The Wonsook Kim School of Art will host “Morainic – an Excursion” from 1-4 p.m. Saturday, April 1, starting at the Center for Visual Arts. The event will include an excursion into the glacial landscape. 

The event will center discussions of the work of Eyak writer Jen Rose Smith, author of “‘Exceeding Beringia’: Upending universal human events and wayward transits in Arctic spaces.” A preliminary reading of the work will be given by Rozalinda Borcila, who will be an incoming Visiting Artist for the Wonsook Kim College of Fine Arts.  

Those interested in attending should RSVP using this form, or contact rborcila@yahoo.com. Borcila’s work combines analytic and embodied modes of artistic research to trace the ways racialized banishment, ecocide, Indigenous dispossession, and extractive violence are encoded in everyday places.  

Rozalinda Borcila

Event Abstract: 

Central to scientific understandings of a changing climate, glacial geographies are increasingly subject to regimes of knowing, accumulation, and management. Meanwhile, across the Great Lakes region, glacial origin stories proliferate, as anxieties over climate futures reanimate colonial preoccupations with origins and belonging.  

But glacial imaginaries are historically entangled with racialization, property-making and Indigenous dispossession. Are we done with these histories, are they done with us? What is at stake in our encounters with glacial landscapes and their attendant formations: erratics, moraines, kames, drift, loess, gravel, waterways, groundwaters? What modes of relation and colonial (un)knowing are animated, or disavowed? 

Event Timeline: 

1 p.m. – Brief introductions, overview, framing 

1:30 p.m. – Caravan to first stop (driving time 20-25 minutes) 

3:30 p.m. – Return; optionally, bring your own lunch and reflections