Settlement was intended to physically occupy Plymouth’s Central Park, UK in summer 2020…

Conceived by Native American artist Cannupa Hanska Luger in collaboration with Plymouth-based collective The Conscious Sisters, Settlement was designed as a groundbreaking way to link communities across the globe. Settlement was envisioned as an Indigenous-led month-long performative encampment in which over 27 acclaimed artists from across North America would travel to and activate Pounds House and its surrounding grounds in Plymouth’s Central Park.

Within the context of a colonial celebration, Settlement was slated to unfold as more than an arts festival. It would become a necessary space for Native American artists to investigate and interpret their lives as the survivors of settler colonialism and in turn to support settler ancestors in moving towards a more relational understanding and acknowledgement of the contemporary Native American experience.

With practices ranging from performance, social engagement, installation, film, poetry, dance and immersive theater, the range of contemporary Indigenous artists planning towards Settlement was unprecedented. Daily programming was to include a series of workshops, performances, installations and talks, creating a live human-to-human experience of Indigeneity. In addition to the Central Park encampment, each Settlement artist was slated to produce a related public engagement elsewhere in the city of Plymouth.

A settlement is an official agreement intended to resolve a dispute or conflict. It is also a previously “uninhabited” place where people establish a community. These two terms came together to inform a project that questions the appropriateness of both. Situated within Mayflower 400, a massive cultural festival remembering the historic voyage of the Mayflower, Settlement was envisioned to reassert the presence and perspectives of contemporary Indigenous people from various tribal nations throughout North America and the Pacific.

Prior to the COVID outbreak, Cannupa Hanska Luger had invited artists from various North American tribal nations to join in Settlement. Over the course of a year, each invited artist was developing new work with Luger’s support and in concert with the other artists. All of their work was designed to explore colonialism and its effects on Indigenous people beyond first contact. For one-week intervals throughout the project’s month-long run, the artists were to overlap on-site with Luger and several others creating a large-scale installation of living public art.

Settlement was designed to reclaim public space in order to consider the continued long-term impacts of colonization on tribal nations. Through contemporary artworks and live engagements, Settlement would create opportunities to address the questions and traumas around colonization while also presenting a complex example of Indigenous resilience and intersection. The Settlement project went far beyond conversational decolonization to present vibrant and evolving contemporary culture expressions,  thereby enacting Indigenization. 

STTLMNT: a digital world wide occupation…

In the face of the Covid-19 pandemic and with over two years of planning, we have pivoted away from onsite engagement. In the spirit of survivance, we have reimagined this monumental site-specific project as an innovative year-long digital occupation. Participating artists have gracefully adapted their projects as a succession of online performances, artist discussions, social engagements, and films. Presented throughout the fall and winter of 2020, this new work invites global audiences to have meaningful interaction with the Indigenous people of North America and the Pacific.

Settlement has been reimagined as STTLMNT, a vibrant digital occupation. This online space facilitates an honest, complex, and living representation of Indigenous cultures, highlighting an intersectional and Indigenous vision of the future. STTLMNT archives Indigenous art practice, relationship, stories, technology, theory and philosophy while disrupting colonial tropes and assumptions.

STTLMNT maintains the ethos of Indigenization as well as the strategy of occupation. By reclaiming (digital) space, we not only find ways to disseminate our post-colonial art works but we stake a radical, visionary claim on the future. You are invited in to experience this digital occupation, and as you do please practice respect and understanding. This is our work, our world vision, our heart, our future dreaming, our technology, our stories, our complexity, our resilience, our pain, our beauty, our art and our community. Together we hope to learn deeper and question further, ultimately dismantling the amnesia wrought by Colonialism.