WORK-IN-PROGRESS - Conditions for an Unfinished Work of Mourning: Descent

Conditions for an Unfinished Work of Mourning is a long term, site-responsive series drawing on the dormant pathos embedded within lands occupied by human and nonhuman dwellers, while searching for evidence of resilience. The project’s third volume, Descent, moves from terrain to water as a means of thinking through how we, along with fish and other organisms, find ways of being and living together within the midst of a global climate crisis impacting our shared resources and, subsequently, our relations. Looking to the fish – who have occupied our planet for millions of years – offers opportunities to visualize interspecies dynamics through time-based photographic systems referencing the imperceptible slowness of evolutionary processes. Digital photographs, scans, and video documentation are combined with UV-sensitive direct contact printing methods that require multiple minutes, hours, or days to construct an image of/with the natural world. While these camera-less works archive the durational period of each exposure – appearing as frozen traces serving as documents or specimens – the digital images and time-based video clips function as infinitely reproducible experience. Together, these recording techniques result in unpredictable visuals corresponding with feminist readings of Darwin’s theory of descent emphasizing anti-essentialist understandings of matter and nature, considering all aspects of Being as relentlessly transformed by and within time. This approach further engages with ideas from Métis anthropologist, Dr. Zoe Todd, who describes how “[T]ime, temporality, and movement are recorded in the bodies of fish in ways we may not [be] attuned to. When we think of fish as specimen or products, we’re not necessarily sitting with each scale and thinking about what stories it contains.” (1) Initial studies from this phase of the project have been produced within and around my hometown of Bahweting/Sault Ste. Marie, Michigan, with a particular focus on sections of Anishinaabe Gichigami/Lake Superior and Baawitigong/St. Marys River. As shaped by colonial powers, these aquatic habitats have become primarily known as a maritime border between the U.S. and Canada encompassing the shipping lanes within the commerce driven Soo Locks. Yet, these waters have long served Indigenous communities as a sacred source of life and continue to provide for many local tribe members who rely on fishing as their main source of income. This biodiverse ecosystem opens up a complicated narrative of contested space where contemporary species management, tribal fishing rights, and commercial and personal use and misuse interconnect and become entangled. Though the rich histories and fish populations of Nayaano-nibiimaang Gichigamiin/The Five Freshwater Seas/The Great Lakes will remain a foundation to the project, the work will extend from this region to consider bodies of water with comparable cultural and ecological characteristics. Connecting our human-made worlds with the lives of fish and their watery homes to varied understandings of descent – as passage, downward movement, decline, sinking, legacy, lineage, origination – I plan to seek out and learn from locations where relationships to land and water are disputed, revered, mourned, misunderstood, or unacknowledged. (1) Todd, Z. 2017. "Prairie Fish Futures: Métis Legal Traditions and Refracting Extinction Regeneration." Paper presented at Aboriginal Territories in Cyberspace and Imagining Indigenous Futures ‘Indigenous Future Imaginary’ speaker series, Concordia University, March 31, 2017.