On Felt Structures: Weather, Embodiment, and Materiality.

Abstract

The thesis project is comprised of research creation works commissioned by curators in Canada and the U.S.: An amplification through many minds (2019) and Kodiak Alutiiq belongings for SFMOMA’s Soft Power; We wear one another (2019) arising from a MacKenzie Delta Inuvaluit gut parka installed for Soundings: An Exhibition in Five Parts at Agnes Etherington Art Centre in Kingston, Ontario; and the sculpture, Indigenous geometries (2019), a work with Métis artist and architect Tiffany Shaw (complemented by performance) for … and other such stories, the Chicago Architecture Biennial. This creative work aligns with generations of Indigenous scholarship and action. These works are accompanied by writing that builds on the intellectual labor of Alutiiq/Sugpiaq and Yup’ik Elders, writers, and cultural workers proposing the analytic of felt structures. Bundling Sugpiaq concepts of lla (weather, atmosphere, universe) and anerneq una (breath, energetic body), felt structures are potentially reparative and liberatory. Key thinkers in relation to felt structures (weather and embodiment) include Katherine McKittrick’s discussion of the counter-conceptual, Dian Million’s felt theory, Kristen Simmons’s settler atmospheric(s), Candice Hopkin’s repatriation otherwise, and Megan Scribe and Sefanit Habtom’s call to Black and Indigenous peoples to breathe alongside one another. Practically, the method is short form: a performance, a text, a sculpture, a breath, a stitch, a garment, or a song. In the brevity of short form, opacity is deployed. Short forms (gesturing towards cultural practices) gather over time, building towards insistence. Writing in a non-extractive way, I refuse to mine the artworks for content (Dylan Robinson). Instead, I write near, alongside, or adjacent to the projects. The writing moves through Kodiak Sugpiaq histories, the weather of (historical) grief, memory, Indigenous concepts surrounding ancestral or cultural belongings, the weather-proof museum, the weather of the body, Indigenous time(s), a politics of mourning, histories of Relocation, the climate crisis, and our insistent efforts at repair. Those working in the fields of performance, museum studies, affect theory, dance studies, and repatriation, including current and future generations of Alutiit/Sugpiat, BIPOC, and LGBTQ2S++ folks, may be compelled by this writing.