I want to start by welcoming everyone to the third lecture in the terror lectures in American Art,
which is the series is focussed this year on the theme, a contest of images, American art as culture war.
And first, I want to also introduce myself. My name is John Blake and Jr. I'm the 2018 2019 Terror Visiting Professor of American Art here at Oxford.
And before proceeding, I want to make an announcement.
There'll be drinks next week after the final lecture in the series.
So I hope to see all of you there.
And I also want to offer again this week a disclaimer that I'm also going to be showing images that are related to death and that are violent.
So if you need to step out of the room, obviously that's not a problem.
OK. On January 1st, 1863, U.S. President Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation,
an executive order that granted freedom to more than three point five million enslaved African-Americans.
The proclamation, signed in the myths of the American Civil War as a war measure meant that slaves who escaped the Confederacy,
the southern states that had seceded from the Union, would now have federal legal status as free and as union troops advanced across the South.
The order eventually applied to 10 states in rebellion.
The Emancipation Proclamation was followed after the war by the 13th Amendment to the Constitution,
which finally abolished slavery in the United States in 1865.
But the signing of the Emancipation Proclamation occurred the same week as another very different presidential action.
On December 26, 1862.
The day after Christmas, the largest mass execution ever on American soil took place in the small frontier city of Mankato, Minnesota.
At 10 a.m., just a few weeks before, on December 6th, President Lincoln sent a directive to the frontier,
ordering the execution of thirty nine Native Americans.
Members of the Dakota part of the Sioux nation, they were condemned to death by hanging.
The men had all been part of an uprising that came to be known as a U.S. dakotah war in which the Dakota desperate for food,
in part because the US government failed to provide annuity payments and supplies as mandated in legally binding treaties,
instigated attacks on white settlers who subsequently repressed them with violence.
Lincoln was under enormous pressure from these settlers to punish the Dakota and not doing so risked encouraging vigilante violence on the frontier.
In fact, Lincoln could have ordered many more Native Americans to death by hanging.
Three hundred and three Dakota men were originally sentenced to death in Mankato by a military commission.
Three hundred and ninety two Dakota men were first tried in the commissions legal proceedings.
President Lincoln, despite the pressures of a civil war. We examined these case records and commuted individual sentences.
Reducing the number of men condemned to death to thirty nine.
Another man was later reprieved. Lincoln reported to the U.S. Senate, quote.
Anxious to not act with so much clemency as to encourage another outbreak.
On the one hand, nor with so much severity as to be real cruelty on the other.
I caused a careful examination of the records of trials to be made and quote.
But despite this careful examination, Lincoln's orders still resulted in the largest mass execution in U.S. history.
How do we reconcile these two diametrically opposed events, events that took place at essentially the same time in American history?
But point you very different mythologies of the American nation.
On the one hand, the Emancipation Proclamation represents redemption for the original sin in American history, the institution of chattel slavery,
which was legal across the 13 original colonies when the Declaration of Independence
was signed in 1776 and which subsequently persisted south of the Mason-Dixon Line.
The Emancipation Proclamation is rightly celebrated as one of Lincoln's most powerful actions in office, both in real terms and symbolically.
It filtered through visual culture in the period as an act of national liberation as seen, for example, in this image, which is from Harper's Weekly.
On the other hand,
the Mankato execution represents the failure of attaining redemption for another original sin in American history settler colonialism.
The executions remain a shadow on Lincoln's legacy, one typically overlooked in popular accounts and in common collective memory.
The Mikoto, 38, have faded from view. They are, for many of us, forgotten.
These events now distant and as I've said, forgotten,
were forced back into memory by the artist Sam Durand through a sculpture he created in 2012 titled Scaffold.
The work was first exhibited without controversy outside of the United States.
It appeared in The Hague, Netherlands, in Edinburgh, Scotland, and at the contemporary art exhibition at Documenter 13 in Castle, Germany.
The sculpture was made up of wooden planks and beams, a massive platform, metal steps and stairs.
But the sculpture triggered an uproar when it appeared in a renovated sculpture garden at the Walker Art Centre in Minneapolis.
In the summer of twenty seventeen, the structures form was, according to Durand, a composite of seven infamous Gallow's from American history.
I will list them. It re-created one. The scaffold used to execute them and Kado 38.
In 1862. So execution, I've already explained.
But also number two, the scaffold used to execute John Brown.
