Null Point presents Relations, not Blank Slates

Relations, not Blank Slates is a reckoning with the coloniality of settler experimental music, and a proposal for an otherwise musical practice. The program offers artistic inquiries into canonical works, and frameworks of settler experimental music are entwined with colonizing relations to Indigenous land as a terra nullius (“nobody’s land”) evacuated of Indigenous sovereignty and sanitized of troubling histories of colonization. Complementing this critical inquiry, the program also asks how Indigenous, arrivant, and settler musicians are proposing otherwise, power-sensitive ways of relating to Turtle Island lands. The program features recent works by Raven Chacon (Diné Nation) and Dylan Robinson (Stó:lō and Skwah Nations), and brings their reconceptualizations to past settler experimental music. The program features 1) critical, against-the-grain realizations of canonical settler experimental music works by John Cage, Alvin Lucier, and Fluxus, grounded in decolonial frameworks, and 2) a new decolonial performance practice for Yoko Ono’s neglected Hide Piece which learns from Ono’s own 1960s decolonial performance practices. Working at the rich boundary between music and contemporary art, the program features musical instruments, projection, ax, interactive electronics, theatre, noise, a banner, coins, found audio, spoken word, police whistles, and more.