Engaging Visual Sovereignty and Decolonial Aesthetics in Participatory Research

• In Event: Millennium Hotel Roundtable Session 10
  In Roundtable Session: Indigenous Visual Methods: Challenging Settler Structures Through Images, Movement, and Participatory Research

Abstract

This presentation explores the possibilities for extending the notions of visual sovereignty and decolonial aesthetics to participatory arts-based research. Visual sovereignty is a concept developed by Jolene Rickard in which Indigenous image-based cultural production serves as a proclamation of sovereignty and resistance. It is closely related to Gerald Vizenor’s notion of survivance, which he describes as “an active sense of presence over absence… the continuance of stories.” (2008) Visual sovereignty provides a way for artists to embed themes of refusal, representation and futurity in their work; allowing viewers to interpret Indigenous visual culture. Through visual sovereignty, Indigenous artists access what French photography theorist Roland Barthes would call the power of expansion, the cast of the dice embedded in the punctum of a photograph (1981).

A decolonial aesthetic in photography discards “consumable scenes of ‘traditional’ activity disconnected from a contemporary whole – and opens up for use the dynamics of reproductive media in manifold ways that reinvigorate culture from within” (Norman, 2014). Like visual sovereignty, it involves a similar process of looking within and beyond. In both approaches, artists turn inward to reinvigorate their communities while simultaneously marking out their sovereign positions to their lands. In decolonial aesthetics, land is considered central to the project of decolonization and “must remain at the center of decolonial thought and practice” in order to re-center Indigenous existences, art, culture and creative connections with colonialism founded on place-based relationships to land, people and community” (Martineau and Ritskes, 2014). In a settler colonial social structure, visual images take on additional meaning and possibility. Images can be used to dispel misrepresentations, to resist false perceptions, and to reimagine futures (Martin, 2013).

Indigenous scholars attending to the visual are developing new methods and descriptors for embodying refusal in their image-based work and writing. I present results from an analysis of my attempts at translating these methods from the realm of professional artists into youth participatory action research (yPAR), through my collaborative work on participatory photography projects with youth. These projects include photovoice projects with migrant undocumented young people in New York’s rural Hudson Valley region, and with Black and Indigenous youth living in urban neighborhoods in Toronto, Canada. I consider my own positionality as a white researcher doing this work in collaboration with Indigenous and Black colleagues.

Findings have gestured to the idea that applying the approaches of visual sovereignty and decolonial aesthetics in photography workshops, through photo elicitation activities and photo-taking prompts, can encourage a sense of ownership over the messages that emerge in images. Through a discussion of implications, I tease out the possibilities for arts-based yPAR projects.

Author

• Deanna Del Vecchio, University of Toronto