TERROR-TORIAL FUTURES
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TERROR-TORIAL FUTURES
Date: 2022
Artists: Bobby Joe Smith III (Black and Lakota) and Bomi Yook (Korean Canadian)
Media: Immersive audio-visual installation, large-scale negative prints, and experimental animation (no AI)
Terror-torial Futures is a collaborative and experiential publishing project between Bobby Joe Smith III (Black and Lakota) and Bomi Yook (Korean Canadian). 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. Yet settler urban planning has been shaped through force and technological control, embedding histories of displacement and violence within the organization of urban space. Reflecting on this history, the piece contemplates the post-apocalyptic nature of contemporary and future cities in America as utopic constructs built upon the dystopic realities of Indigenous peoples.
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 across the urban wasteland. Within this (dys)(u)topia, the piece explores Haunting as a mode of Resistance for Indigenous communities who were/are eradicated from the land.
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.
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