Session: 4h
Day: Thursday 16 April
Time: 9.15–11.00
Room: JK15a 1.01
Chair: Caroline Durand-Rous
Ho’esta Mo’e’hahne (University of California), “Anti-Extractivist Visualities and Indigenous Ecologies Otherwise”
Abstract: ndigenous scholars, artists, activists, and community leaders have long theorised and attested to the ways that the extractive violences that are visited on Indigenous homelands, waters, and more-than-human beings take shape in tandem with the violences that are directed at Indigenous (human) embodiments, genders, sexualities, and communities. Entering these conversations, I contemplate the ways that contemporary Indigenous visual cultures become vital sites for practicing decolonial worldmaking and envisioning more ethical relations between human and more-than-human beings. I read the Indigiqueer and trans* artist Theo Jean Cuthand’s short film “Extraction” (2019) alongside the feminist writer and artist Quill Christie-Peters’s paintings and public intellectual work. I propose that both artists’ decolonial visual aesthetics index, critique, and imagine beyond the apocalyptic worlds that are produced by extractive violence in the Indigenous homelands and waters currently identified as Canada. For instance, Cuthand’s film brings together personal narratives of queerness as well as communal and environmental violence. However, by slowing and reversing images of mining as well as sharing an ecological oral history, Cuthand gestures to a world where extractive violence will end, and more reciprocal relations will be shared between humans and more-than-humans. Similarly, Christie-Peters’s public intellectual work and paintings connect residential school violence and family separation to the forced removal of Indigenous communities resulting from the construction of hydroelectric power infrastructure. Christie-Peters conceptualises environmental violence as taking place at the level of Indigenous relationships to the body and kinship relations to homelands. Her vivid paintings of residential schools flowering with the spirits of ancestors reconnect generations of her community members to one another and their homelands. Together, Cuthand’s and Christie-Peters’s anti-extractive visual worldings offer glimpses of what Charis Enns and Brock Bersaglio call Indigenous “ecologies otherwise,” that is, ecological relations that resist the eliminatory settler biopolitics that target human and more-than-human life.
Bio: Ho’esta Mo’e’hahne is a Southern Tsistsistas and Hinono’ei person who lives and works on Tongva homelands. They are Assistant Professor of English at the University of California, Los Angeles, where they are an affiliate faculty with the American Indian Studies Centre and a member of the LGBTQ studies faculty advisory committee. They are currently completing a book that traces how queer and trans Indigenous literatures, performance, and cinema craft decolonial genders, erotics, and ecologies in settler cities across Canada and the United States.
Doro Wiese (Radboud University), “Sharing Worlds: Human and Animal Motherhood in Tanya Tagaq’s Teeth Apape”
Abstract: In the music video for Teeth Agape (Tagaq and Seitz 2022), a striking visual sequence depicts the transformation of a wolf’s paw into a human leg and then into a running woman. This transformation occurs alongside lyrics describing her as having ‘Grown strong / from holding up weight / By thigh that carries rocks and urgent gait’ (Tagaq and Seitz 2022). The woman then morphs into a stone formation before becoming a wolf again. The lyrics state that she will hunch her shoulders and wait, ‘Claws sharpened / teeth agape’ (Tagaq and Seitz 2022), signaling a readiness to defend her kin across species. Through this powerful blend of sound and imagery, Inuit throat singer Tanya Tagaq and writer, director, and animator David Seitz challenges patriarchal and anthropocentric frameworks that are central to Euro-Western socio-political organization.
Two significant shifts emerge from the music video’s portrayal. First, it blurs the boundaries between animals, humans, and stones, allowing for a metamorphosis between these entities. Second, as highlighted in the interlude of Teeth Agape – ‘Touch my children / And my teeth welcome your windpipe’ – it is the mothers, regardless of species, who are depicted as the primary figures of protection and survival. In my talk, I will show how singer and performer Tagaq invites us into a world where care, particularly maternal care, transcends species and is essential for survival and defense. Life-sustaining “motherly” relationships—rooted in concern, nurture, and protection—create a sense of communion that transcends species and challenges patriarchal hierarchies and domination. As I will demonstrate, such visions go against the grain of settlercolonial ideas about motherhood, and establish a vision that interweaves living beings, demonstrating that they share the same world while simultaneously making us aware of unequal conditions.
