#individualprojectgrant

Marina Hulzenga grew up in the southwest woods just outside the Edmonton city border by the Enoch Cree Nation reserve, which is where the connection for her project LIMINAL SPACE || AWASITIPAHASKAN began to take shape. Hulzenga studied exhibition design at MacEwan University, and eventually moved across the pond to attend grad school in the Netherlands, specializing in Public Space Design. For her final thesis project, her fascination with place and space came full circle, bringing her back to the Enoch landscape where she was raised. “They were my neighbours my whole life, and I never really knew them,” says Hulzenga. “Even as a young child, I sensed it was another place, another world I knew nothing about. At school we were taught about the history of First Nations in Canada, but nothing about this place.”

The first phase of LIMINAL SPACE || AWASITIPAHASKAN was completed in 2014, exploring the borders of First Nations reserves in Alberta on multiple levels: the physical borders, social borders, and emotional borders. Liminal space is defined as “the space of a threshold from one domain to another,” and Awasitipahaskan means “across the border line” in the Indigenous language of Cree. With support from an Individual Project grant, Hulzenga hopes to expand the project. As Hulzenga describes it, “my focus was on the borders of the landscape, which revealed five different types of boundaries. From there I explored each border and how it could be communicated within a book and exhibition format. The final objective of that project was to create a space for conversation. To talk about these borders and ask: what do they mean? Why were they created? How do we use them? Do we still need them? It was not about proposing what is right or wrong, but about illustrating an objective perspective of the landscape.”

As one method of visually representing reserve borders, Hulzenga captured the ground itself in tiles that mark the change from gravel to pavement. The idea initialized from a conversation with Paulina Johnson while driving down the gravel roads of the Saddle Lake Cree Nation reserve. “There was one section where the road was really rough, and I commented, ‘whoa, these reserve roads.’ She smiled and softly said, ‘driving on gravel roads makes me feel home,” recalls Hulzenga. “It really struck me, this simple and beautiful comment. Gravel is such an unassuming, and barely noticed material, and for her it was a symbol of home.”

While working on the project, Hulzenga noted that almost every reserve has gravel roads, where the surrounding provincial roads are all paved with asphalt, creating a border in a very subtle way. “I continued with the idea of these two materials meeting each other, and how that transition occurs at the edge of a reserve.” While displaying the material change as a concrete tile, viewers are able to interact on a tactile level, as a surface they can move across.

Another primary component of LIMINAL SPACE || AWASITIPAHASKAN is the creation of reserve forms cut out of deer hide that visually depict the different contours of the borders. For the first half of the project, Hulzenga managed to capture the shapes of 86 reserves, and with the continuation of the project she is looking to capture the remaining 54. The project required a fair amount of investigation on behalf of the artist: due to the fact that many reserves are not captured on traditional maps, Hulzenga patched together the information using a list of names, locations, and Google maps.  Deer hide was chosen specifically as the medium as it speaks to the idea of cutting a shape out of the landscape – cutting a shape out of the people. As a material traditionally used by Indigenous peoples for constructing clothing and shelter, the medium grounds the shapes with a sense of the people.

Hulzenga also plans to expand her exploration of reserve forms by translating the shapes into different materials to see what these translations could communicate. “This particular story, of the deer hide, is a conversation about the dividing and cutting of the landscape. If these shapes were translated into concrete, or ceramics, or textiles, what would they say then? I would like to listen and hear if these forms have more to share.”

The final major component of LIMINAL SPACE || AWASITIPAHASKAN is to expand upon the lexicon of definitions. This border is about language, and illustrates Hulzenga’s observations about the words and definitions used in conversation with individuals living both on and off the reserves. She noticed that on multiple occurrences, similar words were being used, but would mean different things across the two groups. “Judy Half from Saddle Lake Cree Nation reserve is the Aboriginal liaison at the Royal Alberta Museum. Judy inspired this border because of her definition of the word: artifact. She related to me that the word artifact is not a term her Indigenous Cree community would use, because it insinuates that the object is dead. It institutionalizes the object, storing it on shelves and in drawers. But for many Indigenous people, and the cultures these objects belong to, they are far from dead. Holding very different truths towards their objects, these cultures see their objects as having life.”

Paying extra attention to diction choices and the associated definitions, Hulzenga reviewed her interviews and picked out an assortment of words and definitions that kept repeating. The words and definitions used by Indigenous and non-Indigenous people were placed side by side to illustrate the similarities and differences. It’s about the space between these two definitions. By the end of the project term, Huzenga hopes to compile a larger and more diverse collection of definitions and conversations about the words we use, and what we mean to say when we use them.