The abolition is to let a raid on a federal armoury at Harpers Ferry, Virginia.
In an attempt to initiate a slave rebellion across the South in 1859.
Three The gallows used to execute the Lincoln conspirators.
The three men and one woman who were convicted for assisting John Wilkes Booth in his assassination of President Abraham Lincoln,
an attempted assassination of other U.S. government officials in 1865.
And this event was also the first execution in U.S. history of a woman and then for the gallows used to
execute the Haymarket martyrs who led a labour revolt and bombing in Chicago in eighteen eighty six.
Five, the scaffold used to execute Reynie Bethia,
convicted for rape and killed by the state in the last legally conducted public execution in U.S. history in 1936 and six.
The scaffold used to execute Billy Bailey,
who was convicted of two counts of murder and who elected death by hanging and the last hanging in U.S. history, which was not a public execution.
And then finally, the gallows used in the execution of Saddam Hussein.
This litany of references, this history of capital punishment in the United States probably seemed very distant in The Hague,
in Edinburgh, in Castle, Germany, but it meant something more specific in Minnesota.
The Walker Art Centre, after all, is located in Minneapolis.
Only some 80 miles from Mankato, where the execution of the 38 Dakota man took place in 1862.
The museum's sculpture garden is on land that once belonged to the Dakota.
Durand's sculpture had previously been cited a great physical distance from its references,
but also in completely different national contexts where capital punishment would have been understood as a completely American phenomena,
as something that happened over there far away. After all, capital punishment was abolished in the Netherlands in 1870,
in the United Kingdom in nineteen sixty five, and in Germany after the Second World War.
Now located in close proximity to the works primary,
historical sources in the country where all of these executions occurred, the illusions are not so abstract.
The abstract collapses into this specific, the local into living memory.
The way the sculpture forces the past back into mind is a more violent artistic gesture.
When that path persists for communities that could visit and see and experience the sculpture.
Memories of the execution of Don Carto 38 are traumatic.
Not simply because execution as artistic subject matter is disturbing and inherently uncomfortable,
but because these memories are entangled with the experience of settler colonialism.
The history of settler colonialism in Minnesota requires some elaboration.
The conflict between the Dakota and white settlers that came to be known as the
U.S. Dakotah war can be traced to eighteen fifty one when the Dakota leader,
Little Crow,
signed two major treaties with the US government that ceded massive tracts of native land and what settlers called the Minnesota territory.
In exchange, the Dakota would receive regular monetary payments and goods.
These treaties forced the Dakota onto a reservation, just a thin strip of land.
But the encroachment of white settlement, which occurred in part because the US Senate had surreptitiously removed articles from
the treaties that specified the boundaries of the land granted to the Dakota cause.
Destruction of Minnesota's natural habitat. The levelling of forests.
The ploughing of prairies. This destruction disrupted the ability of the Dakota to hunt, fish farm and gather.
Soon, the U.S. government began withholding annual payments.
The Dakota leader, Little Crow visited Washington, D.C., dressed in Western clothes to renegotiate the treaties.
He was rebuffed. Withheld payments, broken treaties and environmental destruction led to food shortages and famine.
The Dakota became desperate. A white trader named Andrew Jackson Muridke, who frequently sold goods to the Dakota,
is famously remembered for his complete indifference to this desperation.
Quote, So far as I am concerned, let them eat grass or their own dung and quote,
These tensions exploded into violence in August 1862 when a band of Dakota killed five settlers, including Meric, whose mouth was stuffed with grass.
A series of raids and skirmishes followed the war, such as it was only lasted months.
U.S. soldiers took thousands of Dakota captive and forced them into internment camps.
Many were then tried and condemned to death by hanging. After the Mankato execution, the Dakota lost everything.
All treaties were expunged. All Dakota expelled from Minnesota.
A bounty of twenty five U.S. dollars per skalp was offered for any dakotah found in the state.
The case of the Mercado's thirty eight and the larger U.S. Dakotah war represent the trauma of colonisation.
And in invoking this episode,
I believe Sam Durand may have thought he was expressing empathy with indigenous people and unmasking the ideology of Manifest Destiny.
But it is important to emphasise that Durans sculpture is not about just a single historical episode.
It references seven in total. And not all of these episodes can be read as examples of colonisation or miscarriage of justice.
The men and women hanged in his seven case studies were not a unanimously sympathetic group.
