“Geography is always human, and humanness is always geographic.”
– Katherine McKittrick
Davidson College’s commemorative site project is now moving into its next phase. Laid out by the Commission on Race and Slavery, the initiative seeks to create a work of art to honor the contributions of enslaved people and others whose labor was exploited in the construction of the college. The five finalist artists are now interacting with students, faculty, staff, and alumni over presentations to develop their ideas further. Having worked extensively with the Justice, Equality and Community Archivist, Jessica Cottle, the Van Every Smith Gallery Director, Lia Newman, and the Director of Facilities and Engineering, David Holthouser, the artists are now presenting a compilation of historical data about the campus and asking interactive questions.
One such session, led by the artist Sara Zewde, delved into the history of the campus landscape and the changes it has seen through the years. Some of the features included: the rebuilding of Chambers based on plantation architecture, the slow enclosure of the big D-shape made from the streets and roads that enclosed the campus buildings initially, and the construction of an informal perimeter that segmented the campus from the town. As I worked closely with the archive to find other encounters of campus enclosure, I came across other documentation that highlighted the same. At the close of the Civil War, a September 1865 note in the college’s faculty minutes included the following resolution:
Figure 1 Davidson College Faculty Minutes 1842-1873, September 26, 1865.
Another example includes newer fencing of the college grounds as well as faculty housing in 1870s, under the apparent reasonings of cattle control. While the archive doesn’t yet suggest a causation between the slow enclosure of the campus and the increasing demographic change of the town after the civil war, these coexisting racialisised and devisive policies do give us cause activily think and not not render these overlaps to accidental conincidences.
The college campus reflects the racial anxieties of its past and is a crucial site of stories of the people who have been kept at its peripheries. In the making of this art project, we actively reflect on the college’s landscape and buildings to realize the significance of geography. However, without a faculty to dedicate courses to the practice of geography, we still lack the tools to understand this at a larger level.
The college galleries this semester have taken on the project of further exploring the implications of geography in art and stories through their exhibitions. The Van Every Gallery started this fall semester with Prof. Katie St. Claire’s exhibit, Lay of the Land. A closer look at her work reveals her radical mark-making as a way of touching the reality of her natural environment. She articulates how her extended stay on the island of Haida Gwaii enabled the sentiments of solitude and darkness that were then reflected on the canvas. It prompted her to think about the connection between the darkness in her environment and the darkness that she felt within, which led her to a reflection she considered vital. The record of the encounter with the island that carried these reflections then became important. The paintings riddled with the features of the land, the seaweed washed ashore, the foraged mushrooms, the charcoal dust from the fire, and the naturally sourced inks became the record of the place, bringing the land alive in the gallery. Here at Davidson, 2,700 miles away, the wafts of the ocean, salt, and rot rose through the gallery, trying to create that encounter with the place and its reflections for the viewer.
This past month we saw one of our biggest communal eating events, as the year-long project of growing indigenous corn with DeLesslin “Roo” George-Warren from the center Catawba Nation and the artist Nicholas Galanin came to fruition at the dining halls. Indigenous corn grown and harvested at the college farms was cooked with native recipes by Chef Dave McCluskey. Growing the corn at the college farm became an act of land reform, removing it from the self serving purpose of the college and dedicating it back to the people it was stolen from. Keeping that in mind, it was imperative that the college land was utilized to grow the crop instead of just sourcing it from other indigenous seed farms and archives. The seeds took on distinct meanings and power based on the land they were planted on. The center Catawba Nation is now trying to rebuild its seed bank, and certain selected seeds are planned to be replanted at the farm this upcoming year.
The Smith Gallery opened this semester with the exhibition Witness Trees by the Mexico City-based artist Lorena Mal. She immersed herself in the geography of the campus, working with the flowers, soil, tree drawings, and botanical archives to draw “deeper past cultural, political and ecological traces” between her native country of Mexico and the Southeastern United States because she believes that the land and its flora is one of the most important ways of establishing a connection between its people. She worked with two Magnolia trees in both regions, the first planted right by a friend’s grandparents’ grave back in Mexico and the other, as she later discovered, by the cemetery of the enslaved people at an old plantation here.
Other exhibits include Susan Harbage Page’s Embodied Cartography in Territorial Disputes, where she displayed her archive of trauma on the US-Mexico Border, composed of 1000 found objects such as toys, toothbrushes, id cards, and more left behind by the border crossers. When discovered at sites ridden with violence, these ordinary objects take on deeper meanings defined by the border at which they are found. At the same time, Dr. Diego Luis’ (former faculty at Davidson College) exhibit at the Spencer gallery intends to humanize the lives of people living at and crossing borders. He documented the scars that the cities of Laredo and Crystal City bear in witnessing cyclical trauma- Japanese American and Japanese Latin American incarceration during WWII and now the present-day migration crisis.
This is all to emphasize the plethora of examples of the significance of geography. The geographies underscored in all these exhibits communicate the same idea: Land has power, and in ignoring it, we continue to stifle a key component of human experience. As a part of our holistic liberal arts learning, we need to learn that the rules of the land are constructed, and there exists an alternate terrain through which we can tell different stories of the “othered” people. As Davidson’s Commission on Race and Slavery continues to work towards identifying goals that help the college reckon with its troubled history, it perhaps might consider pushing for a dedicated academic and faculty member that can work with the college and its students on the practice of geographies and its implications on the humanities to re-illustrate the point: Geography Matters.