Settlement pairs video moving over open ocean combined with audio from a religious cult leader's initiation sermon to create a narration of an endless crossing. The work references the crossing of oceans to colonize “new” worlds and bodies, and the middle passage and forced removal of bodies to a “new” world. The audio and visual is collaged with scrolling, layered text. Moving over the lower edge of the frame, anonymous quotes celebrating “the American dream”, overlapping and overshadowing “Ancient Indian Proverbs” sourced from the internet. The work layers the popularized historical narrative of the desire for escape of early colonizers and “pilgrims” with a more recent and similarly disaffected group intent to escaping the planet. Aligning escapist expansion projects from the early colonization of the Americas with recent projects intent on escaping and expanding into space, and text imagining and romanticizing the colonial project while reducing Indigenous knowledge to palatable and agreeable “proverbs” the work connects the pathology of escape combined with belief in cultural/religious superiority. 

The result is a narration of endless settler destruction, an endless search for “kingdom”, the work becomes a portrait of an ungrounded epistemology, void of connection or belonging, poised to wreak violence in the name of salvation.

Settlement
1 hour single channel video loop
Nicholas Galanin, 2020