceiling fans, taps, and showers—all wastefully running as though to prove an absolute luxury. It’s a science-fiction ending to the climate apocalypse to suggest that, even when all homes are abandoned, the wealthy will keep their water running. 

The subtle reference to Harris’s _Lake Superior_ may not be obvious to a casual observer, but in an institution like The Robert McLaughlin Gallery, which holds many works by the Group of Seven and Painters Eleven, the tangential critique is welcome. The Group of Seven frequently depicted the Canadian landscape empty of people, demonstrating land that was open to extraction—and were lauded for it. Throughout the 20th century, those images of Canada’s expansive geography maintained a visual iconography of wilderness such that the national economy could be built upon an aggressive program of logging, mining, and resource extraction. But as catastrophic climate change drives us toward increasingly unliveable conditions, real estate—rather than resource extraction—has become the industry that relies upon an imagery of wilderness to sell the fantasy of escape and remote living.

Elsewhere, Kwan’s conceptual approach to value and land use is made apparent through language, and the relationship between text and image. In _Terroir, Terror, Terroir,_ (2020–2021), four photographs show a field of grasses and wildflowers that have grown over a large landfill used exclusively by the city of Toronto. Overlaid texts describe the way it smells in the quirky, specific language of a professional sommelier: “penetrating aromas of rotten eggs, rotting cabbage, and boiled potatoes define the nose and attack sharply.” Those rotting, pervasive smells are a reality inequitably forced upon the communities adjacent to the dump who did not produce its trash. In _Meta_ (2020), digital stock photographs, showing outstretched arms cupping handfuls of soil, are paired with single-word metadata descriptors (some actual, some added by the artist) articulating a poetic web of destructive processes connected to resource extraction. The healthy, black soil is actually bitumen, which shifts the reading toward ideas of ecological destruction and dangerous toxicity. Excavating meaning through language aligns the work with legacies of Conceptual Art and photographic post-conceptualism—think of New York artists like Martha Rosler and Hans Haacke, or Vancouver artists like Ken Lum and Ian Wallace. Kwan’s critical engagement with the digital construction of contemporary images pushes beyond this earlier generation’s concerns, though, particularly given that digital files are already text/image constructions, made of pixels and code, not light and film. Still, like the photo-conceptualists, Kwan asks how we can so easily assume meaning in images: why does a meadow signify beauty or a handful of soil telegraph environmental consciousness?

The largest installation, _Mountain Pose_ (2010– 2020), critiques how the wellness industry and the widespread adaptation of yoga practices have capitalized on the very idea of nature as aesthetic, pleasing, and healthy. Hand-cut yoga mats are layered to produce topographical maps in three dimensions that accurately depict the locations of hill stations throughout India on a miniature scale. Hill stations were settlements high in the mountains established during British colonial occupation, and were largely based on military strategy and the premise that polluted cities were bad for health: retreat became a signifier of wealth and class. I wonder if it’s too simple to read this in light of the current moment, when many are leaving urban areas en masse, happy to work “remotely” as privilege affords. Of course, it’s not the working class who are able to do so. Those who work in hospitals, the service industry, and other front-line settings are not able to conduct their labour lakeside. The purpose of these high hill stations foretells a disturbing but coming future when only the wealthy can escape the most intense weather emergencies, retreating farther and farther from fires, rising seas, hurricanes, and unsafe drinking water.

On the opposite wall, an unlit neon sign reads “WATER IS TAUGHT BY THIRST”—an evocative aphorism suggesting we only know something through its absence. It’s poetic, but suggestive of more alarming contemporary realities for a country facing catastrophic wildfires and drinking-water advisories on First Nations lands in nearly every region, province, and territory—most recently in Iqaluit. Those who are thirsty know the price, and cost, of water. Kwan’s projects point to this capitalization of nature, through a determined and rigorous conceptual framing. It’s the aesthetic—and what the natural world signifies—that is being sold back to consumers as a class aspiration. This was a strangely foretelling exhibition, ostensibly about the economy of the land but ultimately about how the idea of nature can be marketed, bought, and sold as much as the tangible resources extracted from it.

