Graduation Year

2024

Document Type

Campus Only Senior Thesis

Degree Name

Bachelor of Arts

Department

Environmental Analysis

Reader 1

Professor Aimee Bahng

Reader 2

Professor Aly Ogasian

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© 2024 Laurel Ovenell

Abstract

This thesis develops anticolonial heterotopias as a framework to analyze how land-based installation artworks augment space to produce materialized anticoloniality. "Land-based installation art" and "anticolonial heterotopias" are each first defined: the former is constructed to invoke the relationships between landscape as the site of (de)colonization, and the artist and viewers as actors intervening into settler colonial relations to land; the latter synthesizes anticolonial theory and methodologies and Michel Foucault's idea of heterotopias. The ways in which land-based installation artworks create anticolonial heterotopias is site-responsive, and their methods are investigated through the analysis of five artworks: Mary Mattingly's Swale; Leeroy New's Taklobo and Balete; Edgar Heap of Birds' Native Hosts, Claremont, California; and Krystal Two Bulls and Votan Ik's We Are The Land. Through artistic analysis, this thesis does not simple establish these pieces as anticolonial spaces that stand apart from dominant conceptions of land. It also proposes that when land-based installation artworks form anticolonial heterotopias, their imaginative capacity is not limited by the demands of function, scalability, or reason. They can thus uniquely serve as creative spaces that uncouple our collective imagination from the limits of colonial logics of space so that we might pursue anticolonial and decolonial projects now. This is the utility of art in speculative anticolonialism.

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