Moderator: Carla Taunton and Dorota Glowacka

Presenters:

Trina Cooper-Bolam

Kristine Germann

Desiree Valadares

Storied Transformations:

Decolonizing Inherited Space through Memorial Performance

Responding to the priorities of Children of Shingwauk Alumni Association, the Survivors of the Shingwauk Indian Residential School, Storied Transformations: Decolonizing Inherited Space through Memorial Performance is a research-creation and pedagogical project involving transdisciplinary Indigenous/settler research collaboration to investigate and reveal the evidentiary landscape of the Shingwauk Indian Industrial and Residential Schools. Using land-based learning, praxiological museology, and other cultural, creative, and performative methods developed for the project’s experiential field-schools exchange program, Storied Transformations deploys pedagogies from diverse disciplines to engage students in building and supporting Survivor-driven, technologically-enhanced, in situ interpretation, memorialization, and Indigenous place-(re)making. 

Combining and deploying existing technologies in unprecedented ways, the intended output of this project is a virtual environment– a (post)memorial landscape, performative monument, and immersive storytelling space–that will witness historical iterations, uses, and experiences of the Shingwauk site via a series of nested, 1:1 scale, motion-sensing and multi-perspectival 3D building projections interspersed with monumental-scale digital video and motion graphic projections. A unique foray into the fraught terrain of contentious monuments, the project aspires to contribute to a new generation of museal and commemorative expressions which, rather than erasing or neutralizing its difficult aspects, heightens them, rendering them productive, offering promising practices for curating marginalized, displaced, and erased history and heritage. Intertwined with Survivor objectives to culturally and spiritually remediate a site of trauma and reclaim it as a space for “reconciliation through education,” the museology-oriented research objectives of Storied Transformations, are critical, pedagogical, and methodological, contributing to museology theory and practice by: (i) informing collaborative Indigenous/settler research design for engaging with difficult knowledge through exhibition, (ii) supporting affectively-engaged, public-memory-enhancing visitorship practices, (iii) raising historical consciousness and cultivating decolonial ethics and practices, (iv) advancing exhibition as a research method, and (v) developing experiential, transcultural pedagogical infrastructures, networks, and programming. The resulting research-creation work will offer a uniquely immersive experience of place, history, culture, and community toward cultivating decolonial ethics and practice among the visiting public.

Trina Cooper-Bolam is a Banting Postdoctoral Researcher at Concordia University with a PhD in Cultural Mediations and an MA in Canadian Studies from Carleton University. Previously, Cooper-Bolam held senior positions at the Aboriginal Healing and Legacy of Hope Foundations–organizations working to transform the legacy of residential schools. She has consulted for numerous agencies including Crown-Indigenous Relations and Northern Affairs Canada, the Canadian Museum of History, the Assembly of First Nations, and most recently on the Residential Schools National Monument and National Day for Truth and Reconciliation for the Department of Canadian Heritage. Equally an academic researcher and an exhibition curator/designer, Cooper-Bolam is a key contributor to the Survivor-led Reclaiming Shingwauk Hall exhibition at Algoma University.

The inferences of witnessing as research-creation methodology in public art and spatial practices

Curator and art critic Maja Ćirić suggests that the principal failure of museums, institutions, and public art commissioning bodies — to expand their invitation of participation to artists, curators, and publics — historically originates from "the geopolitics of the curatorial, meta-positioning which has been envisioned from the hosts' point of view" (Ćirić 209).¹ The conference paper will query whether the artistic condition of witnessing (Blocker 2009, Corntassel, Chaw-win-is & T’lakwadzi 2009, Tsing 2015) when engaged within the formation of a public artwork can generate points of view diverging from the dominant neoliberal systems of capitalism, colonialism, and patriarchy. 

The paper will examine witnessing as a condition of a public artwork to interrogate the boundaries of how art is identified and defined, and by whom. Claire Doherty suggests “our experience of works which truly produce remarkable engagements with place will be characterized by a sense of dislocation — encouraging us no longer to look with the eyes of a tourist, but to become implicated in the jostling contingency of mobilities and relations that constitute contemporaneity" (Doherty 18). Artists who are producing knowledge in critical writing or material forms are implicated as witnesses of their era. When encountering an artwork, the spectator also becomes implicated as a witness. In this framework I am proposing that a public artwork employing witnessing, which implicates either the artist’s or audience’s account, evidence, and testimony, can become a catalyst for a deeper engagement with a place. Can witnessing or the account of a witness become the authority which identifies an artwork and allow for an exploration of how and by whom art is defined?

