"dear fellow settler colonizer," A Minus Plato broadcast. Episode 3

June 03, 2021 by Ginger Dunnill

"dear fellow settler colonizer," is a Minus Plato series, rebroadcast on Broken Boxes for STTLMNT Digital Occupation as resource archive directed towards education of settler ancestors who may like to more relationally engage with work created by and centering Indigenous artists, such as with the STTLMNT project.

“The show will explore the transformative work of contemporary global Indigenous artists from the explicitly problematic perspective of the settler colonizer. By critically examining our complicity in ongoing structures of colonial violence, the show offers tools for settler colonizers to engage with Indigenous artmaking beyond positions of exploitation, appropriation and other harmful moves to innocence.” - Minus Plato

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"This episode will focus on Indigenous languages and our position as settlers in relation to contemporary Indigenous artists' use of and engagement with Indigenous language learning, publication and other forms of distribution. At the heart of this episode is a wide-ranging conversation with Cannupa Hanska Luger, concept artist of STTLMNT: Indigenous Digital Occupation, about the place of language in their recent work EACH/OTHER (with Marie Watt) and how Indigenous language learning builds community while also transforming the English language from within. The episode also engages with Potu faitautusi: Faiāʻoga o gagana e, ia uluulumamau!, which translates from the Sāmoan language as ‘Be Courageous, Language Teachers! Reading Room', an ongoing project at Columbus Printed Arts Center. We hear from guest librarian Dr Léuli Eshrāghi about how they and other participating artists (including Sarah Biscarra Dilley and Sebastián Calfuqueo Aliste) gather books on Indigenous art and philosophy and create prints with an Indigenous language phrase, proverb or concept to generate a constellatory syllabus grounded in sensual, spoken and marked languages. Léuli offers a description of their new limited edition print created for the project which includes a precolonial Sāmoan prayer and is now available to buy on the Columbus Printed Arts Center website. Throughout the episode, you will hear samples from Elisa Harkins' album Radio III / ᎦᏬᏂᏍᎩ ᏦᎢ mixing disco beats with singing in the Cherokee and Muscogee Creek languages. The album is available from Western Front Recordings and on Harkins’ Bandcamp as a digital download or vinyl LP." - Minus Plato

"dear fellow settler colonizer," A Minus Plato broadcast. Episode 2

June 02, 2021 by Ginger Dunnill

This episode focuses on collaborations between Indigenous and non-Indigenous artists and audiences across a range of roles, from ally to accomplice, challenging performative settler 'moves to innocence'. From the Columbus Museum of Art exhibition "Object/Set" by Gauri Gill to the radical media projects of New Red Order (NRO) and their 'informants', the episode continues the radio show's focus on exploring the transformative work of contemporary global Indigenous artists from the explicitly problematic perspective of the settler colonizer. By critically examining our complicity in ongoing structures of colonial violence, the show offers tools for settler colonizers to engage with Indigenous artmaking beyond positions of exploitation, appropriation and other harmful moves to innocence. In this episode, Minus Plato will again be joined by Cannupa Hanska Luger, concept artist of STTLMNT: Indigenous Digital Occupation

For each episode, Minus Plato will be joined by Cannupa Hanska Luger, Native American concept artist of STTLMNT: Indigenous Digital Occupation. www.cannupahanska.com // www.minusplato.com

This is a rebroadcast for the purposes of education to settler ancestors who are engaging with the work of STTLMNT: Indigenous Digital Occupation. This rebroadcast is of the first episode of Minus Plato program aired at 2pm EST, USA, 19, January, 2021.

Image: photo from outside looking in at the New Red Order (NRO) "Never Settle" installation at the Toronto Biennial of Art, 2019 with text in Pueblo typeface by VIER5

"dear fellow settler colonizer," A Minus Plato broadcast. Episode 1

June 01, 2021 by Ginger Dunnill

"dear fellow settler colonizer," is a minus plato series, rebroadcast on Broken Boxes for STTLMNT Digital Occupation as resource archive directed towards education of settler ancestors who may like to more relationally engage with this website and other work created by and centering Indigenous artists.

For each episode, minus plato will be joined by Cannupa Hanska Luger, Native American concept artist of STTLMNT: Indigenous Digital Occupation. www.cannupahanska.com // www.minusplato.com

After each episode of the series airs we will publish the recording to www.sttlmnt.org/blog

This is a rebroadcast for the purposes of education to settler ancestors who are engaging with the work of STTLMNT: Indigenous Digital Occupation.

This rebroadcast is of the first episode of this minus plato radio program which aired at 12pm EST, USA on Friday, 22 January, 2021.

