"no history" - Live at Skylight (10/04/2015) by stefana fratila published on 2015-04-13T00:12:44Z "no history" Performed at Skylight Gallery on April 10th 2015 in Vancouver on the occupied, unceded, traditional, and ancestral territories belonging to the xʷməθkwəy̓əm (Musqueam), Skwxwú7mesh (Squamish), and Səl̓ílwətaʔ (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations. As a gesture of bearing witness to ongoing colonial violence, I wrote this piece and sampled Stephen Harper's 2008 "apology" for the Indian Residential School system, his G20 speech only a year later (where he stated in candid denial that Canada has "no history of colonialism"), and time-stretched excerpts from Tanya Tagaq's "Ancestors" (who is a throat-singer from Ikaluktutiak and one of approximately 150,000 Indigenous children who attended a residential school). My idea was to create a piece in 'time-stretched witnessing', where sounds from a colonial reality are extended so that we can hear them more deeply and clearly. As a means of retracing memory, the moment of bearing witness is also made longer, more moving and more meaningful. - For anyone interested on reading more about the piece, feel free to to read my Master's thesis, "Decolonizing Reconciliation: Refusing Settler Innocence Through Sound": http://ow.ly/CFjJ300Am7b Genre Ambient
