Listening, Dreaming, Fabricating

Third Text, 2013

Across disciplines, scholars are overturning objectivist approaches to the environment in favour of theorizing the agency and liveliness of matter. The ecological promise of these ‘new materialisms’ is to invite dialogue among a wider host of agents, raising the possibility of an ethics that binds humans to the material entities upon which our livelihoods depend. However, any vision of global environmental justice is incomplete without engaging longstanding indigenous philosophies of materiality. The authors devote the first portion of this essay to an analysis of why it has been difficult for the ‘new materialisms’ to incorporate indigenous intellectual traditions into discussions of non-human agency, focusing on contemporary arts discourse. They then turn to a discussion of recent works by Native North American artists Jimmie Durham, Rebecca Belmore, Will Wilson and Jolene Rickard, which incorporate indigenous understandings of material with an acute awareness of the contemporary, global challenges of co-habitation.

At the Crossroads of Music and Social Justice, 2022

I offer this chapter as a contribution to these rich and exigent discourses on music and sound, nature and survival, a story unfolding about an old sailing ship of wood and steel, which has steered cross-cultural and cross-continental knowledge exchanges through music and spectacle for the sake of our spe- cies and all others. It is the story of Arka Kinari, a ship that sailed around the world and through a global pandemic, powered by the wind and the sun, and offered a floating, multisensory spectacle of music, video art, dance, and the- ater to coastal villagers on the remotest islands of Indonesia. Arka Kinari is a remarkable ship. It is also a radical reimagining of the band tour, the concert setting, and climate activism that recollects and activates old knowledge of the sea.

This article explores the genesis of the film Ten Canoes in the photographs taken by anthropologist Donald Thomson, in Arnhem Land, in the 1930s. Thomson’s images profoundly informed the look and content of the film, and the paper traces this genealogy in order to identify a ‘cultural imaginary’ at work in the film. I argue that a close study of Thomson’s original photographs reveals an approach to photography and to culture that dramatically exceeds the boundaries of the detached anthropological/scientific gaze. Thomson’s vision is a highly tactile one. His images are as much an encounter with the light of the world as they are a document of a time, an environment and a culture; his lens is as much an organ of touch as an instrument of observation. In a remarkable example of what Tim Ingold has called ‘animate thought’, Thomson uses the materiality of photography to make manifest a life-world in which reeds, water and sky are as animate as human figures. Not easily accessible to established criteria for analysing ethnographic images, such as questions of self-reflexivity, Thomson’s polycentric images profoundly challenge the humanist assumptions of many contemporary approaches to reading images. This insight raises new questions about both ethnographic photography and the relationship between the photographs and Ten Canoes.

Rowman & Littlefield International, 2020

Historically, artwork has played a powerful role in shaping settler colonial subjectivity and the political imagination of Westphalian sovereignty through the canonization of particular visual artworks, aesthetic theories, and art institutions’ methods of display. Creative Presence contributes a transnational feminist intersectional analysis of visual and performance artwork by Indigenous contemporary artists who directly engage with colonialism and decolonization. This book makes the case that decolonial aesthetics is a form of labour and knowledge production that calls attention to the foundational violence of settler colonialism in the formation of the world order of sovereign states. Creative Presence analyzes how artists’ purposeful selection of materials, media forms, and place-making in the exhibitions and performances of their work reveals the limits of conventional International Relations theories, methods, and debates on sovereignty and participates in Indigenous reclamations of lands and waterways in world politics. Brian Jungen’s sculpture series Prototypes for New Understanding and Rebecca Belmore’s filmed performances Vigil and Fountain exhibit how colonial power has been imagined, visualized and institutionalized historically and in contemporary settler visual culture. These contemporary visual and performance artworks by Indigenous artists that name the political violence of settler colonial claims to exclusive territorial sovereignty introduce possibilities for decolonizing audiences’ sensibilities and political imagination of lands and waterways.

