The Writing Lesson

description

The Writing Lesson makes reference to the visual typography of the heavy metal subgenre known as black metal in creating a vernacular mode of writing to illustrate place names in Western Canada and Washington with indigenous origins.  Early iterations of black metal music created in Norway sought to resurrect aspects of indigenous pre-Christian spirituality that had been violently displaced in the Christianization of Scandinavia by acts such as the destruction of pagan temples. Through a rudimentary photographic process using  a hand cut stencil, the light of the sun has burned the names of places such as Masset, Skidegate, Chilliwack, and Yakima onto black paper with the hope that more will be revealed than concealed. The Writing Lesson wishes to foreground language as a cultural practice and bring a concern for Aboriginal languages to bear on text-based strategies in art.

The Writing Lesson takes its name from an anecdote offered in Tristes Tropiques, the 1955 memoir of Claude Lévis-Strauss. While studying the Nambikwara of the Brazilian Amazon, the French anthropologist was observed writing with pencil on paper.  Suddenly grasping the purpose of this activity, the Nambikwara proceeded to mimic the process of writing in the production of "wavy, horizontal lines." The chief of this particular group realized that he might increase his prestige and power amongst his people if he were to exaggerate his competency with the written word, so he made a show of his new, somewhat feigned, ability. Due to his ruse, the chief was abandoned by most of his people. From this, Lévi-Strauss gathers a systematic theory of writing that emphasizes its aggressive and coercive character as an ultimately political tool. Writing betrays deceit. The Writing Lesson draws on this anecdote to consider the political potential of wresting these names from an easy, legible familiarity while attributing to them an irreducible Aboriginality.

Photos by Blaine Campbell