Edmonton in situ

• Author / Creator

  Holowack, Kevin

• Edmonton in situ is a multimedia project containing letters, poetry, images, WhatsApp threads, and essais. My aim is to explore the City of Edmonton/amiskwaciwâskahikan as a site of connective tissues between humans and non- or other-than-human beings. The work is necessarily convoluted and unorthodox for it engages with formal issues of how I might scripturally or visually represent the concepts of relationality and enmeshment while asking questions of how I might engage with my surroundings “in a good way.” Edmonton in situ concretizes two year’s worth of efforts to explore my personal relationship to the city in light of new, challenging ideas about subjectivity and place, including Joe Sheridan and Roronhiakewen “He Clears the Sky” Dan Longboat’s evocative suggestion that “Where one is has everything to do with who one is."As a white settler and descendant of European immigrants, my understanding of what it means to live on this land is something that needs to be challenged. A great deal of this challenge comes from my reading and processing of the work of Indigenous scholars including Vanessa Watts, Harold Johnson, Dwayne Donald, and Vine Deloria Jr. who each in their own way seek to (re-)evaluate the gravity and significance of treaty, critique European iterations of “the human,” and call upon settlers to re-examine their relationship to land. In my letters and essais, I also engage extensively with the work of Walter Benjamin, Sylvia Wynter, Denise Ferreira da Silva, and others whose work offers powerful critiques of (and alternatives to) Western conceptual apparatuses and understandings of what it means to be a human in relation to other hummans and non-human beings.In the end, Edmonton in situ represents a process rather than a “product” because the work of locating and sustaining relationships is always ongoing. My goal is not to “solve” issues of relationality or present my work as an authoritative document on the issues I chose to take on, but rather to explore ways of conducting creative research that emphasizes fragmentary impressions, ideas, and emotions as a pathway toward thinking “otherwise” in relation to place—or, as da Silva puts it, “[releasing] thinking from the grip of certainty and [embracing] the imagination’s power to create with unclear and confused, or uncertain impressions.”

• Subjects / Keywords

  • Edmonton
  • Place
  • Poetry
  • amiskwacîwâskahikan
  • Land

• Graduation date

  Fall 2020

• Type of Item

  Thesis

• Degree

  Master of Arts

• DOI

  https://doi.org/10.7939/r3-8ghn-0m30

• License

  Permission is hereby granted to the University of Alberta Libraries to reproduce single copies of this thesis and to lend or sell such copies for private, scholarly or scientific research purposes only. Where the thesis is converted to, or otherwise made available in digital form, the University of Alberta will advise potential users of the thesis of these terms. The author reserves all other publication and other rights in association with the copyright in the thesis and, except as herein before provided, neither the thesis nor any substantial portion thereof may be printed or otherwise reproduced in any material form whatsoever without the author's prior written permission.