As above so below

In the wake of the 200th anniversary of a massacre that was foundational to the expansion and consolidation of the Australian settler-colonial state, two Indigenous curators, Tess Allas and David Garneau, staged a landmark exhibition, With Secrecy and Dispatch, to commemorate this event and to place it in dialogue with other colonial massacres. Adrian Stimson, Siksika (Blackfoot) Nation, southern Alberta, Canada, contributed a drone-enabled, 2-channel video installation titled As Above So Below. Stimson’s work deployed drone visualities in order to expose layered histories of genocidal violence that inscribe both the Appin massacre and the Cypress Hills colonial massacre in Saskatchewan, Canada. In this essay, I discuss the complex and layered regimes of visuality that were enabled by an imaging technology, the drone, usually associated with its own contemporary military massacres. In deploying drone visualities, Stimson challenges and overturns doxic understandings of two foundational categories of Western aesthetics: the beautiful and the sublime. In the absence of the bodies that originally inscribed the bloody sites of two colonial massacres, Stimson mobilises more-than-human testimonies to give voice to the disappeared dead and to re-inscribe the colonial past into the colonial present

Archaeology · Art history · Colonialism · Drone · Exhibition · Indigenous · Media studies · Political science · Sociology · Anthropological Studies and Insights · Geographies of human-animal interactions · History · Law · Memory, Trauma, and Commemoration

• Rethinking verticality through top-down views in drone hobbyist photography

  Open Access•Lauren O’hagan, Elisa Serafinelli•Visual Studies•2023

  Incluir item

• Reckonings with truth

  Open Access•Vanessa Barolsky•Journal of Sociology•2024

  Incluir item

• Challenging the colonial legacy of/at Macquarie

  Open Access•Richard Howitt, Louise Holt et al.•Geographical Research•2022

  Incluir item

• The dispatched drone and affective distance in fieldwork

  Rikke Munck Petersen•The Senses and Society•2020

  Incluir item

• The Patronage of Science and the Creation of Imperial Space

  Matthew H Edney•Cartographica The International…•1993

  Incluir item

• Law, Property, and the Geography of Violence

  Nicholas Blomley•Annals of the Association of…•2003

  Incluir item

• The Fold

  Ian Buchanan, Deleuze Gilles et al.•SubStance•1994

  Incluir item