Stitching the Wound: Land-based Gestures of Healing and Resistance in the Work of Postcommodity and Maureen Gruben

Abstract

Through dismantling the territorial integrity of the modern nation-state, Indigenous sovereignty threatens state imposed hegemonic systems. While these systems exist at the threshold spatially—borders and boundaries—they are the ideological epicenter for controlling human and non-human life, rendering them manageable by the state. These borders are also perpetually liminal spaces, and it is in this liminality that artists intervene through poetics, confronting state rhetorics and exercising sovereignty to address colonial wounds. In 2015 and 2017, two land-based ephemeral art projects were created to challenge the terms by which territory is instrumentalized in order to justify the commodification of both land and humans. In 2015, the artist collective, Post-commodity, set up a land-based art installation, Repellent Fence, intersecting the US/Mexico border in an effort to “stitch” the Americas together again. The gesture of stitching is also employed in Maureen Gruben's Stitching My Landscape from 2017 in which Gruben stitched a segment of ocean ice with vibrant red broad cloth near her home in Tuktoyaktuk, Northwest Territories alongside the Ibyuk Pingo, a national landmark administered by Parks Canada. Both of these projects provide entry points into the various methods by which land is abstracted into an oppressive and singular form. They push back against the rigidity of prescribed borders, instead investigating more fluid entanglements with land.