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Responsive Witnessing: Emily Johnson, Karyn Recollet, Joseph M. Pierce & Camille Usher

May 28, 2021 by Ginger Dunnill

Presented here is a rebroadcast of a responsive witnessing event produced through the STTLMNT Digital Occupation project. This is a conversation between Karyn Recollet, Emily Johnson, Joseph M. Pierce and Camille Georgeson-Usher. You are invited to first Watch the recording of the filmed performance, The Ways We Love and The Ways We Love Better, Monumental Movement Toward Being Future Being(s), Emily Johnson's Collaboration with Jeffrey Gibson, presented at Socrates Sculpture Park, NY, September 16, 2020, and which this Responsive Witnessing conversation is in relationship with. Visit www.sttlmnt.org/projects/emily-johnson to view the performance and learn more about the artists featured in this conversation and the work of STTLMNT.

WATCH Emily Johnson's Collaboration with Jeffrey Gibson at Socrates "The Ways We Love and The Ways We Love Better, Monumental Movement Toward Being Future Being(s)"

About the artists in this conversation:

Emily Johnson is an artist who makes body-based work. She is a land and water protector and an activist for justice, sovereignty and well-being. A Bessie Award-winning choreographer, Guggenheim Fellow and recipient of the Doris Duke Artist Award, she is based in New York City. Originally from Alaska, Emily is of the Yup’ik Nation, and since 1998 has created work that considers the experience of sensing and seeing performance. Her dances function as portals and installations, engaging audiences within and through space, time, and environment—interacting with a place's architecture, peoples, history and role in community. Emily is trying to make a world where performance is part of life; where performance is an integral connection to each other, our environment, our stories, our past, present and future.

Karyn Recollet is an urban Cree scholar/artist/and writer, Recollet’s work focuses on relationality and care as both an analytic and technology for Indigenous movement-based forms of inquiry within urban spaces. Recollet works collaboratively with Indigenous dance-makers and scholars to theorize forms of urban glyphing. Recollet is in conversation with dance choreographers, Black and Indigenous futurist thinkers and Indigenous and Black geographers as ways to theorize and activate futurist, feminist, celestial and decolonial land-ing relationships with more-than-human kinships, and each other.

Camille Georgeson-Usher is a Coast Salish/Sahtu Dene/Scottish scholar, artist, and writer from Galiano Island, BC of the Pune’laxutth’ (Penelakut) Nation. She completed her MA in Art History at Concordia University where she worked to prove the impact of the performing arts in building confidence and leadership amongst Indigenous youth by learning to talk/embody discussions about safer sexual practices. She is currently a PhD candidate in the Cultural Studies department at Queen’s University and has been awarded the Joseph-Armand Bombardier Canada Graduate Scholarships-Doctoralfor her research-creation workaround urban Indigenous experiences within Indigenous arts collectives and other groups activating public spaces through gestures both little and big. Her artistic and curatorial practices are predominantly looking through acts of deep, loving convergences with colleague Asinnajaq (Isabella Weetaluktuk).

Joseph M. Pierce (Cherokee Nation) is Associate Professor in the Department of Hispanic Languages and Literature at Stony Brook University. His research focuses on the intersections of kinship, gender, sexuality, and race in Latin America, 19th century literature and culture, queer studies, Indigenous studies, and hemispheric approaches to citizenship and belonging. He is the author of Argentine Intimacies: Queer Kinship in an Age of Splendor, 1890-1910 (SUNY Press, 2019) and co-editor of Políticas del amor: Derechos sexuales y escrituras disidentes en el Cono Sur (Cuarto Propio, 2018) as well as the forthcoming special issue of GLQ, “Queer/Cuir Américas: Translation, Decoloniality, and the Incommensurable.” Along with SJ Norman (Koori, Wiradjuri descent) he is co-curator of the performance series Knowledge of Wounds.

On Location: Artists Christine Howard Sandoval and Cannupa Hanska Luger respond to The Diker Collection at The Met

October 22, 2018 by Ginger Dunnill

This episode of Broken Boxes Podcast presents a live stream recording by artists Christine Howard Sandoval and Cannupa Hanska Luger as they visited the Metropolitan Museum of Art's new exhibit: Art of Native America, The Charles and Valerie Diker Collection on October 7th, 2018. The two artists engaged in a live stream critique and shared the experience on social media as it was unfolding. Onsite at the Met the two artists were joined by the guest curators from the Nelson Atkins Museum Gaylord Torrence and Marjorie Alexander along with the Met's director of public programs Mari Robles.

In reflecting on the experience in her social media post about the experience, Christine Howard Sandoval explains, “The museum mobilized responsively and the conversation about how the museum is FOR THE FIRST TIME starting to engage with Indigenous art is raw and honest. They have so much work to do as the major museum of art in the country!”

Broken Boxes would like to acknowledge this is an audio recording of a live feed video of an experience viewing an exhibition, so it may feel a bit hard to follow along, but if you are up to it, it may be worth the journey. You can view the video live stream HERE.

