collaboration with Peter Morin
2020 ongoing
The x: where our paths cross performances are part of an ongoing collaborative relationship between artist/scholars Peter Morin (Tahltan Nation, French Canadian) and Leah Decter (Jewish white settler). They bring together Morin’s work with Tahltan knowledge and sovereignties through embodied activations of a book of Tahltan stories “collected” and transcribed by white anthropologist James Teit in the early 1900s, and Decter’s work disturbing patterns of white settler emplacement and settler-state sovereignty, in part through interrogations of the Group of Seven’s landscape painting traditions of the same time period that significantly influenced “Canadian” national identity in celebration of colonial whiteness. The x in the title alludes to the way Indigenous Knowledge Keepers have described the Xs marked on treaties by Indigenous leaders as referencing the place and time the journeys of the signatories’ have crossed, rather than being stand-ins for a signature as a form of personal identification.
Morin and Decter’s pandemic-times virtual version of the project consisted of recorded zoom sessions in which Morin read Tahltan stories aloud from Teit’s Tahltan Tales while Decter drew images of Tahltan Nation territory from collaboratively selected photographs taken by Morin and his family. In these performance sessions, Morin’s act of reading re(in)forms Teit’s interpretation of Tahltan stories through the assertion of embodied sovereignty, and Decter’s incomplete drawing-while-listening erodes assumptions of white settler authority and entitlement with respect to the land.
Decter and Morin’s actions within these performances, and the project as a whole, metaphorically cross each other like an “X” marking their meeting places in time and on territory. These on-line performances have now expanded into live in-person and hybrid performances in which their paths form new Xs by crossing with one another and the audiences in new ways. By working through personal and socio-political scales of relationality and embodiment, this project straddles the varied intimacies of live and virtual “visiting” while activating noncolonial host-guest relations that enact Indigenous sovereignties and confront the certainty of settler emplacement towards otherwise possibilities.
We continue to perform iterations of this work and have recently created an artist book, “x: the meeting place makes the spine,” that extends this project as part of the Undercurrents and Folds series by Light Factory Press.
For more on this project see:
Decter, L, Morin, P. “x: where paths cross.” Performance Matters, Vol. 10 No 2. Performing (in) Place: Space, Relation, Action. (2024)
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