We begin by acknowledging the land on which this project takes place, as the traditional unceded territory of the Wolastoqiyik and Mi’kmaq First Nations. Indigenous peoples have occupied this land, known since 1784 as the City of Fredericton, New Brunswick, for around eight to ten millennia or through Memoria æterna (everlasting memories).
Presented in partnership between Mawi’art: Wabanaki Artist Collective and Connexion Artist-Run Centre (ARC), Land \ Mark consists of a three-part creative presentation and dialogue series. The project intends to support artists working to offset North American settler-colonial histories. Land \ Mark is an invitation towards cross-disciplinary collaboration between contemporary Indigenous artists and designated minority writers in Canada. The collective publication of their works in an annotated anthology, featuring full-colour visual reproductions, culminates the Land \ Mark series.
Land \ Mark is presented in partnership with the Mawi’art: Wabanaki Artist Collective, the premier indigenous collective east of Montreal. The series is comprised of six participants: three artists, invited to present public, temporary, and performative artworks in response to Canada’s 150th year of confederation, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada (TRC): Calls to Action, land restitution; as well as two writers, invited to engage with artists on-site and respond to their work through text.
Land \ Mark addresses the need for critical discourse and documentation on issues central to the task of decolonization, as identified by Indigenous peoples in Canada and the Canadian arts and culture community, by prioritizing the provision of experience, resources, and networking opportunities to Indigenous and BIPOC artists and writers based in Canada.
This online publication includes two of the three residencies that took place during Land/Mark from 2018 to 2020. While the Acknowledgement and titles of each page are in English we have included translations in Wolatoqiyik, Mi’kmaq and French to allow for the core writing to be appreciated more broadly and acknowledge that this project is not possible without the languages included and the people who speak them.