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“Terra Economicus” ran from 2 October 2020 to 22 August 2021 at the Robert McLaughlin Gallery, Oshawa, ON. Curated by Leila Timmins.

“Terra Economicus” — Will Kwan

**Greta Hamilton** is a writer and artist working between Toronto and rural British Columbia. They are an editor of _Silverfish Magazine_.

As I write this in the haze of late summer, I realize it will be months before this review reaches the public. By then, we’ll be in the darkness of winter across so-called Canada. For now, though, the days are long and hot, the sun red against polluted skies as wildfires blaze across vast territories. It’s a crisis, a climate emergency that will be made more palatable by winter’s cold. In the veil of urgency that summer brings, I wonder what can be done to rectify this disaster.

Diane Borsato and Amish Morrell’s _Outdoor School_ (2021) offers an encouraging vision of artistic and pedagogical responses to climate change. The book is a survey of contemporary Environmental Art that emphasizes learning through land-based practices. The projects in _Outdoor School_ include Borsato and Morrell’s curatorial practice under the same name, performances and exhibitions by FASTWÜRMS, BUSH Gallery, Sameer Farooq, Ayumi Goto, and Jamie Ross, among others; a standout essay by Karen Houle on the ethics of education and farming; and a conversation between Jen Delos Reyes, Borsato, and Morrell that illuminates the editors’ pedagogical practice. The book is a counterpoint to the grief and uncertainty of climate change. It assembles a collection of artist projects and interventions that inspire reciprocity and commitment to our lived environments through multidirectional knowledge sharing. Each project emphasizes a mode of looking, learning, gathering, and sharing that honours the knowledge of both experts and amateurs.

_Outdoor School_ brings together a multitude of epistemologies and knowledges across its pages. At times, certain performances and projects are truncated—Bill Burns’s _The Goat Milking_ (2014) and D’Arcy Wilson’s _#1 Fan_ (2018), for example, each appear on a single spread with a short write-up, more as an homage to the project than a careful reading. Elsewhere, however, the longer essays and conversations evoke a deep sense of embodiment that emphasizes the _Outdoor School_ methodology.

Morrell opens the book with a land acknowledgement of both the many lands the artists in _Outdoor School_ work on and his own upbringing in Unama’ki/ Cape Breton. He writes of standing in the kitchen of his childhood home, “I would look out the window at the mountain and the waterfall and think that this was where the water came from. \[…\] I remember the dirt on my hands, the water that came from the mountain, the sawdust from the mill that we used to store the carrots, the sense that I was not just in that place, but that I was made from it.” Both Borsato and Morrell foreground that sense of interconnectivity in their work—a porous relationship between land and self that centres reciprocity. Each of the artist projects in _Outdoor School_ is framed through that methodology, reminding the reader that to be an artist is to invoke connectivity to the histories, ecologies, cosmologies, and knowledges of the land on which we work and live.

_Outdoor School_ generates a public intellectual culture contingent on environmental learning. Non-Western taxonomies, Indigenous ecological knowledges, witch epistemologies, and queer and trans knowledges come together in a messy ecological web, more akin to the making of a life than an art practice. In this way, _Outdoor School_ inspires artistic practices that require a particular kind of embodiment and grounding—it is not the technical skill or mastery of materials that make the projects in _Outdoor School_ art, but the modes and methods by which the artists live their lives.

In reading _Outdoor School_, I wondered how this methodology might also reverberate toward policy and governance shifts related to climate change. Terri-Lynn Williams-Davidson’s performance with Public Studio, _The Rights of Nature_ (2017), imagines a charter of rights for the Earth. The performance included a public reading of the charter by a chorus of performers who read clauses including “2a. the responsibility to recognize and respect that we are all one, that everything depends upon everything else, that we are all interconnected and interdependent and our fates are inextricably interlinked.” The performers call for the Canadian government to include this imagined charter in the country’s official Charters of Rights and Freedoms. The performance echoes the overarching theme of the book—that creative interventions can inspire a shift in our sense of responsibility toward our lived environments, which might in turn inspire the sense of interconnectivity and community that initiates institutional change.

