DIS/PLACE was an exhibition invested in complicating notions of place through the lens of settler colonialism and racial formation. As an idea that seemed to permeate throughout the work and as part of conversations with the artists, the works featured reflected a particular reticence towards the fixity of place and ultimately undermined the foundations by which concepts of place have been historically established. More specifically, and gesturing to Alfred Korzybski’s seminal concept that “the map is not the territory”, the works on display thought through and complicated representations of place as they began to navigate the material and conceptual boundaries of racial formation, their intersections, and their various assemblages. For the artists in this course, discussions circulated around an interrogation of place particularly as conversations began to unsettle and complicate the codified representations of racialized subjects historically within and throughout the archive. For many, visual ephemera such as maps, textiles, and collected images that have circulated online became source materials that reflected populist conceptions of racial identification and recognition, inherently structuring types of categorization that furthered white supremacist and settler colonial power dynamics and agendas. Serving as an index to the ways African, Latinx/a/o, Asian, Arab, and Native American (ALAANA) communities have been seen and understood within a white supremacist, settler colonial gaze, the items, objects, images, and ideologies found within the various collections across the MSU campus thus offered ideal sites for pedagogy, cultural intervention, and the development of strategies of resistance that could empower students. As current and future cultural producers, the course that generated this exhibition allowed students to be intentional about how and why objects and images operate in the ways that they do and to offer them a better framework of analysis that considers cultural work as a reflection of the perspectives of their creators. In many ways, this course was designed to highlight the contexts under which objects, items, and experiences have been made and embed criticality within the processes of making. 

 

In many ways, interrogating race through the lens of place is less intuitive than through the intersectional frameworks that Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw initiated and has become foundational within public discourses. Drawing on the scholarship of Alexander Weheliye in his book Habeus Viscus in which he conceptualizes “the place of race, or racializing assemblages” where the “layered interconnectedness of political violence, racialization, and the human” need to be recalibrated, the class Racializing Assemblages that generated this work looked specifically to moments in and throughout the archive that began to illuminate the ways racialized subjects have been constructed historically. Noting that if “we want to understand the workings of and abolish our extremely uneven global power structures defined by the intersections of neoliberal capitalism, racism, settler colonialism, immigrations, and imperialism, which interact in the creation and maintenance of systems of domination,” we must begin in a place that allows for those intersections to be painfully visible. Furthermore, primary sources found within the historical record of “dispossession, criminalization, expropriation, exploitation, and violence that are predicated upon hierarchies of racialized, gendered, sexualized, economized, and nationalized social existence” allowed for more nuanced and engaged conversations about how images and representations found within the archive have successfully sustained unrealistic expectations of racialized bodies and subjects over the course of history. It was through this intentional and rigorous study that we were able to begin to understand the impact of how racialized images and objects established different frameworks of social relation, and ultimately how structures of racism on micro and macro levels began to operate and illuminate other forms of inequality. 

 

At the heart of this exhibition, DIS/PLACE recognized the systemic, horrific, and continuous displacement of Native and Indigenous peoples, particularly those of the Anishinaabe, or the Council of Three Fires made up of the Ojibwe, Ottowa, and Potowatomi peoples who were subjected to a series of broken treaties that enabled the formation of Michigan State University as a pioneer land grant institution. Founded the same year as the cession of the Detroit Treaty in 1855 in which Ottowa and Ojibwe peoples lost claim to the property rights of their lands throughout what is now known as Michigan, the Agricultural College of the State of Michigan (now known as Michigan State University) was founded and later designated as a federal land-grant college for Michigan following the Morril Land-Grant Act of 1862. Chartered under Michigan State law, the college was “gifted” 14,000 acres by the state of Michigan to develop and establish a model that would help inform other land-grant institutions throughout the US. For Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang, the system to continuously dismantle treaties established a logic “for the settlers [where] Indigenous peoples are in the way and, in the destruction of Indigenous peoples, Indigenous communities, and over time and through law and policy, Indigenous peoples’ claims to land under settler regimes, land is recast as property and as a resource.” Noting the inherent violence of the colonial impulse to consistently eradicate Indigenous claims to land, the logic of settler colonialism foregrounds the notion that “Indigenous peoples must be erased, must be made into ghosts.” In effect, the titling of this exhibition was both a recognition of the active displacement of Native and Indigenous peoples as well as offering a conceptual framework that displaced older conversations around race relegated to fixed, seemingly born identities with conversations that began to highlight and articulate the conditions and contexts under which racial formations became prevalent.

