Our Land, Our Stories - A Multimedia Experience

Our Land, Our Stories - A Multimedia Experience Tuesday

FEB.21 5:30pm

CCA - Academic Building West, Room 6051

On Tuesday Feb. 21 the CCA hosted an event introducing various aspects of the multimedia project Our Land, Our Stories, created with the Ramapough Lunaape Nation Turtle Clad.

It included a documentary film, book, exhibits, and original artwork. Project director and BBBH Seed Grantee Anita Bakshi and project partner Timothy Blunk shared their work about video projects and art installations that offer a visual display of historical records, testimonies, maps, federal and state documents, and affidavits that illustrate the contestation over Indigenous identity and sovereignty in New Jersey.

This event was co-sponsored by RU Indigenous. Our Land, Our Stories (funded by ISGRJ's Black Bodies Black Health Project) tells the intertwined story of racial and environmental injustice at the Ringwood Mines/Landfill Superfund Site, documenting contested narratives around the site’s contamination by Ford Motor Company in the late 1960s and early 1970s, leading to its listing as a Superfund site in subsequent decades. It unearths the histories and stories that have been buried alongside the dangerous chemicals that remain deep in the soil, just miles from a major drinking water reservoir, and counter the processes of erasure that have made the continuing presence of Indigenous peoples invisible to many.

Anita Bakshi is the author of Topographies of Memories: A New Poetics of Commemoration (2017, Palgrave Macmillan). Following several years in architectural practice she received her PhD from Cambridge University with the Conflict in Cities Research Programme. She now teaches at Rutgers University, Department of Landscape Architecture. Her research focuses on contested landscapes and histories, environmental justice, and the relationship between architecture and inequality.

Timothy Blunk is the director of Gallery Bergen, the art space for Bergen Community College, and an assistant professor of visual arts. He served as director of the Puffin Cultural Forum for twelve years. He is a former US political prisoner who served over 13 years in some of America’s most notorious prisons for his activism in resistance to racism, US support for apartheid in South Africa, and involvement in Central America during the 1980s. From his cell in Marion USP, where he served 7 years in solitary confinement, he curated and organized his first exhibition, making use of his extensive correspondences to solicit and collect artworks from political prisoners in 17 countries from around the world.