![\"Laura](\"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/02\/picMillanJourneyToALand.png\")
<\/a>It seems like a good entry point to the exhibition \u201cA Decolonial Atlas: Strategies in Contemporary Art of the Americas\u201d<\/a> at Tufts University Art Gallery in Medford through April 15. It\u2019s a show of \u201cartists from the United States and Latin America who grapple with continued questions of colonialism and postcolonialism.\u201d<\/p>\n Huertas Mill\u00e1n \u201cis using real historic archival writings,\u201d texts from French, Dutch and Spanish explorers, says Pilar Tompkins Rivas, the director of the Vincent Price Art Museum in Los Angeles, who organized the exhibition. \u201cThere\u2019s a rupture, there\u2019s a very beginning of a misunderstanding, a misconception of the Americas. They might write back that they\u2019re half-bird, half-human. They\u2019re fantastical beasts. They get us the idea that the native peoples were savages and that set up the idea that it\u2019s okay to be anniliahted.\u201d<\/p>\n Help WONDERLAND keep producing our great coverage of local arts, cultures and activism by contributing to Wonderland on Patreon.<\/a> And sign up for our free, weekly newsletter<\/a> so that you don’t miss any of our reporting.<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n \u201cDecolonial Atlas\u201d offers an\u00a0impressionistic video by Javier Tapia and Camilo Ontiveros that shows correspondences between communities in Los Angeles and across the Americas. \u201cYou see these people and you see the same faces,\u201d Tompkins Rivas says. \u201cThe address is different, but the face is similar. What is the continuity across time and across place?\u201d<\/p>\n Isabel Avila shows photos of Pawnees playing basketball in 2006. \u201cWe are reminded that native people are not part of the historic past. They\u2019re part of the historic present. And they\u2019re not static,\u201d Tompkins Rivas says.<\/p>\n Jeffrey Gibson draws on his Cherokee and Choctaw heritage as well as references to George Michael’s 1990 hit “Freedom\u201d in his 2016 beadwork reading “I Don’t Belong To You, You Don’t Belong To Me.\u201d<\/p>\n Carlos Motta queers the history with the story of male geographer and explorer writing a romantic letter to a soldier.<\/p>\n Marton Robinson “responds to the invisibility of black bodies within the history of national formation in the Americas\u201d by altering the Cinco Colones money of his native Costa Rica. A sign explains that the bills are illustrated with a painting by an Italian artist at the National Theatre that depicts white, European peasants laboring at the coast.<\/p>\n \u201cThey painted everyone in the style of Italian peasants,\u201d Tompkins Rivas says. \u201cBut of course it was black Caribbean labor. So the artist goes in and replaces the faces.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cDecolonial Atlas\u201d is an exhibition about repression and invisibility amidst the pervasive racism of the Americas. Story after story tells of interlopers treating people and nature as resources to be conquered and extracted, things to be captured and sold and profited from.<\/p>\n \u201cExtractivism being a neo-colonial, neo-liberal policy as it pertains to Latin America primarily, you\u2019re extracting resources\u2014gold or lumber or people. That was the way things were set up,\u201d Tompkins Rivas explains. \u201cIt\u2019s hard for us to imagine because there are places that were already taken from the indigenous people that live there historically. So we take it for granted.\u201d<\/p>\n But of course, Tompkins Rivas says, \u201cThose kinds of things continue today.\u201d A video by Eamon Ore-Giron documents how, Tompkins Rivas says, \u201ca Chinese company bought the top of a mountain [in Peru] and displaced all of the people there to turn it into an open pit copper mine.\u201d<\/p>\n The exhibition is about reorientation and respect. It\u2019s about asserting and reclaiming. It\u2019s about how to live in this colonial fait-accompli now\u2014even as the colonial forces continue on.<\/p>\n \u201cI\u2019m just thinking about these legacies and the overlaying of different eras of European colonialism,\u201d Tompkins Rivas says. \u201cI\u2019m hoping to just draw attention to artists who are asking questions and thinking about how do these things still persist and are tied to forces that have been going on for five centuries in this hemisphere.\u201d<\/p>\n Brazilian-born artist Paulo Nazareth traveled to Ouidah, Benin, to record his 2013 video “L’Abre D’Oublier (The Tree of Forgetting).”<\/p>\n \u201cThe artist had gone to western Africa and gone to a site that was one of the hubs of the slave trade going to Brazil,\u201d Tompkins Rivas says. \u201cHe wanted to go back to a continent of origin that is part of the heritage of so many people.\u201d<\/p>\n The story is that enslaved people \u201cwere marched around the tree as a symbolic act to forget the homeland they were about to depart,\u201d a sign explains.<\/p>\n \u201cThey walked them seven times around the tree,\u201d Tompkins Rivas says. \u201cThey\u2019d say, \u2018Now forget everything you know.\u2019 Because from there they were marched to the slave ships.\u201d<\/p>\n In Nazareth\u2019s performance, he walks backward around the tree, again and again, a ritual reversing, a ritual undoing, a ritual recalling. Tompkins Rivas says, \u201cIt\u2019s a kind of unwinding of hundreds of years of Atlantic slave trade.\u201d<\/p>\n Laura Huertas Mill\u00e1n\u2019s 2011 video \u201cJourney to a land otherwise known\u201d is all closeups of green leaves and orchid blossoms and then a man, his face painted in green camouflage. You hear sounds of water, birds, frogs. \u201cI encountered new plants, new animals, new men,\u201d a voice says (in subtitled translation). \u201cThey walk about absolutely […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":5774,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[100],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5772"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5772"}],"version-history":[{"count":12,"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5772\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5791,"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5772\/revisions\/5791"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/5774"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5772"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5772"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5772"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}<\/a>
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