This paper reflects upon my recent durational performance art work, memoration #2: constituent parts, which I undertook in Kingston, Ontario in response to the bicentenary celebrations of John A. Macdonald's birth. The performance and its discussion in this paper invoke temporal and political through-lines from the colonial policies instituted by John A. Macdonald to contemporary structures of racial power and dominant settler mythologies that continue to shape mainstream Canadian imaginaries and spaces. I suggest that a strategic performance of the white settler body --the embodiment of the exalted white subject, as articulated by Sunera Thobani --can produce disturbances to the perpetuation of white settler dominance in the lands now known as Canada. memoration #2 interferes with icons of material culture that imbue white settler emplacement and infiltrates civic space, university architectures, sites of memorialization and celebratory impulses that assume state and white settler primacy. Further, as an intervention into sites that are inscribed into daily life with disregard for their bonds to historical and ongoing colonial nation-building, the performance works to reveal the well-honed practices of biased amnesia that contribute to the maintenance of colonial beliefs, systems and values. By scrutinizing the embodied, symbolic and relational gestures of this performance, this paper considers the potential, complexities and limits of performative acts that aim to resist colonial power from a critical white settler positionality and invites reflection on non-colonial futures.

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The degree to which authorized sites of commemoration such as monuments perpetuate deep-rooted practices of selective remembering and forgetting in settler states, and in doing so, help to entrench narratives and mythologies that mask ongoing colonial occupation and violence while denying Indigenous sovereignty, has arguably never been more evident. While official sites of remembrance undoubtedly shape the dominant imaginary, vernacular forms of commemoration exerted implicitly and explicitly in everyday life are also powerfully influential in the circulation of the nation’s ascendant ideation as what Audra Simpson calls “narration[s] of truth.” This paper will examine the ways “memoration,” an artistic/performance methodology I have developed through my inter-media art practice and scholarship, performs interventions into commemoration in the guise of public, national, and personal memory. As an adaptable and inherently relational, embodied and place-based methodology, memoration offers a framework of in Andrew Herscher's terms, “remembering otherwise”: one that activates a reckoning with the intergenerational responsibilities of being-in-relation, in my case as a white settler, on Indigenous lands that are at the same time “occupied” and unceded.

Introduction to the issue