tutelage
Nathanael Jones
Nathanael Jones
Tutelage
2 channel audio
22:50 min.
2021
This piece is inspired by my own experiences of acquiring a second language in the context of the enduring and evolving French colonial project in North America. Rather than attempt to explain the ways in which colonized peoples and places are marked through language, it instead looks to convey how physical and virtual landscapes are indelibly marred by colonial violence. These landscapes—geographies, cultural and societal spaces, individual psyches—are haunted by the memory of language weaponized toward imperialist ends, and endlessly reverberate the histories inscribed upon them.
Sound is not often conceived of as being an integral feature of physical landscapes but it is rarely absent from them. I believe that the inherent impermanence of physical landscapes can be foregrounded through deliberate sonic interventions, acts which could help to invert the hierarchy whereby we prioritize what we can see over what we can hear. This inversion draws attention to the varying speeds at which the different features comprising physical landscapes decay, and further highlights the immaterial, overlapping landscapes they share spaces with.
Trauma eludes exposition and cannot be explained, but its effects can be felt as emotional and psychological states. As a porous and flexible medium capable of both triggering memories and integrating seamlessly into physical and virtual spaces, sound is able to tease out the invisible and inexpressible burdens landscapes harbour.
Nathanael Jones is an Afro-Caribbean Canadian writer and artist born in Montreal and currently based in Chicago, USA. His practice is interested in probing the spaces between poetry, performance, installation, and experimental music in order to draw attention to the structures and systems which make up our world. He holds a BFA in Interdisciplinary Fine Arts from NSCAD University and an MFA in Writing from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC). He has exhibited and performed in Canada, the USA, and the UK, and has published work online and in print with Aurochs, Ghost Proposal, DREGINALD, and Infinity's Kitchen.
borrowed land
September 30 - December 31, 2021
A series of exhibited works including sculpture, letterpress, documentation and experimentations reflecting on the physical presence of a settler home on the stolen traditional territory of the Yuułuʔiłʔatḥ.
soil from 1595 Bay Street in Ucluelet with traditional trading bead
Mamaałni
wooden rowboat, cut sod from district lot 282 on Yuułuʔiłʔatḥ territory (1595 Bay Street)
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The Nuu-chah-nulth word for white person – mamaałni – translates as ‘people of floating houses’ and refers to Europeans who arrived by boat and were thus, ‘people of no land’.
- part of Borrowed Land, a changing series of exhibitions running until the end of December.