 

Looking specifically to the collections housed at MSU’s Special Collections, Cultural Collections, and Maps Library, artists grappled with the lingering effects of colonialism where in many instances, objects often contained incomplete records or were improperly kept by the collectors that donated them. Other objects and ephemera whose records were not incomplete featured images or depictions of racialized subjects that sustained representations enabled by colonial encounters. Conjuring the glass cases that are often used for display, a relic of the Wunderkammer, or Cabinet of Curiosities prevalent throughout the 16th and 17th centuries, the works for this exhibition additionally activated the history of collection and its subsequent display. As “liminal objects that lay on the margins of charted territory, brought back from worlds unknown, defying any accepted system of classification (and most notably the conventional categories of ‘arts’ and ‘sciences’), and associated with the discovery of ‘new worlds’”, these “curiosities” currently found in collections across the globe, as well as at MSU, helped to shape, classify, and most importantly, inscribe how we understood the world and its people. As these collections later became the foundations of museums and archives, it is safe to consider the notion that, as Sumaya Kassim writes, “Museums are not neutral in their preservation of history. In fact, arguably, they are sites of forgetfulness and fantasy.” In protecting and projecting a particularly porous account of geopolitical spaces through the material cultures of the era, what emerges then is not an accurate reflection of the spaces of the world that were newly “discovered”, but on the collectors themselves. As such, the works on display offer both a mirror and a lens through which we can begin to understand the conversations that the artists are interested in having while beginning to navigate the conditions and contexts of MSU’s collections.

 

As an introduction that begins to help contextualize the making of these six projects, I also want to foreground the notion that the works featured are not resolutions in any way, nor do they seem to solve the paradoxical nature of racial ideologies that still persist today. Rather, the works featured only begin to highlight the complexities of racial formations and invite viewers into the multiple conversations the artists are beginning to have with and through this work. Noting the current political climate where racial tensions have been exacerbated by increased reporting of anti-Black violence at the hands of the police and the incremental rise of white supremacist organizations fearing their erasure by the presence of immigrants and refugees, the works featured could not be more vital. While this form of pedagogical intervention only begins to illuminate the broader scope of institutional racism and settler colonialism, not to mention how power structures remain and sustain within the broader logics of neoliberal capitalism, it is my hope that these projects allow for nuanced and passionate conversations beyond the classroom or hallway and make their way to the dinner table, the bus stop, or even the “third space” of the coffee shop. 

 

In looking towards the future, I would be remiss to not recognize the work and conversation by the committed students in this course who were willing to have and hold difficult conversations through an interdisciplinary critical art practice. Small, but mighty, I have been incredibly fortunate to work with this diverse future of creative practitioners and can only begin to reflect on how much they have offered me in their generosity. I thank them for their efforts, enthusiasm, and willingness to participate in this experiment in pedagogy and am incredibly grateful for all that I have learned from them. 

 

 

 

 

 

Alejandro T. Acierto

Artist In Residence for Critical Race Studies 

Michigan State University

Spring 2018

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Notes

 

1. Korzybski, Alfred. “A Non-Aristotelian System And Its Necessity For Rigour In Mathematics And Physics.” In Science and Sanity ; an Introduction to Non-Aristotelian Systems and General Semantics. International Non-Aristotelian Library. Lakeville, Conn: Institute of General Semantics, 1995.

 

2. Weheliye, Alexander G. Habeas Viscus: Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics, and Black Feminist Theories of the Human. Durham: Duke University Press, 2014.

 

3. Miner, Dylan. “Protecting the Land and Water: A Curator’s Perspective.” Lecture, LookOut! Art Gallery, April 11, 2017.

4. “The Nation’s Pioneer Land-Grant University.” Michigan State University Morrill Celebration (blog), n.d. https://msu.edu/morrill-celebration/history.html.

 

5. Tuck, Eve, and K. Wayne Yang. “Decolonization Is Not a Metaphor.” Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society 1, no. 1 (2012): 1–40.

 

6. Mauriés, Patrick. Cabinets of Curiosities. London: Thames & Hudson, 2002.

 

7. Kassim, Sumaya. “The Museum Will Not Be Decolonized.” Media Diversified (blog), November 15, 2017. https://mediadiversified.org/2017/11/15/the-museum-will-not-be-decolonised/.