2024
performance
curator: Erin Sutherland
remains responds to the absence of the John A. Macdonald statue in Kingston City park as well as the numerous markers of settler emplacement surrounding the site where the statue once stood. It calls back to two of my previous performances in this location: memoration 2: constituent parts and memoration 4: geodetic implications. Drawing attention to the imposition of settler whiteness in knowledge production and public memory, while enacting disturbances to its authority, the former took place at the Macdonald statue and Queen’s University during the bicentennial of Macdonald’s birth. The latter invited participants to engage with the geodetic survey marker, as a monument to colonial cartography not far from the statue, to consider how they are impacted by and implicated in settler colonial place-making.
The removal of the John A. Macdonald statue is a significant event in recognition of its damaging connotations, given the projects of settler colonial violence MacDonald spearheaded and his position as an icon in Canadian culture. Monuments are worthy targets of reparative removal aimed at mitigating the impact of their presence. However, their absence does not erase the harms they perpetuated, nor those caused by the figures they represent. Further, as this site demonstrates, our everyday spaces are littered with referents of settler colonial whiteness that garner much less, if any, scrutiny.
remains addresses the scars left after monuments are removed and shines a light on the less prominent trappings of settler colonial memory that linger, while implicating myself, as a white settler, in both.
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