Film Series 2016-2021 Film Series Summer 2021

June 30: Waters of Empire (online)

  • Waters of Empire:

    Modern Water as Relation on Occupied Turtle Island

    Null Point / Colin Tucker

    June 30 – July 31, 2021


    This online event features experimental, interpretive music initiative Null Point in the premiere of an audio-visual, online lecture-performance by Colin Tucker.  Bringing VSW’s     Joan Lyons Independent Press Archive into dialogue with VSW’s film, video, lantern slide, and print collections, this lecture-performance engages the medium of the “event score”—musical scores intended for realization by untrained or trained musicians in mundane circumstances, often notated with words—as a point of departure for re-interpretations of archival media collections.  Featuring event scores from George Brecht’s Water Yam and Yoko Ono’s Grapefruit, this program focuses on against-the-grain interpretations authorized by anti-Humanist conceptual frameworks of Indigenous, Black, and decolonial study. The lecture-performance presents event scores by Ono and Brecht focused on water, interpreting them in ways that foreground their positioning within settler-colonial spatial politics on occupied Turtle Island, and considers a variety of attempts to rewrite Indigenous land as secular water not only within specialized technoscience, but also within libidinal economies of the Settler-Conquistador everyday.

    Tucker will be donating a portion of the artist stipend for this project to:

    Content Warning: discussions (but no graphic depictions) of anti-Black, anti-Indigenous, and anti-Asian violence, and environmental racism.

    The lecture and performance videos can be watched in the order displayed. Text and commentary for each video appear as a link under their respective windows.

  • Modern Water Lecture text

  • Introducing the event score lecture text