By Victoria Nolte (Carleton University, Ottawa) & Emily Putnam (Carleton University, Ottawa)
From November 8 to 10, 2019, the Ottawa team of the Transnational and Transcultural Arts and Culture Exchange (TrACE) hosted Worlding the Global: The Arts in the Age of Decolonization, a four-day consortium ‘designed to collaboratively re-imagine and pluralize the “global” from multiple geocultural perspectives.’ Worlding the Global was the first iteration of the international academies that comprise the Worlding Public Cultures project.
The programme for Worlding the Global consisted of a number of different formats for engaged dialogue: from roundtable sessions and panel discussions to an early career researchers’ workshop, artists’ talks, and a keynote lecture by Shu-mei Shih (UCLA). The academy brought together scholars, artists, and curators to think through questions of relationality, collaboration, decolonial modernisms and the ethics of history writing, structured through the critical framework of worlding. Worlding the Global was also organized in partnership with Àbadakone | Continuous fire | Feu continuel (2019-2020), an exhibition of international Indigenous art organized by the National Gallery of Canada.[1]
In the conversation that follows, we reflect on Worlding the Global through our perspectives as PhD researchers and two of the members of the organizing committee.
Victoria Nolte (VN): It has been nearly four years since we wrapped up Worlding the Global: The Arts in the Age of Decolonization in Ottawa. Three years seems like an incredibly short and yet long stretch of time to reflect upon this event, especially in light of what the world looks like today. The conference remains the last large-scale and truly public gathering that I have attended in-person. It is interesting how unfamiliar a gathering like this now feels as we continue to grapple with a global pandemic and all the loss it has wrought.
Emily Putnam (EP): The way that we reflect upon Worlding the Global: The Arts in the Age of Decolonization feels distant, fleeting. Our lives are both very different today while also being strikingly similar (and this largely is due to our privileges). The conversations that Worlding the Global engaged with are as relevant and timely, perhaps more so even, as they were then.
VN: The pandemic has revealed that conversational spaces dedicated to analysing complex power and knowledge structures are still necessary for us. As I look back at some of the promotional materials written for the conference, I’m prompted by how we have described decolonization in the conference text as ‘a multi-sited and collaborative engagement with entangled histories, epistemologies, power structures, migrations, culture, and capital.’ An engagement that involves examining how being-in-the-world is deeply localized and yet capacious. I’m interested in what this method of discreteness and relationality could look like now after three years when barriers to multi-sitedness and collaboration have been made even more stark. What role can contemporary art play as we think through how we are situated and how we relate?
EP: I appreciate that you have brought up how decolonization was defined in the conference text because it is certainly an intriguing position: ‘A multi-sited and collaborative engagement with entangled histories, epistemologies, power structures, migrations, culture, and capital.’ I think this framing calls forth a need to think across time, space, institutional frameworks, geographical boundaries that are human constituted[2] as you have suggested. This aim prompts reflection on the inherent tensions of working as settler scholars with multi-generational ties to belonging in Canada. Discussions of decolonization look different for us than they do for scholars working through decolonization in other contexts globally. What is decolonization in a settler-colonial context given that land and ownership to/over land or terrestrial resources is the central modality that upholds the settler colonial state and grants us our privilege (including on a global scale)?
VN: Decolonization must be understood as a process, especially for those of us situated in a settler colonial state like Canada. Aileen Moreton-Robinson in The White Possessive (2015) determines that control of terrestrial resources is part of the “possessive logics” of settler colonialism. Though ownership of land is a crucial part of these logics, regulatory mechanisms such as immigration policies, terms of citizenship, and cultural expressions also operate through them and must be continually deployed in order to reproduce and reaffirm the settler state’s claim to land as simultaneously home and history, culture and capital. If we don’t think about decolonization as the restitution of Indigenous lands, cultures, and sovereignties, we will continue to preserve these logics and the violence they can wield.
