marking the metropole

work series

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Statement:

The Western late modern Artist has often been located in and oriented toward the imperial metropole, yet artists and non-artists alike have mostly failed to mark this location, let alone reckon with its fraught politics. Since moving to the Canadian settler imperial metropole of “Toronto” after living most of my life outside of metropolitan centers, I find this place’s metropolitan attributes abundantly strange (and still do after 2 years); the present piece aims to leverage this experience towards marking these often unmarked features. 

Learning from decolonial studies, Black studies, and world-systems theory, I take as axiomatic that the metropole is not a fixed or self-contained entity but an asymmetrical, violent relation: a city’s metropolitan (in a variety of senses) status is contingent less on its internal “development” than on its colonization, degradation, and peripheralization of sovereign peoples and lands. The present piece marks imperial relations embedded in the metropole’s banal infrastructures. Typically of liberal late modern Western imperialism and particularly of “nice” Canadian settler imperialism, these traces concurrently reproduce and disavow violent imperial relations. The piece’s subject matter is not Global South experiences of imperialism, which is not mine to speak about, but rather the ways in which empire is legitimated and normalized within the metropole. I proceed from the assumption that the alignment of metropolitan subjects with empire is hardly inevitable. Even while what Black study scholar WB DuBois calls the “wages of whiteness” continue to be paid in differential ways in the metropole, the result of these payments is uncertain in an era when fascism, environmental breakdown, and housing insecurity that were historically delimited to the colony are moving into the metropole.
Works in this series mainly take the form of textual scores that are designed to be portable and realizable by people with no specialized skills. While I do not doubt that the pieces are shaped by my location in a particular settler imperial metropole where a large share of the “profits” of the mining and fossil fuel industries are concentrated, the scores are designed for realization in a variety of urban and other settings across the imperial core. I aim to revise the (white) Fluxus event score’s interest in the banal: rather than unmarking metropolitan banality, as many of these scores do, I aim to mark it, by taking a cue from the more politicized performances of Yoko Ono. While artistic interventions of this nature are by no means sufficient to dismantling empire, they are likely a necessary condition for doing so. That is, if imperial core subjects lack tools for mapping and defusing the pernicious propaganda infrastructures that constitute the air that we breathe, we will be unlikely to be able to make robust contributions to building anti-imperialist power.

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constituent works:

in the wake of the santa maria (2021-25)