This is a fact missing from many accounts of Durant's sculpture,
which tend to assume that the artist's only selected instances that reflect the abuse of power.
To me, this sculpture is actually very unclear, evoking episodes of execution that are contradictory,
their social and political resonances inconsistent.
For example, the Mikoto execution is now understood by most historians as legally and morally reprehensible.
The trials were rapidly processed by a military commission.
On the last day of trials, the commission heard 40 cases, some results with guilty verdicts in just a matter of minutes.
There was no due process. The Dakota was also tried as common criminals, not as legitimate belligerents of a sovereign power fighting in a war.
And the trials did not take place in actual courtrooms or with standard court procedures.
Perhaps worst of all, the proceedings were in English, a foreign language that the Dakota did not all speak or understand.
But Durant's other cases are ambiguous, Rainey Bethia, for example, was convicted of raping a US excuse me, a 70 year old woman.
He also killed this woman. Bethia was not charged with murder, only rape, so that he could be executed by public hanging.
Otherwise, he would have received a conviction of death by electrocution, which would not have enabled a public spectacle hanging.
By contrast, ensured an audience. The case attracted national media attention.
Some 20000 spectators attended. This photograph is shocking in its depiction of the mob.
The thieves executioner was also drunk at the time of execution.
It is no wonder that this was the last public hanging in the US.
The episode led to reforms in the application of the death penalty.
The discussions of Durant's scaffold often reduced the sculpture to a sympathetic, if ill conceived, gesture towards the Dakota.
But I'm not sure what commentary Durand is making on these other cases, like Pythias, whose execution became a disturbing public spectacle.
But who is not a particularly sympathetic figure in this way.
I see Durand doing two opposite and contradictory, contradictory things with Scaffold.
He is drawn to historical episodes that reveal the failure of American justice
and the powerful fault lines that pool American history and society apart.
Sorry, went ahead there. But he has also drawn to the spectacle of it all.
He sees the gallows as another site of public fascination, of voyeuristic pleasure.
He wants to fix the gaze of those 20000 spectators viewing Pythias execution back on to his own work.
Scaffold contains political content, possibly critical content.
Perhaps I'm not even sure, but it is also an indulgence in this spectacle.
Something and we talked about this at great length last week.
These two intertwined themes are present in historical accounts of the Mankato 38.
The execution in Mercado took place on a large Gallow structure that was purpose built for
the occasion designed to allow the execution of all 38 condemned men in a single instance.
The trap or trap flaw dropped and everyone fell.
I explored last week how murder became public spectacle and how vision is often part of these events,
rituals which take place for people to see, to watch, and then to image and continually reimagine through keepsakes and postcards.
The drama of mass death in a single instant at Mankato was similarly intended to increase the visual spectacle.
It is interesting, given this fascination with visualising death in America that we have seen in previous case studies, which is also this.
This named Death in America is also the title of World Series of disaster paintings
that we considered that there are actually no photographs of the Mankato execution.
There were, however, prints that appeared in Frank Leslie's illustrated newspaper and Harper's Weekly engravings of the scene circulated widely.
They appeared on commemorative trays. This is for Standard Brewing Company and also commemorative spoons.
These images are all triumphant, containing and reducing the violence of a mass execution to the gallows at centre,
a perfect square feet in the distance and emphasising instead the perfect lines of troops, information and the many spectators.
The news coverage at the time similarly presented the scene in visual terms, even when only describing it with text,
newspapers often manipulated readers responses by setting up a visual tension,
one that is important for Durant's later work between the beauty of the surroundings in Mankato and the reality of what happened.
The New York Times focussed attention on the scaffold structure and the spectacle of it all in this way.
Quote. The instrument upon which the extreme sentence of the law was to be performed was constructed in a very simple yet most ingenious manner.
It was erected upon the main street, directly opposite the jail and between it and the river.
The shape of this structure was a perfect square.
Precisely at the time announced 10:00 a.m., a company without arms entered the prisoner's quarters to escort them to their doom.
The signal to cut the rope was three taps of the drum.
All things being ready.
The first tap was given when the poor wretches made such frantic efforts to grasp each other's hands that it was agony to behold them.
The second tap resounded on the air. The vast multitude were breathless with the awful surroundings of this solemn occasion.
Again, the doleful tap brakes on the stillness of the scene.
Click goes. The sharp axe and the descending platform leaves the bodies of 38 human beings dangling in the air.
