Mary Bunch, Dolleen Tisawii’ashii Manning & Caitlin Fisher

How do we – settlers and Indigenous people – dream, think and make the world at the end of history - that is, of western colonial, developmental, versions of history?

A masked peformer in red confronts three interconnected performers wearing black and white costumes and a fox mask in a forest .

Pluriversal Worlding with Extended Reality is a four-year research-creation project led by Mary Bunch and Dolleen Tisawii’ashii Manning that creates worlds with extended reality media, including virtual reality, augmented reality, closed parameter AI video, and projection. Pluriversal Worlding engages with colonial power relationships, disability justice, queer worldmaking, and the complex interrelationality of ecosystems, to imagine possible worlds set in fictitious re-imaginings of trouble sites in southern Ontario. This work explores the decolonial concept that the world is composed of many worlds, that worldviews create reality, and that all existence is interrelated.

Ruin

Mary Bunch and Dolleen Tisawii’ashii Manning, Ruin. Sculptural Installation with found objects (metal, junk, obsolete technology), projection and augmented reality, 2024

Exhibited in In Resonances, curated by Helen Lee. Vector Festival, Interaccess and Sensorium, Toronto, July 2024.

The wreckage of capitalism, colonialism, and developmental progress might be the end of history, but it is not the end.

We dwell in the ruins as both the site of trouble and as a place from which we make new worlds. The ruins, as Anne Stoler writes, is “what remains … the aftershocks of empire … the material and social afterlife of structures, sensibilities, and things. Such effects reside in the corroded hollows of landscapes, in the gutted infrastructures of segregated cityscapes and in the microecologies of matter and mind” (194). Where progress finds itself in ruins, Anna Tsing contends, “it becomes possible to look differently.” The disintegration of one world evokes new possibilities for what was once unnecessary and hence unthinkable in times of insatiable consumption. Ruin is an augmented reality (AR) work that examines the accumulation of refuse and obsolete technology produced by capitalism. An Ipad is fixed in place and oriented to an environment—in this case the hallways of the Goldfarb Centre for Fine Arts at York University. A series of 6 three-dimensional scrap metal objects and heaps of debris are projected into the space with AR. The ipad is linked to an old television in a pile of obsolete technology at the gallery entrance, where the images of scrap metal flicker. These images are remainders that implicate the viewer, and the university, in the wreckage of modernity. Adding to the pile, we fill the pristine space of the academy with rusted, mangled detritus using digital technology that is no less damaging. Yet, the metal, and its state of disintegration, are overgrown with vegetation and entangled with the biosphere, as waste recyclers whisper new life. A vehicle—decades ago abandoned in the bush, ravaged by the elements, and cannibalized by happenstance treasure hunters, is an uncanny apparition. It is transformed into public art installations in unexpected places, like the scrap metal forts the workers at Zubrick’s Metal Yard in London Ontario build for their own pleasure. These are likewise repurposed by other-than-humans who make nests in rusted out cavities, find purchase for rhizomes or mycelium tendrils to take hold. These objects are imbued with the potential of reclamation and recovery, this terrible beauty is also endlessly, heartbreakingly enmeshed with the enterprise of capitalism and hence humanity’s own ruin.

Returning Rivers

In this Future Toronto, the repeal of the Papul Bull returned the territory to Dish with One Spoon Governance. Everything is changing. The rivers have returned to the city.

A vibrantly colour 360 video of a river, with a cloudy sky and brown autumn grasses is distorted as a reverse tiny planet image.

In this media artwork in-progress, audiences walk through a future Toronto where the creeks, rivers and wetlands that were buried during colonial construction have resurfaced. Guided by an IOS and Iphone accessible map, viewers pass through a series of augmented reality portals where 360 videos of waterways, narrated story and performative vignettes amplify the resurfacing of Toronto’s cityscapes. In this speculative future, the 2023 revoking of the Doctrine of Discovery, a Papal Bull issued in 1452 that justified colonialism and underpins the legality of colonial nations, has transformed reality. A crisis of modern thought ensues and disrupts the ideological foundations of nation states and their hegemonizing systems (i.e. carcerality, heteronormativity, capitalism). A different process of enacting worlds (re)emerges under the Anishinaabe and Haudensaunee Dish with One Spoon Treaty. This pre-colonial treaty invokes the responsibility of Indigenous peoples, settlers, and newcomers, to steward the land and share its resources equitably.
Project team: Mary Bunch, Dolleen Tisawii’ashii Manning,Caitlin Fisher,Moynan King,Luke Kuplowsky, and Jorge de Oliviera.