Am I Ancient or a Human-Made Machine?
How do exhibitions have the capacity to create moments of communality rather than objectifying the beings that enter into its modern grid? How does the exhibition become permeable to life through orality, reciprocity, and in connection with geopolitical trajectories, struggles and potential alliances? In a partly speculative and partly documentary manner, artist Michelle-Marie Letelier weaves a series of collaborations through virtual reality, song, storytelling, laboratory, matter, performance and conversations. Against the grain of extractivism, this exhibition engages the poethics of a sovereign ocean through the consciousness and memory of our fellow being, salmon: Am I Ancient or a Human-Made Machine?
Within the geopolitical embattled ground and clashes amid (neo)colonial structures and the resistance, the exhibition tackles the violence of neoliberal extractivist narrative through which fellow beings are seen as resource, commodity and signs of profit, and in turn invites us to listen, remember and engage with more-than-human practices and indigenous epistemologies based in relations of reciprocity, empathy and kinship. Who are the native ancient salmon creatures that struggle to complete their entire life cycle and how do communities welcome them across the oceans? Who are their captive cousins, the human-made techno-beings genetically modified to inhabit within the confines of industrial tanks that, in contrast, threaten the self-determination of the communities around? Rather than exhibiting objects only to be seen, the exhibition’s installation Am I Ancient or a Human-Made Machine? welcomes us with an invitation to take position and enter in relationship with those sentient beings:
Please pick a card upon entering the exhibition space.
This card will suggest you which group you can start your journey through the exhibition: Ancient on the front; Human-Made on the back of the room
– Michelle-Marie Letelier
Apparently minimal and somewhat empty, the exhibition intends to give space to various acts of communality, weaving multiple agencies. Based on extra-disciplinary research and collaborations, in the sites of exploitation and on ancestral indigenous knowledge and post-humanist ways of remembering, connecting, listening and telling, The Bone, and The Bonding emerge as acts of connection. The Bone, a virtual reality that literally emerges when one connects to the simulation, and through which the gallery space becomes fulfilled by the water-world: the welcoming song by Sámi Yoik singer Ánde Somby, the flow of consciousness of an ancient salmon, and the submarine dancing forest of algae. While The Bonding, on the other side of the installation, is a live video streaming that intends to create a long-term emotional bonding and encounter between people and the captive human-made salmon, aiming to regain some of the empathy and kinship lost by the alienation of industrialization. By a webcam system, both the salmon swimming in a laboratory tank and the artist from her computer camera have been face-to-face along the lifespan of the fishes, from the egg stage to their current age.
Departing by a salmon skull that is returned to the ocean, The Bone VR experience turns it into rock-like and large- scale undersea sculpture to listen to, while its otoliths, those tiny crystals of the inner ears that archive insights of the life history of a fish, act as illuminated cues of memory inviting us to take different narrative paths in the virtual route. In collaboration with German-Norwegian philosopher Martin Lee Mueller, The Bone’s script recalls indigenous epistemologies. Based on Lee Mueller’s investigation and book Being Salmon, Being Human (2017) in which the Salmon Boy story, that he learnt while visiting the indigenous Klallam community at the Elwha River in the U.S in 2012, plays a central role in the practice of respect with the salmon by returning the bones to the river as a gesture of reciprocity. Common to various First Nation communities of the Pacific Northwest of America, such as in British Columbia, the Salmon Boy story remind us of the significance and even of the agreement of the act of reciprocity, between humans and the living beings in the rivers and oceans:
*“Each year when the first salmon start pushing up the river, the Klallam are there awaiting them. Songs inter- twine with the mist on the river. Voices of everyone from elders to toddlers incant the familiar greetings. The lead salmon is considered the chief of the salmon people. He is cooked, cut, and gifted to the tribal elders in a ceremony led by a shaman. His head and bones are arranged with great care on a cedar mat. The raft is then placed carefully into the river’s currents, which will return the chief’s remains to his people, who live in houses below the sea. He will tell his fellow travellers how honourably he has been treated, and that it is alright for them all to move up the river”.
Transversally and also confronting the operations of objectification, the exhibition intends in a humble but active way to connect geopolitical trajectories, struggles and potential alliances across three regions that share the resistance against extrac- tivism, approached by Letelier’s projects, from Norway’s fjords, with the Sámi community; to the Onashaga Channel, the Beagle Channel, within the Yaghan community in the South of Chile; until the relation and investigation that departs with this exhibition through the waterways of British Columbia, on the unceded territory of the xwməθkwəy’əm (Musqueam), Skwxwú7mesh (Squamish) and Səl’ílwətaʔ/ Selilwitulh (Tsleil-Waututh) First Nations. Through a series of conversations produced during the span of the exhibition, we are grateful to collaborate with cultural practitioners, activists and indigenous community members, tackling the Poethics of a Sovereign Ocean: Orality, Reciprocity and Geopolitical Trajectories (accessible at: http://www.orgallery.org/). By relying on orality and listening to stories and practices of reciprocity, the conversations bring collaborators to the front, creating moments of togetherness to weave models of respect that contest the geopolitics of extractivism. Throughout the conversations we will be hosting Ánde Somby, Sámi Yoik singer; Morgan Guerin, Musqueam Fisheries Officer and artist; James Harry, artist that works integrating traditional Coast Salish art forms with contemporary concepts and materials; and David Alday, member and representative of the Yaghan community in Mejillones Bay, the Onashaga Channel, the Beagle Channel, in the South of Chile.
Paz Guevara
Guest Curator
Guest Curator
*Martin Lee Mueller, Being a Salmon, Being a Human. White River Junction, VT, Chelsea Green Publishing, 2017. p. 16
Text written on the occasion of the exhibition Am I Ancient or Human-Made Machine? at Or Gallery, Vancouver (2021), curated by Paz Guevara.
In collaboration with Goethe Institut Toronto