This conference aimed to think about present exigencies for decolonization in a settler colonial context in relation with transnational calls to decolonize. Much of the conference programming focused on examining decolonial struggle in the twentieth century, linking foundational movements to the present. For example, in her paper on the 1980s minjung art movement, Sohl Lee noted how the works of artists turning towards local traditions and folk theatre (rather than international modernism and avant-gardism) aligned with wider calls for collective action and the reconsideration of terms of liberal democracy practiced by US-supported dictatorships in South Korea. On the same panel, Samina Iqbal presented a paper about the pluralized landscape of modern art in Pakistan in the 1950s. She examined how this landscape (which saw artists taking a variety of approaches to form and subject matter) was connected in large part to the aftermath of the partition of the Indian subcontinent — a moment of decolonization resulting from the British Empire’s hasty and unconsidered process of economic retreat. The partition resulted in one of the most traumatic mass uprootings in history.
EP: As a scholar who focuses within the social, cultural, political art histories of Canada, I think decolonization will often be centred around Eve Tuck and Wayne K. Yang’s “Decolonization is not a Metaphor” (2012), so I feel a specific hesitancy towards the word, especially today with what I might otherwise describe as an age of awakening or an age of conciliation—to refer to David Garneau.[3] My hesitancy towards utilizing the language of decolonization comes from my positionality as a settler. For me, it is a question of who gets to decide whether a region is engaged in a process of decolonization. In Canada, settlers — anyone who is non-Indigenous to the land the nation-state occupies — need to be able to unlearn, work through and navigate our own relationships and worldviews, as well as the systemic ways we benefit from ongoing colonial structures before we can do the work of decolonizing. Many of us who identify as settlers are only beginning this work and so, I view this is a period of awakening. Canada is still in a phase of grappling with what conciliation could be because of these larger realizations about the past and the present that have been taking place. What would it mean to have a conciliatory relationship between settlers and Indigenous nations and communities? Decolonization may be a process that is a significant part of a conciliatory relationship, however, settlers themselves should not be the ones to define what is and is not a decolonizing practice. My hesitancy comes from a desire to be careful and thoughtful about the claims I am making and the language that I am using. There is a messiness in navigating language and a constant learning/unlearning being undertaken and my positions are ever-shifting. At the moment, and based on how conversations about decolonization and (re)conciliation in Canada have shifted in the past few years, I become more hesitant with terms I may have used more freely in the past. With that in mind, I am interested in the context that Worlding the Global exists in now that we have some historical space from the gathering.
VN: It may be worth thinking about the conference’s emphasis on relationality. Positing decolonization as ‘multi-sited’ and ‘entangled’ suggests the continued relevance of the movements that scholars like Lee and Iqbal examine and points to how we may link these histories to present concerns with how settler nations like Canada and the US intervene in the maintenance of liberal democracies overseas. How might we think about decolonization relationally and in time when it must be addressed specifically, ‘with attention to the colonial apparatus that assembled to order the relationships between particular peoples, lands, the ‘natural world’, and ‘civilization’’ (Tuck and Yang 21). How do we connect specific histories, politics, and contexts which are not settler colonial with the urgency to decolonize Canada and other settler states? I wonder if, in this way, Tuck and Yang’s ethics of incommensurability could be useful for a project on worlding.
EP: Tuck and Yang’s ethics of incommensurability could be an important analytic lens for us in settler colonial states grappling with the project of worlding. By invoking Frantz Fanon, Tuck and Yang postulate that ‘incommensurability is an acknowledgement that decolonization will require a change in the order of the world’ (Tuck and Yang 31). An ethic of incommensurability reminds me of the Zapatista quotation at the beginning of Marisol De La Cadena and Mario Blaser’s A World of Many Worlds (2018) that says “the world we want is a world in which many worlds fit” (De La Cadena and Blaser 1).
VN: Thinking relationally is not always about perfect alignment. It is a deeper understanding of contextual particularities which could provoke more meaningful potential relations.
I’m also thinking about Ariella Aïsha Azoulay’s Potential History: Unlearning Imperialism (2019) and what she says about unlearning progress as a feature of liberal citizenship which as we know is one of the regulatory mechanisms of the settler state. Evoking progress is a common move to innocence we see in Canada, especially in the constructed narrative that we have overcome our shameful racist and colonial past and are now (since the 1970s) embracing multiculturalism. Thinking through the model of an ‘age’ places decolonization within this timeline of successive moments in history. It abstracts the work of decolonization as a process of unlearning colonial knowledge structures. An ethics of incommensurability — which starts from acknowledging the need for structural and epistemological change — could instead provide tools for examining how the worlds we inhabit are so different and yet interrelated, brought together not by colonial logics of linear time but rather by sharing goals to care for a common world (Azoulay 39).
