Perpetual trauma

Abstract

This chapter presents a visual essay on four major artworks that speak to aesthetic acts of witnessing the perpetual trauma of the colonial project in the context of its various deathscapes: (1) As Above So Below was created for the exhibition, With Secrecy and Despatch, Campbelltown Arts Centre, 2016. Using drone cameras, two massacre sites were filmed, Appin, Australia and Cypress Hills, Canada. They are beautiful landscapes that hold the memory of colonial violence. The land we steward bears witness to our genocide. (2) Sick and Tired, 2005, is an installation that brings the past into the present. Material culture from Old Sun, one of 130 Canadian Indian Residential Schools, is reconfigured with feathers and Bison hide. It speaks to genocide and the legacy of colonialism and survival. (3) Aggressive Assimilation, 2013, addresses the intergenerational impact of Canada’s Indian Residential Schools and their regimes of colonial violence. The fourth work, Silent Witness, 2015, is a performance piece through which Stimson references his father’s, and his own, experiences in residential schools and their survivance of violent practices of assimilation that attempted to erase their Indigenous culture and heritage.