This paper was featured in the Pointure supplement (edited by Leora Farber and I), published in December 2012 in Art South Africa. This publication following the Pointure exhibition and colloquium hosted by the University of Johannesburg in 2013. This pdf contains this and other articles that emerged from these events: In pointing to a lace structure in the human experience, the Irish poet and scholar John O’ Donohue chooses an apt model for the frailty of the human interface with the eternal. He also gestures to an unexpected notion: that it is the ruptures in our lives, the openings, punctured, trimmed and mended, and at times raw, that are the most sublime. The recent Pointure exhibition and colloquium ‘laced’ together a poignant range of artworks and theoretical papers that relate to artistic acts of stitching and notional derivations of this material phenomenon. In these written theses and artworks, the acts of stitching, pricking, suturing, tearing, rupturing, cutting, embroidering, appliquéing, grafting, spinning and weaving, and a myriad of other incarnations of this practice of the ruptured mark, demonstrate and invoke the incisive, deconstructive, cathartic and prophetic energy of the ‘stitch’. Derrida’s rhetorical formulation – pointure – is employed as a probing theoretical frame for this ‘weave’ of medium and metaphor. Pointure is a metaphoric device in Derrida’s 1978 essay ‘Restitutions of the truth in pointing [Pointure]’, ‘poking holes through’ and ‘lacing together’ Heidegger and Shapiro’s exploration of themes of presence in Vincent van Gogh’s painting, Oude Schòenen (Old Shoes). This mimetic word relates to printing in terms of the “small iron blade with a point, used to fix the page to be printed on to the tympan” as well as the “the hole which it makes in the paper”; and serves the figurative purpose of opening the text for critique. Pointure also references the practice of cobbling (in an intertextual gesture to van Gogh’s shoes) in relation to the ‘sewing together’ of the shoe, and the ‘drawing together’ action of the lacing-eyelets. In the context of the Pointure exhibition and colloquium, pointure is employed as a trope through which complexes of visual culture involving ‘pointured’ mediums and ‘pointured’ literary approaches may be critically framed. In this sense, pointure serves as a textu[r]al ‘loom’ for weaving together theory and practice, with the ease that one might lace a shoe. This extended conception of pointure is here entwined (by unisex design) with Bracha Lichtenberg Ettinger’s intrauterine inspired matrixial theory – a “maternal-feminine” model for human discourse. In a leaning towards aesthetic application and revisionist thinking, matrixial theory and Derridian pointure share a common zeitgeist. Further to this Ettinger has also linked matrixial theory figuratively to the notion of weaving. In terms of the articulation of ‘pointure-type’ visual and textual practices, matrixial theory represents significant possibilities, as it allows for a complex ‘weave’ of subjectivities within visual representation and the ‘warp and weft’ of practice and being. Ann-Marie Tully is an artist, writer, and Research Associate at the Visual Identities in Art and Design Research Centre, Faculty of Art, Design and Architecture, University of Johannesburg.

Transmotion, 2019

This article seeks both to communicate a sense of the vibrancy and diversity of Indigenous new media artworks and projects, and to “frame” them within the context of the particular transnational networks of friendship and support into which they are born and in which they circulate. It is my contention that Indigenous new media arts have particularly flourished across the parts of the “Anglo-world” (Belich) that are the result of the early waves of British settler colonialism, most notably in countries such as Canada, Australia, Aotearoa/New Zealand, and the United States. The article explores the conditions that make such global Indigenous networks across the British (post)colonial settler world possible, before moving on to study in more detail works by Hymhenteqhous Mizhekay Odayin/Turtle Heart, Skawennati, Ruben Anton Komangapik, Lisa Reihana, William Ray Wilson, and Lily Hibberd and Curtis Taylor, amongst others. It concludes with an analysis of the exhibition of Indigenous new...

Interactive Film and Media Journal

The Odeimin Runners Club is an Indigenous and Black-Persons-of-Colour (IBPOC) media arts collective (the “Collective”) creating an online story map using an open-source satellite mapping platform. By tracing activities and connections in our engagements with each other and our communities, our counter-mapping project re-traces trade and ceremonial routes between the north of Turtle Island and the Caribbean archipelago, linking stories, videos and artworks to traditional territories. This paper addresses the process of a pilot project making three 16mm experimental films. Process cinema methodologies that incorporate plants and organic materials in film processing were applied in the first phase of the project to produce three short films using Bolex film cameras. The films are themed on human survival, land connection, “rematriation” and BIPOC counter-mapping, threading our knowledge and stories together as we visit each other’s territories. In the making, Indigenous and performativ...