In “Farm as Ethics,” Karen Houle describes her pedagogical practice through urban farming as institutional critique. At Guelph University, Houle teaches Western philosophy and uses the urban organic farm as an alternative site of learning. Alongside students, Houle farms as an antidote to the disembodied traditions of Western philosophical thought, resisting mind-body duality in exchange for holistic, resilience-building labour—hands in dirt and tasks dependent on whole systems. This labour, Houle describes, is the work of philosophy itself. She writes that, at the end of the day, “if we still have questions that still seem important \[…\] we can ‘do some philosophy’ together: we can trace out the ways that the claims in the texts we read do or do not align with what we have just done together. \[…\] We might suddenly find it all embarrassing and banal and stupefyingly pretentious, and if so, we’ll just divide up the leftover garlic and go home.”

I’m keeping the lessons of _Outdoor School_ with me through the winter: that to be an artist is to live in reciprocal relation with the environment, to care deeply for and listen closely to our surroundings. Through artistic intervention, the projects in _Outdoor School_ generate potential ways through our era of disaster. They imagine a decolonial, nurture-based culture that exists outside of, and in resistance to, galleries and institutions. While I’m not always sure that artistic interventions are the most effective mode of instigating political change, I’m inspired by Borsato and Morell’s pedagogy. I’m also inspired by the kids who are building blockades in defence of old-growth forests at Fairy Creek, by the Wet’suwet’en people who have been protecting their territory from Coastal Gaslink for years, and by the networks of mutual-aid organizers who have been finding ways to provide sustenance to their communities. The resounding notion throughout _Outdoor School_ is that our life-sustaining practices reverberate into our art. So how do the lives of activists and organizers fit in to the visual and intellectual culture that _Outdoor School_ imagines? As Borsato and Morrell’s project continues, I wonder how direct action, mutiny, and gestures more challenging to aestheticize will fit in to the landscape of contemporary Environmental Art. Can that shift in art practice forge a resonance beyond the arts sector, toward something impactful enough to mitigate this emergency?

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_Outdoor School_ was published by Douglas & McIntyre, Madeira Park, BC, 2021.

Outdoor School: Contemporary Environmental Art Ed. by Diane Borsato and Amish Morrell

Julian Jason Haladyn is an art historian, cultural theorist, and Assistant Professor at OCAD University.

Projected onto screens in a large window at the back of Museum London, Mohawk filmmaker and artist Shelley Niro’s exhibition “Thinking Of You” quietly speaks. The work is only presented at night, meaning those who want to view it must stand outside in the August heat, the quiet sounds of Deshkan Ziibi (Anishinaabemowin for “Antler River”) or the Thames River audible in the background. I assume that for most of the night there are few, if any, people to experience the project. Regardless, it keeps addressing all beings, including the river that is a prominent part of the landscape around the museum. Standing in this context, I wait for the sun to set, for the darkness, so that I can see the work more clearly. 

Two large screens hang in the window. Presented on the left screen are two photographs projected side by side, each given its own space. Changing at regular intervals, the images cycle through two previous photographic series that Niro produced: _Resting Place Of Our Ancestors_ (2019) and _Final Moments Thinking Of You_ (1998).

_Resting Place Of Our Ancestors_ consists of closeup pictures of fossils, presented as large-scale photographs. “I’ve spent many hours looking at different species embedded into rock faces,” Niro writes about these images in a past exhibition statement. “I’ve become attached to the narrative of these small creatures as they went about their daily tranquil lives and suddenly they are now the centrefolds for explaining my own existence as I slither along the edges of this century. These imprints of long gone life unite us all as evidence of where we come from.” This philosophical approach to life is a common quality of much of Niro’s art, from her interest in the cosmos to her exploration of the Earth as a history.

_Final Moments Thinking Of You_ is a series of twelve photographs in which the four basic elements— water, fire, air, and land—are represented in groups of three images per element. The first two consist of relatively close-up pictures of water and fire, which appear almost like patterns at a distance. For land there are images of the ground in a wooded area, as if one is looking down. For air the artist is a bit more poetic, showing two images of the sky, as if one is looking up, and one picture includes a white, patterned material band that gives the impression of looking at the sky through a curtained window. The title of the current exhibition is taken from this series, minus the catastrophically toned “final moments.”

