To begin Voluminous Arts’ 6-month residency at Kaje Projects, label founder Gavilán Rayna Russom shares some of her preliminary research on Gowanus, the neighborhood in Brooklyn where Kaje is located. Through the lens of that research, she explores connections between the neighborhood’s industrialization and her approach to the concept of a “research residency”.

WERPOS is a site within the ancestral and living homeland of the Canarsee people. It is currently occupied by a contested settler colonial entity called Gowanus, Brooklyn. The word Werpos describes a landscape that includes an area that is elevated above nearby waterways, which it overlooks. Until 1626 there was a village of dwellings present on the site and, according to a 1946 map, a burial site. The lands around the place called Werpos in the Canarsee language - a dialect of Munsee Lenape - are also an ancestral and living homeland to several Algonquin peoples. The relationships between the overlapping lifeways of these diverse peoples were held in balance for thousands of years (before the arrival of Dutch settler colonists) by treaties and protocols that facilitated rich and sophisticated ways of being with each other on shared land despite differing traditions and beliefs. These treaties and protocols included understandings about how to relate to the land which areas of it were suitable for dwellings, which were suitable for hunting and gathering (and at which times of the year), which were suitable for burial sites, which were suitable for planting crops and which should be left as undisturbed as possible. These protocols were, and still are, often misunderstood by settler colonists. Even well-meaning scholars and activists will sometimes use the archeological evidence of dwellings as a way to identify Native homelands as separate from “unused” land. It is important to understand that whether or not a Native dwelling ever existed on a given piece of land all land is Indigenous land.

Read the full article at: https://voluminousarts.com/werpos