What does it mean to COLONIZE?
Last week, Friday, January 23, 2015 I attended the first class of a course I’ve enrolled in at MICA (Maryland Institute College of Art), called Urban Resilience. It’s an undergraduate level studio course. Although I’m a graduate student, we are required to take some studio electives in order to fulfill credits to graduate. There aren’t (m)any graduate level studio courses that are open to students not in that particular program, so undergrad classes are pretty much all that’s available. It’s not bad really, and I’m always open to learning something new.
Anyway, last week the instructor of Urban Resilience left us with an assignment to “colonize a public space.” By colonizing a space, she added that we were to “shift the meaning, perception, or use of space.” She asked us to document out work with at least three photos. This assignment was supposed to be a (or multiple) quick exploration, experimentation, or sketch. We were to give a 10 minute presentation on the work we did as well as on an artist of interest who works in the public arena the following class day. Then we were sent on our way.
I should add that the instructor for this class is a white woman approximately in her 40’s.
Who in their right mind, considering the murky history of colonization across the globe, would tell a group of undergraduate art students to “colonize a public space” without speaking of any ethical code of conduct, political repercussions, or even presenting a sliver of the history of colonization at all? My colleague and friend, Kai, who is also enrolled in the course, ended up venting about the assignment in our MFA program seminar the following Tuesday. “As people of color, whose bodies have literally been sites of colonization, how the fuck are we supposed to ‘colonize a public space?!’ Doesn’t she understand the historical implications of that?” We asserted incredulously. Our peers and faculty backed us up. As community artists they were all concerned about the instructor’s intentions with the assignment. We mulled over the idea of holding a teach-in in class, but eventually opted to just make the most of it and do the work. Somehow.
For my work I chose to intertwine the labor for the assignment with the labor I was doing for my thesis work–picking up trash. I thought that the only way that I could ethically “colonize a public space” was to actually colonize a visibly public space, but a space that was actually private. My target was Johns Hopkins. I would colonize Johns Hopkins with trash collected from an ailing area of West Baltimore. The cognitive connection I drew was Johns Hopkins’ history of purchasing or otherwise acquiring private properties (through venues such as eminent domain) and then sitting on them, watching the properties decay, until they were ready to expand their institution. Although this particularly relates to the Medical Campus and the communities surrounding it in East Baltimore, I chose to focus the “colonizing” on the Homewood Campus and pull trash from West Baltimore.
So I rummaged around my house and collected all of the black plastic bags I could find. I found 16 bags. From what I had learned about vacancy in the City of Baltimore, 16 was a significant number. There are approximately 16,000 buildings and 14,000 lots officially registered as “vacant” by the Baltimore City government making a total of 16% of all residential properties in Baltimore City vacant. I took those 16 bags and spent 3 hours filling them with trash. When I had finished, I loaded the bags into my car and trucked them to the Hopkins Homewood campus and installed the work.
See the documentation at my personal website
In case anyone was wonder, yes, I did deinstall the work once it had been up for an hour or so.
When I presented the assignment in class it was remarkable at how interested people were in the concept and the politics surrounding my piece, and yet how little the grasped about the definition of what it means to colonize. I introduced my project as taking issue with the entire premise of colonizing a space. Beginning with the definition of colonize I stated that, to me, to colonize means to form a colony, to take over an area that does not belong to one’s self, requires that multiple agents are involved in the colonizing, inherently displaces the original occupiers of the space, doesn’t ask for permission, and exerts power over other people or things who typically have less power than the colonizers. I also stated that by this definition, not only was it not ethical, but it was not possible for an individual artist (especially one of color) to colonize a space because one simply does not have the authority (cultural, physical, financial, legal, or otherwise) to maintain the space as a colony, even offering the term “occupy” as a more suitable (ethically and contextually) alternative to the term “colonize” for the purposes of the assignment. The instructor quickly disagreed on both accounts and said that she does believe that as artists we can and do colonize every time we create public works and that occupy doesn’t quite fit what she meant.
The feedback I got of the work was that it was “too polite” or “not colonizing enough” or “too formalistic” and “doesn’t affect the use of the space enough.” Fortunately with regards to the first two comments, Kai backed up my work. He and I reaffirmed the historical context of colonization as a “quiet” and “polite” act in that the intentions of the colonizers were generally either good or they were slow to come to fruition. After all it took years for the British to dig in and colonize the eastern shores. It’s not as if they dropped an entire city on top of the indigenous civilizations in one day.
At any rate, despite that pretty clean cut checklist I provided of the essential criteria that is required to colonize, these undergrads and the instructor herself kept insisting that real life dynamics such as white flight were acts of colonization by people of color moving into those white areas. EDIT: Also let is be known that the instructor likes to talk about her experience as a white woman walking through black neighborhoods as “feeling very Other,” (please learn the definitions and history of words, people!!!) How further away from an understanding of colonization can you get? Kai and I spent much of the class staring at each other, wide eyed, in amazement at the types of comments being so casually thrown around the room. This class is clearly going to test my limits with its absurdity and political and ethical ignorance. At least it’s artistically challenging as well. Hopefully I’ll come out with something good to put in my artistic toolbox by the end of the semester.
