Brief Project Description
“Driving East Through Indian Country” is an iterative, multimedia
project that takes the road trip as a point of departure to examine the centrality
of mobility in American history and culture. The project consists of four
successive stages in multiple 'chapters' or locations carefully chosen for
their historical significance. In each location, I will produce sound compositions
based on field and archival research on questions of mobility, examining
their routes and histories of European settlement and Indian removal and
considering how they are impacted by present day migration and immigration.
Second, these sound compositions will be broadcast via low-power FM radio
from a mobile transmitter inside an automobile during a road trip whose route
metaphorically reverses ('de-enacts' rather than 're-enacts') a specific
historical trajectory, such as a route of westward settlement or removal.
Third, these sites, performances, and sound pieces will be presented via
a series of multi-media installations that incorporate video, audio, photographs,
and ephemera. Fourth, in collaboration with an experienced radio producer,
these sound compositions will be woven with other texts to produce more documentary-style
radio pieces suitable for broadcast. By working in an iterative and site-specific
manner based in residencies across the United States, I plan to produce a
body of work over the next three years that collectively re-envisions historic
and present-day questions of American mobility “from sea to shining
sea.”
Rationale
An enduring image of American media culture, the cross-country
road trip celebrates mobility as a key feature of an ‘essential’ national
character and conjures timeless images of freedom and speed, finding one's
own way in the world, and open-ended personal discovery in an authentic,
vast and empty continent. Often imagined as an east to west journey, the
road trip can be seen as a compressed, individualized and unconscious ‘re-performance’ of
19th century westward migration. Reversing this trajectory, then, is a gesture
of moving back in time and has often served, particularly in film, as a metaphor
for complicating or contradicting American history and culture. The land
now crisscrossed with Interstate highways has been—and continues to
be—subject to contests over territory, migration, and mobility in the
form of land treaties, annexation wars, Indian removal, reservation policy,
and now border surveillance. My objective is to uncover, recover, expose,
and re-present traces of these histories still resonant, if barely legible,
in the landscape and to connect them with present-day concerns.