EP: You, of course, know I keep returning to Azoulay. A short sentence from Potential History is coming to mind for me that I think will bring us to discuss art and keep us within this context of being of the new, the progressive, the chronological. Azoulay writes “the reduction of art making to the pursuit of the new drains communities of their worldliness” (Azoulay 61). Maybe we could think about this within the context of Àbadakone. What then is the role of contemporary art? Can it help spark processes of unlearning? Does it foster relations?
For reader context, the title of the exhibition, Àbadakone, is an Algonquin word chosen by Elders from Kitigan Zibi Anishinaabeg that translates into English as ‘continuous fire’. The exhibition featured contemporary Indigenous art from across the globe. While our understanding of what is or is not contemporary art tends to focus on articulations of newness (or nowness), the central organization on ideas of continuity and patterns of lineage in Àbadakone holds Western concepts of contemporaneity in tension. From the outset, the exhibition itself was not seeking to define itself within a particular age or along a measure of progress but through interconnected histories and temporalities.
Is there a work in the exhibition that stood out for you?
VN: I’m reminded of Eleng Luluan’s sculptural installation Between Dreams (2012). The installation is comprised of Styrofoam, metal, and wrapping paper threaded together in a manner that reinterprets traditional weaving techniques of the Rukai Nation, one of the many Indigenous peoples of Taiwan. Suspended from the ceiling, Between Dreams formally resembles a makeshift dwelling space and it was activated during the exhibition in a number of ways. Visitors could step into the enclosed space in the centre to get a closer look at the materials delicately and intricately laced together. Peter Morin, a Tahltan Nation artist, activist, and scholar engaged with the installation during his performance land.breath, a gesture in which he considered his body’s relationship to the works in Ábadakone as well as with the land upon which the National Gallery is situated. Orienting his body to the floor, Morin activated the installation by taking deep, slow, purposeful breaths. Through his act of breathing — a form of bodily transfer — Morin brought together ways of knowing and being between Tahltan and Algonquin lands on Turtle Island and Indigenous territories of Kucapungane in southern Taiwan, territories that inform Luluan’s work which, as curator Biung Ismahasan explains, ‘challenges revolving around environments, community values, and the desires and concerns of one’s original homeland’ (Ismahasan 106). Luluan’s installation brings the viewer as well as the surrounding works in the exhibition into relation so that they can mutually inflect one another.
EP: For me, AKA (2019) by the Mata Aho Collective is reflective of these ideas as well. AKA was a commissioned installation presented in the rotunda of the National Gallery of Canada made from a pale teal marine rope used in the fishing and farming industries in New Zealand. The work is a 14-metre-tall hand-woven sculptural installation inspired by Waitiri, a Māori female deity and personification of thunder. AKA is a transnationally conceptualized work of art: the rope is inspired by “Poly-Pacific Blue” a well-used type of marine rope found in Honolulu; the majority of the sculpture was hand-woven in Palmerston North, New Zealand in a shared space with volcanologists at Massey University, and then freighted to Canada and finished by Mata Aho for Ábadakone where it continues to live in the National Gallery’s collection. AKA seeks to honour the continuity and contributions of women in Māori through its reference to Waitiri, but also through the type of weaving known as whatu (finger twining) using modern materials. The collective explained that whatu was a customary tradition for making clothing textiles and that this knowledge was learned by an elder in their community. Referencing the Māori word for vine, AKA, is a metaphor for gaining knowledge and investigating the world (Mata Aho Collective, 2019). AKA represents this type of continuity and patterns of lineage as told through relations that was so representative of Ábadakone.
VN: We came into the project as PhD researchers and were involved in many aspects of conceptualizing, organizing, and implementing the conference programme. To conclude, it may help to think about how we brought our own embodied sets of knowledge, our own experiences, and our own research methods and questions to the event as a way of thinking through a more relational structure.
