Catriona Jeffries

Artist and choreographer Tanya Lukin Linklater and architect, artist, and curator Tiffany Shaw-Collinge share a long-standing interest in, and personal relationship with, Indigenous materials and forms. Indigenous geometries is a space for Indigenous performance. Mobile and temporary, it draws on Alutiiq (southern coastal Alaska Native) ways of life, architecture, and material culture. Each modular element is composed of laminated bent-wood bars in a simple spline-like curve, referencing an Alutiiq steam-bending technique used to make visors worn during sea mammal hunting. When assembled, these parts form a geometry that recalls traditional Alutiiq semi-subterranean homes. The choice of ash wood, native to the Chicago area, pays respect to the Indigenous peoples who inhabit lands around this city. The structure will be activated in a series of performances titled A song, a felt structure: We are putting ourselves back together again. Dancers move the curved wood pieces into different configurations, speaking to the ways in which Indigenous social structures have been actively dismantled by colonial US and Canadian governments, and the continued work of Indigenous peoples toward putting their languages, families, and selves back together.

Documentation by Tom Harris and Neven Lochhead.