Photography: Nicholas Galanin’s “In Every Language There is Land”/”En cada lengua hay una Tierra,” Brooklyn Brige Park 5/28/23
Nicholas Galanin is a Sitka, AK-born, Tlingit and Unangax̂ multi-disciplinary artist and musician, whose work frequently explores a dialogue of change and identity between Native and non-Native communities. Galanin adapts aspects of pop art and minimalism, such as repetition, text and industrial production to protest oppression systems of division and control.
His latest installation in Brooklyn Bridge Park, In every language there is Land/En cada lengua hay una Tierra uses English and Spanish, two languages brought over and imposed in North America since colonization. The work was created with the same steel tubing used to construct the U.S.-Mexico border wall and echoes its 30-foot height.
The metal was cut and reassembled to spell out LAND in a format reminiscent — and perhaps inspired by — Robert Indiana‘s famous 1966 sculpture LOVE. The anti-climbing plate seen atop of the border wall appears on the piece’s upper letters and the text repeats in four layers to create a dynamic, open structure. As your point of view changes, the text shifts between legibility and abstraction.
The piece also reminds the viewer that Indigenous people persist and permeate borders despite the forcible removal of rights, languages and access to land and water. For Galanin, “barriers to Land directly reflect barriers to love, love for Land, for community and for future generations.”
The afternoon that I caught this piece, kids were playing in and around the sculpture. Most of the kids were immigrants, and it struck me as being profound that something so normal could be brought out from something so ugly and racist.
Discover more from The Joy of Violent Movement
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.