Here is the audio recording of Artists Christine Howard Sandoval and Cannupa Hanska Luger live stream at the Metropolitan Museum of Art's new exhibit: Art of Native America: The Charles and Valerie Diker Collection:

Subscribe to Broken Boxes Podcast on iTunes HERE to stream and download this episode

More About The Artists Engaging In This Action:

Christine Howard Sandoval is an Obispeño Chumash and Hispanic artist based in New York. She is a multimedia artist who challenges the boundaries of representation, access, and habitation through the use of performance, video, and sculpture. Sandoval makes work about contested places such as the historic Native and Hispanic waterways of northern New Mexico; the Gowanus Canal, a Superfund site in New York; and an interfacing suburban-wildland in Colorado.

Cannupa Hanska Luger is a multi-disciplinary artist of Mandan, Hidatsa, Arikara, Lakota, Austrian, and Norwegian descent. Through monumental installations that incorporate ceramics, video, sound, fiber, steel, and cut-paper, Luger interweaves performance and political action to communicate stories about 21st century Indigeneity. Using social collaboration and in response to timely and site-specific issues, Luger produces multi-pronged projects which often times presents a call to action, provoking diverse publics to engage with Indigenous peoples and values apart from the lens of colonial social structuring. Luger lectures and participates in residencies around the globe and his work is collected internationally.

More About The Exhibition:

Art of Native America: The Charles and Valerie Diker Collection

Exhibition overview sourced from the Met’s website: This landmark exhibition in the Museum's American Wing showcases 116 masterworks representing the achievements of artists from more than fifty cultures across North America. Ranging in date from the second to the early twentieth century, the diverse works are promised gifts, donations, and loans to The Met from the pioneering collectors Charles and Valerie Diker. Long considered to be the most significant holdings of historical Native American art in private hands, the Diker Collection has particular strengths in sculpture from British Columbia and Alaska, California baskets, pottery from southwestern pueblos, Plains drawings and regalia, and rare accessories from the eastern Woodlands.

A note from the producer about this episode:

Broken Boxes Podcast has had the immense privilege to interview over 70 artists over the past 3 years. As the producer and creator of Broken Boxes, this project has been so dear to my heart and I am truly humbled and grateful for all of the incredible people who have taken the time to be vulnerable and share their stories on the platform of this podcast. This episode will mark a 6 month break I will initiate in the project, so I can regroup and take time and space to gather more interviews, edit them, upgrade equipment and connect with more artists and movements in a way that feels authentic and respectful. On a personal note, as a mother of two young children, I have just began approaching ‘unschooling’ or kind of like life schooling, focusing on some really intense life choices, allowing my children to love learning and be able to navigate the world in a way which respects them, and this journey is radical, scary and my partner and I are really excited to focus on our children a bit more holistically, which seems to be quiet a strong way to walk the walk in caring for our future and how we hope it to perpetuate. For this episode I was going to make a collection from all of the interviews I have done to date, I began, and got to about episode 30, when I realized there is no clear way to edit down the content of each episode, each artist is speaking in such a long format, and unapologetic way, sharing such important and critical information, I just could not edit the episodes down into soundbites, and it was making me feel horrible to try. (If you need to catch up on all the past episodes, you can do so in the Archive section.) And so, I chose not to do that for this episode. For this episode, before I take a nice break in publishing work, stories, interviews, conversations on this platform, I am grateful to share with you a pretty special recording of a live feed from earlier this month at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. I felt sharing this live feed broadcast would be a wonderful segway into the more in depth concentrated content I hope to begin intercepting into this project. I hope to find a way to follow more closely with a project or approach an artist is examining and present a more journalistic approach to the story and concepts. This will take time and travel and equipment upgrades. And so this break will allow me space to find these tools and refresh this work. I do feel this project is critical, it is an archive of existence, but this project breaks the colonial lens which the stories of my peers are often times focused through. And so I would like to continue it, but I would like to step it up many notches.

I also wanted to put out there that if you are a person of color, and Indigenous person, a queer, trans, two spirit, gender non-conforming person, an activist or feminist person who centers people of color in your work, and have content you need a platform to put it out on, email me! While I am on this break of producing, I would love to allow this airwaves space to be utilized by anyone who needs it and has the skills and energy to edit together an episode to share information. If you need this access and want to share something on Broke Boxes, I can put up your content on the podcast for you anytime over the next 6 months (through say April 2019), email me at brokenboxespodcast@gmail.com and I can fill you in on the logistics of how I could support this. I am In gratitude and solidarity with all the artists and activists whom I have had the privilege to engage in this project and with all the listeners who I may never meet, I believe in you, and I believe in us.

Gratitude and solidarity, Aloha malama pono!