It was an awful sight to behold. Thirty eight human beings suspended in the air of the Bank of the beautiful Minnesota above the smiling,
clear blue sky beneath and around the silent, thousands hushed to a deathly silence by the chilling scene before them.
Durant's sculpture repeats this bizarre collapse of positive and negative.
He translates the rhetorical device used in The New York Times into aesthetic terms, into experiential terms.
Scaffold is deadly serious, but it looks to me like a jungle gym or a playground.
The type of structure on which children run, play Klein and laugh.
A postcard shows one such structure in Minnesota, just an hour and a half from both Mankato and the Walker Art Centre.
The image is unsettling. It now evokes the gallows scuttled, creates an ironic tension between the spectacle,
the historical events and a more contemporary resonance and common shared childhood experience.
Images of the work as installed abroad show visitors responding to it in this way,
clambering up its steps, playing in its shadows, circling on Bicycle's scaffold was fun.
This tension is further reiterated by the works, citing in the Minnesota sculpture Guarded,
where it was positioned in ironic dialogue with a giant sugary cherry balanced precariously on an enormous boon.
That work by class Oldenburg and Coscia van Brugmann is also a fountain and sprays a spritz of water from the tip of its cherry stem.
It conveys pop pleasure and humour, a sensuality in shiny red metal.
Scuffled was also cited not far from a giant bright blue rooster by Catarina Fritsche.
Scaffold looks plainly ridiculous between these works,
and it's also intriguing to think about the spoon sort of recurring surreptitiously in this sighting.
Durand's might have imagined that such irony strengthens the charge of the work scaffold,
creates associations with the ludic, with playful, fun, with the big red cherry and the blue rooster.
But then subsequently punctures these playful associations as one suddenly becomes aware of the reference to mass execution.
Three taps of the drum click goes the sharp axe.
The work placates viewers as a first approach and then forces them into a state of discomfort.
Scuffle, therefore, reflects a problem that we have encountered while examining Donna Shutz painting Open Casket,
which rendered the body of Emmett Till in a seductive sheen of oil pigment on canvas.
And here's the detail. It gave that awful image a decorative appeal through paint that effectively transformed and transmuted historical reality into,
as Parko Bright called it, Black Death spectacle in scaffold.
The work does something similar, but different. The look of the work is really not all that seductive or appealing.
It doesn't look like much,
but the playfulness of its associations and its siting in a sculpture garden are completely at odds with historical realities it represents.
What does the category of art as a philosophical construct do to memories of trauma and tragedy?
To how those memories are experienced now? Many viewers believe that the works.
Historical references actually served a valuable educational purpose.
The National Coalition Against Censorship and Anti Censorship Organisation, which I'll speak more about, momentarily, argued that the work quote,
intended to create awareness about capital punishment and its historically disproportionate effect on people of colour.
And Pope. Others found similar meetings in Scaffold.
A curator at the Walker Art Centre recalls seeing the work for the first time in 2012.
Quote, I thought it was an incredibly powerful piece,
which I read as a comment on the history of capital punishment and mass incarceration in the United States.
And quote. But how does creating awareness even work?
What is the comment? The sculpture actually makes about Kopit capital punishment?
I don't see one at all. I'm not sure.
Visitors are made aware of history in their encounter with the sculpture, which does very little to reframe and re signify history.
It only inserts historical associations into an aesthetic experience, which does not seem to me to resolve those histories in any way.
The explanation of the purported content that the sculpture references seven infamous
Gallow's cannot be learnt from the sculpture alone without text explaining it.
Nothing about the works form expresses the reality of the works content.
In a statement from May 2017, draughted, in response to the complaints from a native community, Durans explained the purpose of the work as not to,
quote, cause pain or suffering, but to speak against the continued marginalisation of these stories and people and quote, to create that awareness.
His comments revealed his own blind spots, which he openly admits to having about the work and his perception.
I made scaffold as a learning space for people like me,
white people who have not suffered the effects of a white supremacist society and who may not consciously know that it exists.
It has been my belief that white artists need to address issues of white supremacy and its institutional manifestations.
Whites created the concept of race and have used it to maintain dominance.
For centuries, whites must be involved in its dismantling.
However, your protests have shown me that I made a grave miscalculation in how my work can be received by those in a particular community.
In focussing on my position as a white artist making work for that audience,
I fail to understand what the inclusion of the Dakota 38 in the sculpture could mean for Dakota people.
