1.
ARTIST TALK

Song Life
Thursday, November 26, 1–3 pm MST

This talk will focus on the category of Indigenous non-human-being as it pertains to material culture and songs as having life, aliveness, and as giving life. These forms of non-human life—in addition to naming our relations as kin or ancestors—taken together recognize the fact that not all Indigenous people consider tangible and intangible cultural expression to possess commensurable subjectivity, or as imbued with/imbuing life. Indeed, some songs are just songs, and some objects are merely objects. Yet for those Indigenous songs and belongings that do possess life, understanding the context of Indigenous non-human being is of keen importance given the extent to which such life has been “salvaged” and re-situated within museums. To what extent, then, might we draw parallels between other histories and policies of Indigenous dis-placement and forced segregation from kin: incarceration and the 60s/70s scoop? What kind of lives have our ancestors lived within the museum as dwelling-place, and how might we move beyond repatriation’s transactional practices of return to practices of reconnection with kin?



2.
WORKSHOP/seminar

Settler-Colonial Structures of Attention
Friday, December 4, 10 am – 1 pm MST

limited space

Drawing from some of Robinson’s writing in Hungry Listening, this workshop will focus on settler-colonial structures of perception across sensory domains. We will seek both to identify how attention is structured by settler colonialism, through interpellation by an aesthetic object/subject, and by normative patterns/grooves. To what extent, upon identifying such structures (noting their frequencies, hum, and haunting), might we begin to practice attention otherwise?

Dylan Robinson is a Stó:lō scholar who holds the Canada Research Chair in Indigenous Arts at Queen’s University, located on the traditional lands of the Haudenosaunee and Anishinaabe peoples. His research focuses upon the sensory politics of Indigenous activism and the arts, and questions how Indigenous rights and Settler colonialism are embodied and spatialized in public space. His current research documents the history of contemporary Indigenous public art (including sound art and social arts practices) across North America. This project involves working with Indigenous artists and scholars to collaboratively imagine new models for public engagement, to create new public works that acknowledge Indigenous histories of place, and to envision future sovereignties.

From 2010-2013 Dylan led the SSHRC-funded “Aesthetics of Reconciliation” project with Dr. Keavy Martin that examined the role that the arts and Indigenous cultural practices played in the Truth and Reconciliation Commission on the Indian Residential Schools. This research led to a second collaborative project, “Creative Conciliation”, supported by a SSHRC Insight grant, to explore new artistic models that move beyond what many Indigenous scholars have identified as reconciliation’s political limitations.

In addition to his research on Indigenous art, Dylan is an artist whose practice bridges music performance, dialogic art, and installation. He completed an arts practice-based doctoral degree at the University of Sussex in 2009, where he imposed unlikely intimate partnerships between modernist music compositions, one-on-one dialogue, and protocols of hosting. This work sought to examine the efficacy of social arts practices toward the development of ‘public musicology’. As part of the intermission inter-arts collective founded in 2003 with Anna Höstman and David Cecchetto, Dylan has presented work at sites as diverse as the Sheremetev Palace Theatre (St. Petersburg, Russia) and outdoor Mexican courtyards (Profética Cultural Centre, Puebla). Most recently, Dylan took part in the three-year collaborative project nuyamł-ił kulhulmx (singing the earth). This music installation was the result of a fieldwork-creation process with composer Anna Höstman (a descendent of the first Norwegian settlers in Bella Coola) and ethnomusicologist Patrick Nickleson in Nuxalk territory now known as the Bella Coola Valley, and was premiered by Continuum New Music Ensemble in Toronto in December 2013.

For more information see: https://www.queensu.ca/art/robinson-dylan