TERROR-TORIAL FUTURES
TERROR-TORIAL FUTURES 2022
Artists: Bomi Yook and Bobby Joe Smith III
Medium: Large-scale Immersive installation of experimental photography, procedurally generated CG animation, and print design.
Terror-torial Futures is a collaborative and experiential publishing project between Bomi Yook (Korean Canadian) and Bobby Joe Smith III (Black and Lakota). Devised as an exercise in speculative worlding, Terror-torial Futures is framed by the question “how might Indigenous people exist in a Future designed by Settler Colonizers?”
Historically, settler cities have been sites for utopic world-building. Shaped by the ideals of imperialist imaginary, settler utopias are often manifested in dystopic fashion through force and technology.
Reflecting on this history, the piece contemplates the post-apocalyptic nature of contemporary and future cities in America; as utopic constructs that are built on the dystopic realities of Indigenous peoples.
Within this (dys)(u)topia, the piece explores Haunting as a mode of Resistance and Justice-to-Come for Indigenous communities who were/are eradicated from the land.
A three-walled projection immerses viewers into a speculative post-apocalyptic American landscape. Large-scale negatives are suspended throughout the space to illuminate the silhouettes of Indigenous bodies.
Their ghostly shapes emerge and dissolve across the urban wasteland. Their shadowy faces surface and dissipate over crumbling monolithic structures, collapsed military operations, and decaying grids of control.
Colonizers came, settled, and went- leaving a trail of mass destruction behind them. But the spirits of Indigenous people linger in the land- never forgetting, never relenting- their stories steeped deep into the blood memory of the earth.
From the charred remains of the decadent settler (dys)utopia, the spirits of the dispossessed find rich soil. We are new growth with deep roots—a flourish of thistled weeds flowering in the pilgrim’s untended plot, swallowing whole sun and alien seeds like a terrifying terrestrial tide. With offerings of flesh we sow our prayers across the broken spaces. Promises of vengeance propagate the air, thick as spring pollen. Our persistence is the fruit born of ancestral love and labor—their sacrifice an assurance we will be fed. We are future ghosts awaiting the harvest.
After the manic rush for riches, after mass extraction, after the theft of people and land, after displacement and disenfranchisement, after environmental depletion and capitalistic exploitation, after genocide, and after every kind of warfare raged, Indigenous presence still remains here- spirits inextricably tied to the land and its life-destiny that outscales the rise and fall of colonial imperial utopias.
Haunting demonstrates the power of "still here" that is the unrelenting, outlasting, binding relations to the land.
Haunting is presence that endures across more-than-human timescales- seeking justice, breeding vengeance, and awaiting regeneration.
The result of Yook and Smith’s inquiry emerges from the shores of their respective media arts practices and research in 3D generative world-building, experimental publishing, decolonial poetics, and urban social imaginary.