Bio: Doro Wiese, assistant professor, Radboud University Nijmegen, was trained in literary studies, film studies and cultural studies. In her multifaceted research, such as The Powers of the False (Northwestern UP 2014), she investigates how aesthetics is a manner of drawing people into an effective relation with the lacunae of knowledges and histories. Doro Wiese evinces a strong commitment to the study of colonialism, epistemic injustices, transcultural epistemology, or nature and culture. She is inspired by insights formulated in Indigenous Studies.
Halbe Hessel Kuipers (University of Amsterdam), “Eye to Eye with the Wild, Radical Alterity, and the Limits of the Modern Cosmology”
Abstract: In Amerindian cosmology, the Brazilian anthropologist Eduardo Viveiros de Castro specifies, the figure of the jaguar embodies radical alterity: not just another as opposed to ourselves, but an Other that has its own other. The jaguar, so we are told in Amerindian myth, is the proto-figure of predation in that the encounter with the jaguar expresses the potential to be made into the other’s other, game, that is, the prey, while it perceives itself as human. As a figure of radical alterity, the case of the jaguar presents us with an excellent opportunity to inflect its operative logic and disclose what we might call the limits of the modern cosmology. In this talk, I mean to examine these limits across two poles: the supposed ontological position of, on the one hand, the object ‘out there,’ and on the other, the subject and its ontological position as the base and origin of all experience. In line with what Viveiros de Castro calls ontological perspectivism, we might draw two theses from here that make it clear that we must affirm that a thing can be a different thing, ontologically so, and that a subject must always be understood in terms of its production. Finally, I want to consider the cosmopolitical implications of the theses.
Bio: Halbe Hessel Kuipers holds a doctorate in philosophy from the University of Amsterdam, thesis under the direction of Patricia Pisters and Erin Manning. Having worked a lifetime in the experimental laboratory for research-creation at SenseLab, Kuipers served as editor of the journal Inflexions and spearheaded its radical pedagogy project on neurodiversity. Kuipers’ first book, A Cinematic Mode of Existence, will soon appear at Bloomsbury.
Bethany Davison (University of Lincoln), “Im/material Landscapes in the Arctic Iconotext: Reading Tanya Tagaq’s Split Tooth”
Abstract: Positioning the Arctic tundra as a ruptured and breathing landscape, this paper argues that the construction of iconotextual moments throughout Tanya Tagaq’s Split Tooth creates a geologic aesthetic within the text, where the interpolative form becomes analogous to layers of geological strata.
Demonstrating how the Inuit wonderwork (Justice, 2018) performs layered episodes of becoming through its narrative prose, pictorial insertions and poetic ruptures, I read the iconotextual moment as a site of intra-material encounter, enabling a co-constitutive exchange that Louvel describes as a ‘“becoming image” of the text and the “becoming-text” of the image’ (2016). Subsequently, this paper argues that Tagaq’s text demonstrates a textual mode of “becoming-landscape”.
Apertures emerge from such text–image–body episodes, and the narrator of Split Tooth is depicted as a transient vessel for the multi-scalar and multi-elemental inter-mixing between corporeal, planetary and cosmic bodies. Throughout the text she performs a multi-elemental becoming located in the diffracted and shamanistic, specific to the Arctic landscape and Inuit Qaujimajatuqangit. That this celestial interaction is facilitated by birth and the spilling of bodily fluids, I argue that it can be located within the hyperabject (Frantzen and Bjering, 2020).
Showing how the narrator inhabits the landtimescape (Barad, 2017) of the textual artefact, breathing through and sedimented within its geological patterning, this paper argues that these iconotextual ruptures alter the temporal experience of the textual artefact as it emerges from the porous border of text and image, placing the protagonist at the precipice of both a deep past and future.
I argue that the text depicts a bodily becoming of landscape, specific to the Inuit Arctic, as the iconotextual moment permeates the space and time between text and image, just as it portrays the dissolve of boundaries between im/material realms through the cavernous corporeal body, terrestrial ruptures and celestial apertures.
Bio: Bethany Davison is a doctoral researcher at the University of Lincoln (UK). Her research interests extend across the environmental humanities, with a focus on energy narratives, petrocultures and contemporary fiction. She has a book chapter forthcoming with Edinburgh University Press, examining the re-imagination of spinsterhood in the novels of Scottish modernist Nan Shepherd.