I offer my deepest apologies for my thoughtlessness. I should have reached out to the Dakota community.
The moment I do that, the sculpture will be exhibited at the Walker Art Centre in proximity to Mankato.
My work was created with the idea of creating a zone of discomfort for whites.
Your protests have now created a zone of discomfort for me.
In my attempt to raise awareness, I have learnt something profound, and I thank you for that end quote.
That discomfort is evident in the signs posted by protesters on the chain link fence that surrounded the sculpture garden.
In the photos that circulated online, these signs serve as textual labels that,
as we saw with Parker Bright's response to open casket last week, effectively re signify and reframe the work.
Cultural genocide opportunist. This hurts native people, respect Dakota people, not your story.
Feels like 1862 execution is not art, Dakotah.
Genocide is not art. Take it down. One sign offered a 200 dollar reward for Skalp of artist,
updating the old reward offered by the state of Minnesota for Dakota Scouts and inverting the irony of Duran's work.
Back at the work itself, Durans also became the target of social media attacks.
The type of Twitter abuse and Internet outrage that is again a prevailing feature of the contemporary culture war.
But these protests had a very different effect in the case of scaffold in comparison to the case of open casket.
While claims of cultural appropriation recur in both instances,
there is also the suggestion from activists who protested Scaffold that the work triggered a powerful negative
reaction not because it reflected cultural appropriation that was self-serving to the artist and institution,
but because it enacted the forced confrontation with a painful past.
In other words, it forced people to remember. That was Durant's goal, education awareness.
But why should Native American communities be forced to remember in public spaces
in the museum at the Walker Art Centre so near to where these events occurred?
Why should they bear that burden when those memories had never even been forgotten?
Well, the act of remembering is powerful. The uproar aimed at the rant and against Scaffold indicates that not everyone is in a position
of privilege that allows remembering to happen in a purely intellectual or aesthetic manner.
For some, it is too deeply intertwined with actual experience with real life.
Moreover, the protests also prompted different resolutions in these two cases.
Donna Shutz defy protesters claiming her work was motivated by empathy but expressing no regret, shame or embarrassment.
By contrast, Durant actually listened. He met with protesters and he's seen here with director of the Walker Art Centre at the time, Ohga Visa.
Duran came to appreciate the perspective of the protesters.
He ultimately agreed with them and supported the removal of his sculpture.
The original plan had been to ritually burn the work, but community leaders decided that burning was inappropriate.
As fire into code, a myth represents a constructive life force and should not be used to destroy Durant's
signed intellectual excuse me intellectual property rights over to the Dakota.
And they instead decided to bury the wood in an undisclosed location.
And Okah Visa would later write about this experience. She stepped down from her position following this incident,
and she writes here in an editorial in The New York Times about how the museum's reaction
might be a more progressive reaction than the case of Donna showed that the Whitney.
Colonisation of the West operated through the mythology of Manifest Destiny and the frontier.
Under those ideological imaginings, the West was just empty.
Ready for colonial conquest. Ready to be colonised.
The problem with the mythology of Manifest Destiny and the frontier was that they were structured upon an imagined erasure of indigenous presence,
which thus justified the forced removal of indigenous people.
Durand, in his embrace of remembering, regardless of his intentions,
seems to forget that there are people there who already remember and may not want to be forced to publicly remember.
Again. From one protester, quote,
It's really traumatising for our people to look at that and have it just appear without any warning or idea that they were doing this.
And it's not art and quote. An editorial in a local paper further explained the problem.
Quote, Minnesota has so successfully wiped clean. It's awful treatment.
That's a quote of people that no one, no Walker, curator, board member or patron raised the issue of what actual Dakota might think.
The history of art and in fact, all history is founded on the assumption that the past is worth remembering, reconstructing, reanimating.
It's our job as historians to give life to the past.
This episode suggests to me, however, the value of precisely, precisely the opposite procedure forgetting,
deconstructing, dismantling, dismantling the gallows means finding a way to acknowledge what happened.
Sure. But also a way to move beyond it. The need for this procedure might be more acute today, in part because of the disruptions of digital culture.
Last week I alluded to the way that all history is now rendered invisible, easily accessible.
The past is always present on our computers and iPhones. Perhaps this is part of what makes the notion of dismantling, of forgetting appealing to me.
The debate over scaffold was cheap, which seemed to shock everyone in the art world.
Actually repeated and reiterated an ongoing series of culture war debates over the representation of the US dakotah war.
