Reflection: Valaria Tatera


Valaria Tatera documents cultural, ancestral, and personal trauma in her work Kill the Indian Save the Man: Legacy of Residential Schools (2021). She explores the impact of colonialism on indigenous peoples in textile, specifically the "cultural genocide" (timestamp 1:06 of the interview) of boarding schools. She wants to represent statistics of the lives ended and otherwise affected by the schools in an impactful and personal way. In her work, the commodity of ribbon stands in for commodified native bodies, and those people that white Americans' history has tried to forget.

A documentary on Tatera's subject, particularly for the purposes of representing statistics as real people, could be a very effective way to communicate her meaning. But she is referencing the history of trade between indigenous communities and white settlers via her use of textiles, which is an economic and cultural impact of colonialism.  Perhaps she doesn't want to digitize her work because it wouldn't fit the historical narrative well enough. However, she could also be commenting on the lack of record-keeping of indigenous history, and the deliberate erasure of said history by white people. Digital media, though important in the field of documentation, wouldn't actually serve her best in this case because she wants to be a bit more subtle.

Valaria Tatera – Women's & Gender Studies Consortium – UW–Madison

McLuhan makes a big deal of the differences between soundscapes and visual landscapes, and the similarities of soundscapes to timescapes. He says on page 111, "[w]here a visual space is an organized continuum of a uniformed connected kind, the ear world is a world of simultaneous relationships." I think Tatera subverts our expectations of a visual space here by incorporating very geometric, strict lines into her work - but using ribbon to do so. Lengths of ribbon are going to move in the slightest breeze, and their organized and linear form will be disrupted immediately. The ribbons are more like sound in this way, and I think that's an interesting crossover for her to make. It accentuates the disruptive nature of colonialism on the history of Native American peoples. 

I think the way Tatera uses textiles in such a creative and unexpected manner is very effective. I admire how well she is able to communicate with her chosen medium.

Comments

  1. TessaOctober 4, 2021 at 8:01 AM

    I hadn't though of the distinct choice to avoid digitizing her work and what it would mean, it's a very interesting observation! There certainly is a sort of combined visual-tactile quality to the work that doesn't translate in pictures/online/

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

I've barely started to emerge from myself

Image
I have limited practice writing personal mission statements. I also hate talking about the future. I don't mean talking about the future like this: "Hey mom, wouldn't it be cool if someday I went abroad to work on a farm in Germany?"  I mean when someone asks me a question commonly asked of young adults. It goes: "Where do you see yourself in [x] years?" I don't know. I don't think I'll have it figured out for a while. I'm entering my third year of college and I'm still not sure majoring in music was a good idea. Once, I received scholarship money for writing an essay about how much I hate that question.  I find it challenging, as many my age do, to see my future place in the world as anything particularly concrete. I have ideas for myself, I have wants and hopes and dreams, but my plans take significantly longer to solidify. In a similar vein, when I think about what art I want to make, I feel I don't know myself or the world or the
Read more

Presentation: John Cage

Image
  John Cage, circa 1986. I have never considered silence as much as before I started researching this man. More than even his connections to McLuhan, I found myself wanting to write about silence in John Cage's works and how deeply important it is to his art. I am often told when performing solo music to "take more time" or allow myself time to breathe and time for the music to breathe. In orchestra rehearsals, sometimes we are told to make the silences as exciting as the sounds, if it fits the character of the piece. However, I have never taken it to the level of Cage. It inspires me to seek silence out in music, and play around with it too. I don't think I could be as brave about it as him, but I think I would learn a lot from the attempt alone. I did also find joy in reading about Cage's life and work and thinking about his connections to McLuhan. His artistic sensibilities are somewhat unfathomable to me, for the reasons mentioned above, but he seems like some
Read more

Nature Negatives

Image
  "These are difficult times because we are witnessing a clash of cataclysmic proportions between two great technologies." -McLuhan, pp. 94 This project was originally going to involve photographing people, but when I actually went outside to do so I found myself drawn to plants, as I am in most outdoor situations. I notice very small details that many people do not, and I can be entertained by a square inch of soil in the woods for upwards of an hour. I decided to follow my impulse and photograph the textures and small, complex shapes I saw around me on the walks I took. As I was walking, however, I began to notice how many man-made structures and textures looked similar to the natural world I was observing. From there, I decided to try and critique how people have been substituting outdoor environments for indoor ones, and how they are very reluctant to notice that this is often detrimental and unhealthy. It terrifies me that the world is changing in this way. I wish I didn
Read more