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I talk to my cousin Corey Stover on the phone and he teaches me hokšíkilowaŋpi (to sing a lullaby); we are both cruelly out of tune. He is in Oglala Nation, I am in LA, and we perform our distance. He sings to me and I to him, a short melody. I watch LAPD helicopters out the window of 242 East Avenue 41 and compose a short drone.
In the fall of 2020, I began gathering samples for what I’ve termed an Anthropogenic Mineral Collection. These carbon-based minerals consist of human-mediated byproducts of geological intervention from the Industrial Revolution to the present. The majority of those in my collection are caused by industrial mining of valuable conductors, and have not been recorded elsewhere as natural occurrences.
Despite the conclusion, the museum continues to exhibit the sculpture, claiming that it has acquired a modern cultural identity that transcends “issues of origin and genuineness” and stands as an “icon of the ever-changing perceptions and connoisseurship in the field of pre-Columbian studies.”
I kept considering what happens when liminal space becomes static—how we are all stuck in this transition with the expectation of a return of normalcy, but in actuality there is no neutral, there is no normal. Normal is a veneer in which a few have the privilege of living under.
Colonialism is rooted in the planetary imagination which fails to account for histories of structural racism based on geologic relations and the violent dispossession of indigenous lands. This resulted in legacies of destructive cartography and mapping now used in machine vision in space.