And this is a debate that really the Welker's should have been aware of.
Since 1923, a painting by artist Anton Gag has hung in the Minnesota Capitol Building.
It depicts an attack on a frontier city of new home. The work became controversial on account of its depiction of the Dakota as violent.
The painting does not fully represent the complexities of the U.S. dakotah war or its causes.
And critics argued that displaying this particular view of history in the Capitol building bestows
that narrative the narrative of the white settler with complete historical authenticity and validity.
It conveys Gex impression as the official, state sanctioned view of the war.
After the painting was then sent to the Minnesota Historical Society for Conservation,
it was not returned, effectively removing it from the capitals walls.
Many attacked what they saw as censorship. The Centre for the American Experiment, a conservative think tank based in Minnesota, took on the issue,
calling the painting superb and historically accurate and the decision to remove it, remove it as incomprehensible.
An editorial on their Web site elaborates, quote, The Tota did, in fact, attack the town of New Arm.
And the painting could just as easily be seen as depicting the battle from the Native American perspective.
I don't know how Gex painting could reasonably give rise to an inference that it is a white interpretation.
Thus, do the organs that control our cultural life steadily impose their vision of how American history should be viewed?
And quote. Comments from readers attacked cultural cleansing.
Quote, The P.S. politically correct crowd has learnt much from the Stalinist Nazis and Taliban, end quote.
That debate closely resembles any number of recent culture war episodes in which any alteration to an object or image is seen as a profane,
profane destruction of history. As fascism.
Indeed, this conservative right wing response was bizarrely mirrored in the left wing response to scaffold,
as put forth by the National Coalition Against Censorship, which typically defends things like flag burning.
People thought, photos, etc. They put out a press release.
Quote, The Walker's decision to destroy scaffold as a way to respond to protests sets an ominous precedent.
Not only does it weaken the institution's position and future programming,
but it sends a chill over artists and other cultural institutions commitment to creating and exhibiting political,
socially relevant work, even ostensibly voluntary decisions to destroy artwork have ominous implications for
creative expression and the need for public debate over contentious social issues.
And quote. As the coalition saw it,
the decision to dismantle the gallows was a concession to the frightening forces that aim to limit Americans First Amendment right to free speech.
Even if Durant willingly approved of the action and even if the museum agreed to allow it to happen in consultation with the artist,
the act of destruction negates the power of the artist and the museum to argue for free speech and against censorship in all future instances.
I appreciate the thinking here and I also want to condemn acts of censorship.
But I don't think this argument applies to scaffold. The work was dismantled, destroyed, but it was not censored.
The artist's intervention was a deliberate choice to remove the work, and I consider that action to have been a performative part of the work itself.
As I see it, dismantling is an aesthetic gesture. The art is in the destruction.
Duran's position illuminates a counterintuitive approach to the work of art and to history and overcoming it.
The sight of the gallows in Mercado's struggling downtown is now thoroughly unremarkable.
A public library in concrete and sandstone occupies what had once been the open square where the scaffold was constructed in 1862.
There is a small park named Reconciliation Park along the Bank of the Minnesota River near the site.
It contains numerous memorials intended to mark the significance of the location and the gravity of the events that occurred there.
A historical plaque and one bearing a prayer. But Dakota Warrior dedicated in nineteen eighty seven.
A sculpted bison. From 1997 and so on, these memorials all replaced a more offensive monument, a Carstone that read here were hanged.
38 Sioux Indians, December 26, 1863. 1862, sorry.
This monument, this older monument has been dismantled.
But these other memorials seem to me unable to match the terror of public hanging or the realities of the U.S. dakotah war and its legacies.
But the forced removal of the Dakota people from Minnesota. Are these memorials and monuments successful at helping us remember?
They seem profoundly inadequate. Sam Durante points to a different approach, one based not on remembering,
but on finding ways to forget, to dismantle, to escape the past and its shackles over us.
I don't mean this in the sense of letting history disappear,
but this sense of forgetting the weight and burden of the past in all of our public spaces,
especially when it impacts some people so forcefully and immediately.
Who benefits from that imposition of power over them?
Does that action, rhetorically coded as awareness and education, celebrated as aesthetic experience?
Not reiterate and repeat the imposition of power that occurred in settler colonialism?
Dismantling is a more compelling gesture, maybe letting people forget is a better form of reconciliation.
Thank you.