G.4.1 The Settler’s Silk: H.R. Mallinson & Co.’s National Park Patterned Textiles

• Manon Gaudet, Yale University

As splintering shells propelled shrapnel into soldiers’ skin on the Western Front, inked shells of a different sort imprinted ornament onto supple silken surfaces in New Jersey. For the sake of rationing wool and cotton for the war effort abroad, American women made the most sumptuous sacrifice of all by donning silk at home. In 1926, during the resulting post-war zenith of the American silk industry, the textile manufacturer H.R. Mallinson & Co. debuted a series of printed dress silks to commemorate a decade of the American National Park Service. In colorways reported to be “as vivid as the parks at mid-day or as soft as at twilight,” Mallinson transformed twelve of the nation’s protected geographies into effusive designs for women’s fashion. The series was spectacularly well-received, alliteratively applauded as “the season’s sensationally successful silk.”

This paper considers the material intimacies of settler-colonialism as imprinted in the medium of a silken garment, asking what it means to wear dispossessed land? First, it examines how Mallinson’s patterns recapitulate nineteenth-century landscape conventions and the surveyor’s techniques of regulating land. It then attends to the making of industrially manufactured fabric as a process bound to issues of scale and repetition, placing these in dialogue with their colonial counterparts. Finally, the paper considers how wearing the National Parks as a silken second skin collapses the separation between figure and ground. Land as wearable pattern is tailored to the body, impotent if not for the wearer’s presence. Instead of an Indigenous ground upon which the white body treads, Mallinson’s silks transform the white body into the ground onto which dispossessed Indigenous land is overlaid. As worn dress-silk, these patterns project a land that exists only according to an a-priori white body—intimately and iteratively upholding the settler-colonial project.

keywords: settler-colonialism, land, textile, scale, material culture

G.4.2 Mobile Monuments: Regina José Galindo’s Haunting Figures

Georgia Phillips-Amos, Concordia University

Since 2020, Guatemalan performance artist and poet Regina José Galindo has been haunting public spaces from Guatemala City to Berlin. With choreographed performances, Galindo inserts cloaked figures, as monuments to women who have disappeared, into urban environments. The first iteration of the work Monumento a las Desaparecidas, staged in Germany in 2020, included 28 performers, representing the number of women in Guatemala who disappear each week. The artist’s gesture remains consistent across locations, but each is site-specific in terms of number: 43 in Castellón representing the number of women murdered in the Spain in 2021; the same year in Berlin, a figure appeared every three days, corresponding to the frequency with which women in Germany are murdered by their partners or ex-partners. Though the artist is known for using her own body in her performances, these living monuments are collaborative, with Galindo developing the concept from Guatemala City and local performers carrying it out in each location. Cloaked, individual bodies are abstracted, each rendered a component part of a chorus. Brazilian artist Lygia Pape used a single cloth to cloak and bind together performers participating in her famous 1968 Divisor, but here the performers are not held within a single sheet. Scattered across countries, each stands alone though cloaked in a shared material, forming a collective body representing lost bodies, stretching across hemispheres. Though joined together these are not figures whose reality is collapsed into a single “universalized” state. This paper considers the intimate relations established and expressed through Galindo’s iterative living monuments.

keywords: performance, public space, monuments, (post)colonial feminism, Latin America

G.4.3 The Column by Adrian Paci: Contemporary Art, Migrant Labour and Globalization

• Deborah Ruth Galante, McGill University

The artwork The Column, by Albanian/naturalized Italian artist, Adrian Paci, is a twenty-five-minute video that traces the voyage of a marble block from a quarry in Beijing, China, on its shipboard journey towards Europe. On board the “factory boat”, Chinese workers strenuously labor to transform it into a Corinthian column, destined to be exhibited as an installation for Paci’s solo show at the Jeu de Paume in Paris. The artist commissioned the whole process and directed the film, which focuses on the transformation of the raw block of stone into a beautiful, finished product, thus revealing the “messy” procedure of which most consumers are oblivious. Paci’s brief yet poignant piece clearly displays an uncomfortable ‘imbrication’, thus opening the discussion on the current critical issues of globalization, labor outsourcing, Western exploitation of migrant workers and a voracious consumer appetite for material goods. Paci’s film leads the viewer to reflect on the human toll underlying fast production, optimized timing, and low expenditure – all to satisfy customer demand. The artist himself admitted to organizing and financing the trip including the Chinese workers’ labor, thus creating a difficult “intimacy” between him, a privileged Westerner, and the less privileged laborers. I draw upon the research of scholars Dmitriy Plekhanov, Robert Anderton, Paul Brenton and Joseph E. Stiglit whose economic analyses ponder continuing Western consumerism and exploitation of poorer countries. They consider low-skilled workers, outsourcing, low wages in China, globalization and an increasingly fast paced production which comes at significant human, financial and ecological cost. Paci, by filming the production of the Corinthian column, symbolic of European culture, is benefitting from Western exploitation—albeit for “artistic” purposes—thus deliberately confronting the viewer with this unsettling reality.

keywords: migrant labour, exploitation, Western countries, outsourcing, globalization