On the right-hand screen of “Thinking Of You,” Niro presents a handheld video of a river—an approximately half-minute clip that is looped, without sound. Shot from the banks of the river and using trees as a framing device, the scene shows rapidly moving waters at a relatively short distance. The context of this particular space is not shown, making it impossible to identify the specific river—although I am sure that detail does not matter to the Antler River, as it mirrors the movements on-screen. It is hard to claim that the video is without sound as I stand hearing water and listening to geese flying overhead. As birds fly by, their shadows move across the glass of the large window and the images presented on both screens. These birds become part of the work.

I would be remiss not to acknowledge the horrifying discovery this past year of more than 1,300 unmarked graves containing the remains of children who died in former Canadian residential schools. Niro’s title, “Thinking Of You,” is in part a gesture toward a collective act of thinking about these children. This continuing story of colonization is also part of the work—as are the COVID\-19 pandemic and the increasing environmental and ecological disasters around the world. Experiencing this work outside, it is hard not to see the world as part of Niro’s project—or at least what the work is in dialogue with.

As a “constellation” of the exhibition, Niro’s poem “DARKNESS” is presented at the nearby SATELLiTE Project Space. Shown in the window as white text on a black background, the title indicates the poem is speaking to an experience of darkness through the artist’s memories “about living on the / Six Nations Reserve / as a kid.” She describes “being outside / at night / in darkness”—which I read standing in downtown London at night, surrounded by lights. The poem addresses the role of the dark in the city, which for Niro is Brantford, where “Street lights are constantly on” and all the inhabitants, not just humans, suffer from “light pollution.” She ends by lamenting: “I miss the darkness.” These words are on my mind while I stand and watch the projections of “Thinking Of You” behind Museum London, thinking about having to wait for the dark before the work can communicate. And while there may be less people during this time, there certainly is a lot of life to be experienced.

In a contemporary world that overprivileges the individual, Niro’s project is not simply _thinking of_ us in particular, but rather addressing all beings as they exist within a dialogue. If we imagine “Thinking Of You” as a dialogue between the Antler River and the images in Niro’s works, we begin to see ourselves not as the centre of this narrative, not the “you” in the title, but rather as part of a larger conversation with the world that the artist wants us to recognize.

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“Thinking of You” and “DARKNESS” ran from 1 August to 31 August 2021 at Museum London and SATELLiTE Project Space, London. Curated by Peter Lebel and Matthew Ryan Smith.

Header

C Mag

Issue 150

Maps

Credits

Letters

Letters

Editorial

Editorial: Maps

Explore Issue by Images

Features

Hydrocartography: Mapping with Waters

The Map Is the Territory: On Lucas LaRochelle’s Queering the Map

Star Stories and Indigenous Resistance Against Light Pollution

Directions to BUSH Gallery

The Poetics of Indigenous Carto-Activism

Mapping the Black Box

Slow Enough to Watch the Ptarmigan Eating Willow Buds on Tundra: A Conversation with Maureen Gruben

Artist Projects

No Man’s Land

No Man's Land by Razan Al-Salah: Text

Columns

Composition: Cacophony and the Beyond: An Aural Topography

One Thing: Octavia E. Butler on Mars

Tilling: Governance, Ungovernance, and Other Possibilities

Reviews

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

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

“Terra Economicus” — Will Kwan

Outdoor School: Contemporary Environmental Art Ed. by Diane Borsato and Amish Morrell

“Shelley Niro: Thinking Of You” and “DARKNESS” — Shelley Niro

“Provisional Structures” — Carmen Papalia with Vo Vo and jes sachse

“Jess Dobkin's Wetrospective”

SULLAE 술래 — Jesse Chun

The Breaks — Julietta Singh

“Soul Power” — Jan Wade

“Of things as they happen to be” — Jeanette Johns

The Andean Information Age — Oscar Santillán and Alessandra Troncone