Time, Colonial Construct

A half-hour after logging on for the kickoff of From Land Grab to LandBack and seeing nothing but a black screen, the online audience saw an apologetic Cruz Garcia suddenly appear in the Zoom room. “Time is a colonial construct, and we are always punished by it,” Garcia, an associate professor at Iowa State University’s (ISU) architecture school, said, before turning the camera onto the Meskwaki artist Shelley Buffalo just as she was wrapping up her talk in the building’s atrium. “Obviously, capitalism must die,” we heard her say in closing.

So began the six-day-long conversation series, throughout which fourteen speakers proposed counter-narratives of different communities that have been subject to colonialism, sketching out their untold and under-documented histories. The artist Sean Connelly and architect Marakiani Olivieri spoke about struggles for demilitarization in Hawai’i and Puerto Rico, respectively. Ukrainian filmmaker Oleksiy Radynski shed light on the genocides and ecocides committed by Russia in Ukraine and northeast Eurasia in ramping up fossil fuel production. Buffalo presented on Indigenous aesthetic movements, prompting the audience to imagine how they might have developed had they not been interrupted by imperialist oppression. The writer Abu Salma Khalil simply affirmed his Palestinian identity as he joined us from France, a country whose government classifies him as “stateless.”

Speakers furnished a range of visual media—photography, digital models, Google Street View captures, even blood tests—in their presentations. Brazilian architect Gabriela Leandro gave a layered history of sites of colonization and indigenous resistance in the state of Espírito Santo by juxtaposing images from her own family history and indigenous music over video images of maps, landscapes, and urban environments. She pointed out that this mixed media approach allows her to “re-enchant” and “re-occupy” stolen lands within the narrative she read to us, and to depict her country’s violent colonial past without centering violence itself. Some speakers offered pathways to decolonization, though these varied in scope. Connelly, for example, proposed a “land back urbanism” that identifies areas containing resources key to sustenance and prioritizes their return to Indigenous stewardship. The Caribbean artist Nadia Huggins demonstrated how to look differently by way of her underwater photography, which subverts the tourist gaze by protagonizing not the beach but the sea, with all the marine and human life that flourishes there.

The week was punctuated by repeated observations that the event would not have been possible ten years ago, when the phrase land back wasn’t even in the vocabulary of the average architecture professor or student. That a symposium would provide the space for not one but two Palestinians to speak freely about Israeli apartheid would have been unimaginable just five years ago. Asked how she sneaks in political messages when working with large institutions worried about alienating their donor base, Palestinian designer Dima Srouji advised, “Ask for forgiveness, and not permission.” Her talk, which shed light on the use of archeology as a tool of empire, was a lesson in the courage integral to Palestinian resistance. Today, as Israel presses its indiscriminate bombing of Gaza, we watch mainstream media outlets justify war crimes by invoking dehumanizing Islamophobic stereotypes. The cowardice of those in power shows itself, too, as Israel’s openly genocidal rhetoric finds bipartisan support among all but a handful of sitting US politicians. It’s my hope that those reading this realize that now is not the time to cower in uncertainty, but to stand solidly with the Palestinian people of Gaza, who have been living in an open-air prison for the past sixteen years.