I’m New Here: Black and Indigenous Media Ecologies: Curatorial Statement

Tao Leigh Goffe,Tatiana Esh

doi:10.5070/r74155772

Abstract

Exploring themes of race and shared ecologies across the Americas, the born-digital photography exhibition I’m New Here: Black and Indigenous Media Ecologies presents a hemispheric vision of African diasporic and Native life in the United States, Caribbean, and Latin America. The exhibition features experimental virtual reality (VR) and filmic components. In this curatorial essay, themes of the entangled dispossession of Native sovereignty and African enslavement are explored in the works of seven photographers from Trinidad to Wisconsin to Peru to Dominica. Artists Abigail Hadeed, Nadia Huggins, Kai Minosh Pyle, Allison Arteaga, steve núñez, Melia Delsol, and Dóra Papp provide a visual critique of the long history of racial capitalism, climate crisis, and Black and Indigenous presence. Together the photographic essays form a constellation, a vision of what environmental and racial justice can look like for the hemisphere after the catastrophe of European conquest. Speculatively picturing Black and Indigenous coalitions in the past, present, and future, the artists use the technology of the camera to frame nature, exploring visual aesthetic forms that seek not to replicate the capture of the colonial archive.

Highlights

The Dark Laboratory, a humanities and technology collective that centers race and shared ecologies, presents the photography exhibition I’m New Here: Black and Indigenous Media Ecologies
The exhibition explores the intersecting ideas of race and ecology through the visual and literary interpretation of the work of seven photographers from across the Western Hemisphere
I’m New Here: Black and Indigenous Media Ecologies gathers a dark chorus of contemporary voices who illuminate how art continues to answer the call for a vision of ecological justice that must include racial justice

Summary

Introduction

The Dark Laboratory, a humanities and technology collective that centers race and shared ecologies, presents the photography exhibition I’m New Here: Black and Indigenous Media Ecologies. Linking the histories of the dispossession of Native sovereignty and African enslavement, the photographs offer a visual commentary on how any just vision of the future must reckon with race, Black being, Indigeneity, and climate crisis.

Results

Conclusion