Alluvium
ORGANIZED BY CORSON ANDROSKI AND ALLIS CONLEY
JANUARY 22ND, 2020 - FEBRUARY 27TH, 2021
Maps measure the distances between us. They delineate borders and symbolic separations drawn and redrawn to legitimize territorial expansion and archive our geographic alienation from one another. Made even more navigable by Global Positioning Systems that divert our attention from the Land to the screen, maps can invisibilize our physical relationship to the landscape, making it easy to ignore and easier to neglect.
How do maps measure our sense of place in and relation to Land, Water, and our neighbors, both human and more-than-human? How do they measure the boundaries of our interdependence and the complexities of place?
Alluvium, organized by Corson Androski and Allis Conley with support from Sarah Rowe, and inspired by a teaching exercise designed by Zoe Todd for her Indigenous Ecological Ways of Knowing course at Carleton University (Ottawa, ON), is not a map built for navigating or quantifying, but rather a map to "sensitize participants to the waterscapes [we're] situated in," and "expand awareness of indigenous territories beyond the abstract to more concrete/tangible factors." (Dr. Zoe S. Todd).
Visitors who registered for Alluvium were led by a gallery attendant through a relational mapping exercise, adapted from Dr. Todd’s course, structured around small acts of remembering, recording, reorienting, and reconsidering our relationship to Nebraska’s waters and the Indigenous territories we occupy. At the end of this exercise, each participant placed a notecard, inscribed with their memories, impressions, and experiences of water, on the gallery wall. Together these cards created a collective archive of the waters that connect us, rather than the borders that separate us.
Virtual Generator Grant programming is presented with generous support from the Nebraska Arts Council and the Nebraska Cultural Endowment.
Installation Images
Virtual Lecture with Dr. Zoe S. Todd
Visit the Alternate Currents blog for a transcript of the lecture and links to additional resources.
About the Organizers
Corson Androski is a researcher, conservationist, software developer, and photographer/filmmaker from Hutchinson, Kansas. Their work uses the concept of care—as labor, affect, and ethic, given/received by humans and other-than-humans, individuals and systems—to consider subjects like institutional medicine alongside state ecological regulation, and beyond their respective margins, emergent communities of illness alongside informal conservation of the small, overlooked ecosystems of weeds and fungi that spring up in the seams of our patchwork flyover states.
Allis Conley graduated from Grinnell College with a Bachelor’s in Gender, Women’s and Sexuality Studies. After spending some time in Colorado, they happily moved back to Omaha, their hometown. As a community manager, fiber artist, and facilitator, they thrive on reshaping or designing new systems on a variety of scales. They’ve been practicing fiber arts for 15 years, but above all else they love dabbling in new skills and collaborating with other artists.
Sarah Rowe is a visual and performance artist in Omaha, Nebraska. Her work addresses issues of self-identity and exploitation of natural resources. She re-imagines traditional Native American symbology to fit the narrative of our modern cultural landscape. Her work opens meaningful cross cultural dialogues by utilizing methods of painting, casting, textiles, performance, and Native American rituals in unconventional ways. Rowe is of Lakota and Ponca descent. She co founded Sweatshop Gallery and has exhibited her work nationally.
About Dr. Zoe S. Todd
Zoe Todd (Métis/otipemisiw) is from Amiskwaciwâskahikan (Edmonton), Alberta, Canada. She writes about fish, art, Métis legal traditions, the Anthropocene, extinction, and decolonization in urban and prairie contexts. She also studies human-animal relations, colonialism and environmental change in north/western Canada.
Her research is on fish, colonialism and legal-governance relations between Indigenous peoples and the Canadian State. In the past, she has researched human-fish relations in the Inuvialuit Settlement Region, and has also conducted work on Arctic Food Security in the Inuvialuit Settlement Region in the Northwest Territories, Canada. Her current work focuses on the relationships between people and fish in the context of colonialism, environmental change and resource extraction in Treaty Six Territory (Edmonton, amiskwaciwâskahikan), Alberta and the Lake Winnipeg watershed more broadly. Her work employs a critical Indigenous feminist lens to examine the shared relationships between people and their environments and legal orders in Canada, with a view to understanding how to bring fish and the more-than-human into conversations about Indigenous self-determination, peoplehood, and governance in Canada today.
She is currently an assistant professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Carleton University.