Collected Landscapes, 2022

by Related Tactics (Michele Carlson, Weston Teruya, and Nathan Watson).

This project was initially created as part of the 2021-2022 Print Public Fellowship Residency at Kala Art Institute, Berkeley, CA.

[Below is a sample of the full set of postcards. All postcards: Inkjet on rag paper, 5.25” x 3.5”]

Collected Landscapes is a set of 51 vintage postcard prints (one from each State and Washington D.C.) that featured colonial and white supremacist monuments that have been digitally altered to erase those markers, leaving only the ghostly trace of the former presence within view. The seeming tranquility of the remaining landscape image belies the violence not only of the current struggle to dismantle monuments celebrating racist figures, but the violent processes of colonialism, war, and capitalist expansion that asserted control over these vistas and the people who lived within them. These ‘backdrops’ are themselves part of a scopic regime structuring knowledge and power and serve as a reminder that those systems are in operation whether or not these monuments visibly exist in a community. This project is part of our as part of our Memories Breathe and Every Monument Deflates body of work.