2023
Commissioned by WalkingLab in conjunction with the University Arts Association of Canada conference in Banff.
Curators: Stephanie Springgay and Aubyn O’Grady
like the wildflowers and groundsquirrels was a critically site-responsive participatory performance that speaks to ongoing impacts of settler colonial whiteness, particularly as it relates to practices of extractivism and the ways they affect peoples and environments across the territories of sovereign Indigenous nations now known as Canada.
The location for the performance, a former mine site and contemporary tourist attraction called Bankhead Ghost Town, summons not only extractivism tied to “natural resources” in relation to its history as a coal mine. It also exposes extractivism arising from colonial conceptions of the “natural” environment as a resource for promoting well-being through recreational activities that often rely on unfettered access to the territories of Indigenous nations, and national pride that assumes a state of exclusive Canadian sovereignty. Incorporating the relational embodiment of shared gestures, offerings of implicated material culture that link to national and personal narratives, and situated references to the site and its stories, like the wildflowers draws attention to these issues within the site and beyond. Enlisting the audience as participants, it also calls on those present to consider responsibilities of care towards the lands, the more-than-human, and one another, given the ways we are differently implicated in and affected by histories and present-day extractive practices.
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