Informed by settler and Indigenous theoretical frameworks the conference paper will reflect upon the research-creation strategy of witnessing and how this methodology might offer the potential to how public artworks are realized within capitalistic, colonial, and patriarchal contexts.

Kristine Germann (she/her) is a curator, producer, artist, advocate, and researcher of settler ancestry whose public, social, and spatial practice is reflected through the realization of public artworks and staged cultural events. This experience is reflected within the Canadian cultural ecology through commissioning, presenting, and realizing public art within corporate, not-for-profit, cultural institutions and government situations. Kristine has held public art commissioning, curating, creation and producing roles including Public Art Officer, Commissioner and Curator of the Public Art & Monuments Collection of the City of Toronto and Programming Manager of Nuit Blanche Toronto. In the latter role, she led and directed all artistic, curatorial, and programmatic content of the City of Toronto produced cultural events including Nuit Blanche Toronto, North America’s largest public art event. She is currently Curator, Public + Visual Art at Supercrawl Productions Inc. and a PhD student at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario. Her PhD research-creation and curatorial project examines the potential for curating, commissioning, creation and production practices to unsettle capitalistic, colonial, and patriarchal structures within public art situations.

Image: 2021, Kristine Germann

Desiree Valadares

In this paper, I offer an architectural history of the residual landscape of Second World War confinement (internment) sites in Interior British Columbia, Canada. I focus on the architectural legacy of road building camps along the Hope-Princeton Highway (Highway 3) and present-day efforts to commemorate this infrastructural route with highway markers or Stops of Interest Signs. Located in Interior British Columbia, this highway was built by Depression-era relief camp workers. It was completed by incarcerated Japanese Canadian men during the Second World War whose forced labor was mandated by an Order-in-Council under the Defense of Canada War Measures Act. I show, through archival research in legal, cartographic, and engineering archives across Canada, how

the spatial logics of Japanese Canadian internment and forced “enemy alien” labor on road building projects are embedded in the punitive mechanisms of the carceral settler state. I argue that a study of British Columbia’s roads and highways reveals the ways in which settler colonialism and carcerality intersect and are subsequently obscured through tourism promotion and selective commemoration. My reading of the Hope-Princeton Highway reveals how roads fundamentally alter the geographic imaginary and operate within the logic of globalized capital even while they seem part of a local landscape.

In this paper, I ask: How do we theorize the violence and carcerality of infrastructure by considering struggles over land and labor along a single route? What conceptual vocabularies might we use to develop relational understandings of such violence? How do we develop relational methodologies that can trace the violent assemblages and materialities through which infrastructure is made, operated, and spatially distributed

across vast scales? Methodologically, my analyses of images, including architectural drawings, engineering records and visual culture of the highway is informed by anthropologist Deborah Poole’s notion of “visual economy.” For my purposes, the notion of visual economy is useful because it illustrates that the meaning of images derives in part from their circulation and their complex role in transnational social relationships, especially colonialism. I conclude this paper considering the possibility of subversive visual practices and alternate ways to re-imagine intersecting and relational histories and commemorative agendas along this route.

Desiree Valadares (desiree.valadares@berkeley.edu) is an architectural historian and heritage practitioner trained in landscape architecture. She writes about territoriality, oceanic geographies and empire in Canada and the US with a focus on the aftermath of Asian migration (wartime forced relocation) and Indigenous intersections in the transpacific – Hawaiʻi, Alaska, and British Columbia. Her research is supported by the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada, the Graham Foundation for the Fine Arts, the Canada Council for the Arts, UC Berkeley Regent’s fellowship and the Canadian Centre for Architecture. Valadares is an incoming Assistant Professor of Geographies of Settler Colonial Canada and an Affiliate Faculty in Asian Canadian and Asian Migration Studies at the University of British Columbia-Vancouver (from July 1, 2022, onward)