Sovereign Media: Memory Work in the Wake of Perpetual Genocide

• In Event: Ghosts and Media Futures: Sovereignty, Memory, and Afterlives of Property

Abstract

Sovereign media situates our practice as media-makers within Indigenous futurisms and orients our project toward a planetary demand for land back. It asserts that our understanding of what media is, what media does, and what media can be, has been foreclosed by colonial logics of property, visibility, authorship, audience, consciousness, and distinctions between subject and object. We have been limited by paradigms that radically curtail the potential for media-making to participate in the work of intergenerational healing and communal restoration that is essential to standing in solidarity with and empowering communities-under-seige. Sovereign media asserts that we must go underground, eschew the demand for visibility, be specific about audience, learn from the structure and organization of mycorrhizal networks, and unravel what we know about mediatic poetics, protocols, and pedagogies, such that we might emerge on another side where media-making can be a practice toward realizing the demands of past, present, and future ancestors, an index of our reciprocity with the land where we are situated, and a site for us to strategically attend to the protracted temporal scope of communal memory work in the wake of perpetual genocide.

Author

• Latipa .