Art Journal, 2017

[Excerpt] I briefly retrace a path of art and criticism in the decades between American Indian Movement and No Dakota Access Pipeline to consider tensions and resonances between the work of select Indigenous practitioners and broader developments in art and ecology. Some of the groundwork is laid in a previous article I coauthored with Janet Catherine Berlo, “Beyond the Mirror: Indigenous Ecologies and ‘New Materialisms’ in Contemporary Art,” for a special issue of Third Text on contemporary art and the politics of ecology, edited by Demos in 2013, as well as my recently published book, Art for an Undivided Earth: The American Indian Movement Generation. Some of the same artists and insights from that research reappear here.This essay differs in its aim to build a genealogy of ecocritical concerns connecting philosophy and activism during AIM in the 1970s, so-called identity art of the 1980s and 1990s, and creative media in the context of Anthropocene discourses after 2000. Putting “Native struggles for land and life” in dialogue with contemporary ecoaesthetics—or more specifically, considering their intersections in a continuum of First Nations texts and artworks—bears on some of the most pressing problems in both fields. A historically informed engagement with the political status of Native American lands can yield a fuller understanding of the interdependencies among colonialism, capitalism, and ecological devastation. More profoundly, the related arts have played a critical role in transmitting alternative means of organizing human-earth relations through a painful history to address our equally fraught present.

Chacón, Gloria E, Juan G Sánchez Martínez, and Lauren Beck. Abiayalan Pluriverses: Bridging Indigenous Studies and Hispanic Studies. E-book, Amherst, MA: Amherst College Press, 2024

In 2018, as copresident of EILA V (Fifth Intercultural Encounter of Amerindian Literature and Art) in Bogotá, I co-organized and co-curated Soberanía visual, an exhibit on “trans-Indigenous and intercultural” art practices in Abiayala. The intention of organizing such an exhibition was to bring into discussion embodied cultural practices in the field of Indigenous Studies. I understand as embodied practices not those that emanate from academic spaces and disciplinary constructs but the ones associated with situated and contextual knowledge and that are able to bring oral and local traditions into institutional spaces of the arts and culture. As a scholar currently living in the US and working frequently with Indigenous cultural producers (filmmakers, visual artists, oralitores, scholars, activists) and their work, I believe that transcultural and decolonial approaches are able to interrupt academic spaces such as universities, museums, galleries, conferences, and publications. The opportunity to contribute to this volume had me revisiting those ideas and pondering the ways our thinking and doing relate to the disciplinary divides across Latin American Cultural Studies, Indigenous Studies, and North American Indigenous Studies. This chapter brings the embodied, situated aesthetic practice of a group of Indigenous and non-Indigenous cultural producers into dialogue with decolonial approaches and Indigenous and Native American Studies from the North American academy. The notion of embodiment derives from the way each subject literally carries its territory and develops a critical yet sensible individual and collective interruption in the way academic disciplines look at cultural products, categorizing and compartmentalizing them in taxonomical exercises of capture and control. I use trans-Indigenous and decolonial practices to identify critical departures from coloniality (the beyond, expressed in the prefix “trans-”) and the points of origination in coloniality itself. These producers work on intercultural dialogues and do not make what we consider art (in conventional terms) but mostly perform acts and events that interrupt spaces within and outside academic locations, supporting ways of exercising aesthetic sovereignty and forms of liberation. Their work, however, is read within the realm of visual studies.

GeoHumanities, 2018

This article—a component of a multimedia series that includes academic papers, video documentaries,painting, poetry, dance, and song—documents and visualizes the continuities and contradictions inherent in diaspora and immigration for Indigenous Mexicans in the U.S. South. We argue for deployment of a decolonial aesthetics that calls into question long-standing colonial systems of meaning making, particularly racialized representations. We elaborate decolonial aesthetics by draw-ing on the visual language of Seed Spirits, a video documentary produced in collaboration with Otomi people. Decolonial aesthetics works through an affective register to evoke a wide range of responses tothe video including a deeper respect for ontologies of difference. A sacred element of Otomi cosmology, artisanal paper known as papel amate, further illuminates how we understand the liberatory potential of decolonial aesthetics. In conclusion, the Mexican diaspora and the cultural politics of Indigeneity it unleashed are reinscribing the narrative of Indigeneity in the Americas.Key Words: affectivity, decolonial aesthetics, Indigeneity, multimedia, Otomi.