Public Art’s Interpellation: Refusing the Anthropocentrism of Climate Grief

SOUND/TEXT

SPEAKER: Dylan Robinson, Queen’s University

This presentation considers human and non-human encounters with sound art works located in outdoor public spaces. Specifically, I address the ways in which public artworks interpellate the public as settler subjects, alongside other forms of interpellation that hail Indigenous and non-human publics. With numerous artists engaging in ecological art, I also examine the extent to which public art practices amplify climate grief, leaving the larger question of public art’s sonic and material relationships to land's life unspoken.

About the Speaker

Dylan Robinson is a Stó:lō scholar who holds the Canada Research Chair in Indigenous Arts at Queen’s University, located on the traditional lands of the Haudenosaunee and Anishinaabe peoples. His research has been supported by national and international fellowships at the Faculty of Music at the University of Toronto, in the Canadian Studies Program at the University of California Berkeley, the Indigeneity in the Contemporary World project at Royal Holloway University of London, and a Banting Postdoctoral fellowship in the First Nations Studies Program at the University of British Columbia.

From 2010-2013 Robinson led the SSHRC-funded “Aesthetics of Reconciliation” project (with Dr. Keavy Martin) that examined the role that the arts and Indigenous cultural practices played in the Truth and Reconciliation Commission on the Indian Residential Schools. This research led to a second collaborative project, “Creative Conciliation”, supported by a SSHRC Insight grant, to explore new artistic models that move beyond what many Indigenous scholars have identified as reconciliation’s political limitations. 

His award-winning monograph, Hungry Listening: Resonant Theories for Indigenous Sound Studies (2020), a critical response to what has been called the “whiteness of sound studies,” considers listening from both indigenous and settler colonial perspectives, presenting case studies on Indigenous participation in classical music, musicals, and popular music. 

Robinson’s current research documents the history of contemporary Indigenous public art across North America, and questions how Indigenous rights and settler colonialism are embodied and spatialized in public space. Funded by the Canada Research Chair program, this project involves working with Indigenous artists and scholars to collaboratively imagine new forms of public engagement and create new public works that speak to Indigenous experience. Dr. Robinson is also an avid Halq'eméylem language learner. Yú:wqwlha kws t'í:lemtel te sqwá:ltset!

How To Join

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If you have any questions, please contact Alex Rehding at arehding@fas.harvard.edu.