A wall is a shadow on the land
A wall is a shadow on the land is about the relationship to land on my father’s side of the family, and our Chalon Ohlone ancestry. The adobes that made up the Spanish missions along the Pacific Coast were made through the slave labor of my great grand father and great great grand mothers who lived in the San Luis Obispo Mission and Mission Soledad.
This project deconstructs the story of Spanish missionization through the forms of its architecture, modularized constructions built on top of Indigenous sacred sites and architectures throughout the Pacific Coast, from South America to Alta California. The project starts with a report I wrote when I was 10 years old in the 4th grade of public school in California, and presents the pages of that report alongside and in dialogue with documents from archives that control the narrative of Spanish colonization.
What happens when the documents of compulsory colonial erasure within public school education are read in the context of the state and church apparatus of violence?
What can be gained from the interstices, or the blank spaces in between the lines?
Are their moments in the text, or the decision to use certain words, that reveal an awareness of the apparatus to my 10 year old mind?
The iteration for SETTLEMENT occupies a digital space, in place of an original physical and spatial occupation of Plymouth, UK. A wall is a shadow on the land will also exist as an exhibition for the Contemporary Art Gallery (Canada) and a public installation of billboard sized images that will be installed in the Yaletown Station in Vancouver, BC.
The web-based configuration is a set of image sequences organized according to 3 themes: language, architecture, and land. The information presented on this site will grow as the project grows, and is meant to live as a changing and dynamic document of my un-learning process.
This project is for my family first and foremost, and has become a way for us to connect, untangle, and speak with the ghosts that exist in our lives for generations. We already know where we exist in the land, how we have remained for thousands of years in the place of our ancestors. We are rising from the ground and literally toppling colonial structures and it’s monuments to genocide. The seeds of our future have always been alive and present, and are growing into visible manifestations of what we know to be the truth.