EP: Yes, I think that would be a great way to conclude. When I joined you on this project of organizing Worlding the Global, I had been thinking about how to develop an ethic of collaboration and relationship-building that would be sustainable over a scholarly and curatorial career. Within white settler culture in Canada, there is an implicit adoption of extractive thinking to achieve individual success — this may be the case in non-white spaces as well, but I cannot speak to those. Our benchmarks are to extract knowledge, become financially successful, own property, and for those of us in the arts, to obtain impressive cultural capital. Academia as a system also demands of us to thrive through work if we are to achieve stability — it is about building our CVs, rarely declining opportunities, and working within hierarchies. Rather, I believe that all work should be the work of relation: I am still learning how to do this and unlearning the ways we are told to measure success. I enjoy collaborating with you because even if it is within a traditional academic framework, we collaborate first from a place of friendship and we build upon our mutual interests without feeling like we must compete with each other.
VN: I deeply appreciate the space we have created together through mutual exchange and collaboration. Much of this space depends upon trust: trusting not only that we will each respond with kindness, but also that we give each other time to think through things slowly and with patience. I want to embrace slowness as a way to counteract the extractive demands of academia. Slowness yields more thoughtful and informed scholarship, which is necessary for thinking through and in relation with one another.
Notes
[1] We would like to direct readers to read Maya Wilson-Sanchez’s review of Àbadakone that thoughtfully builds connections to Worlding the Global: The Arts in the Age of Decolonization. Wilson-Sanchez was also an early-career scholar participant in Worlding the Global. See Maya Wilson-Sanchez, “Àbadakone Creates Community”, Canadian Art, 21 November 2019, https://canadianart.ca/features/abadakone-creates-community/
[2]We include the term human constituted as a deliberate reminder that the boundaries, barriers, and frameworks in the human world and knowledge practices are created by and centre human lives, cultures, and knowledges. However, what we learn from Indigenous scholars and epistemologies is that more-than-human worlds exist and there is much to learn from non-human beings, communities, and our relations with them. For instance, anthropologist Zoe Todd explores how “fish pluralities” and human-fish relations in Paulatuuq are complex and a “site of active engagement” (Todd 16). Todd writes that “Rather than treat fish as separate from humans or humans as separate from fish, fish are intimately woven into every aspect of community life [in Paulatuuq]. Fish have agency, as evidenced by the fact that they can choose when to be caught” (Todd 19).
[3] The language of conciliation comes from Garneau’s 2012 text “Imaginary Spaces of Conciliation and Reconciliation.” In his text, Garneau notes that reconciliation, which is, of course, not the same as decolonization, is an attempt to repair a harm in order to return to a harmonious relationship whereas conciliation is to bring a relationship into harmony (Garneau 34-35). The assertion that he makes is that historically, there was rarely a conciliatory relationship between colonizers and Indigenous nations (Garneau 34-35).
References
Azoulay, Ariella Aïsha. Potential History: Unlearning Imperialism. New York: Verso, 2019.
De La Cadena, Marisol and Mario Blaser, eds. A World of Many Worlds. Durham: Duke University Press, 2018.
Garneau, David. “Imaginary Spaces of Conciliation and Reconciliation.” West Coast Line #74 (Reconcile This!), vol. 46, no. 2 (Summer 2012): 28-38.
Ismahasan, Biung. “Tasipyane yakai Kacaucadurane: performative sovereignty in Between Dreams by Eleng Luluan at Àbadakone | Continuous fire | Feu continuel.” In Àbadakone | Continuous fire | Feu continuel. Edited by Greg Hill et. al., 104-112. Ottawa: National Gallery of Canada, 2020.
Moreton-Robinson, Aileen. The White Possessive: Property, Power, and Indigenous Sovereignty. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015.
Todd, Zoe. “Fish pluralities: Human-animal relations and sites of engagement in Paulatuuq, Arctic Canada.” Études Inuit Studies vol. 38, no. 1-2 (2014): 217–238.
Tuck, Eve and K. Wayne Yang. “Decolonization is not a metaphor.” Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society vol. 1, no. 1 (2012): 1-40.
Image: detail of poster for Worlding the Global: The Arts in the Age of Decolonization featuring Jinny Yu, "Study for Perpetual Guest", graphite on paper, 10.16 x 15.24 cm, courtesy of the artist.