Talking Basket
– Native American grass basket, Dakota Access Pipeline proposal, General Electronic voice recorder, clippings, turtle shell, polyurethane
© 2016 Chris Manfield

Talking Basket represents the subversion of Indigenous knowledge within the United States’ post-colonial institutional system. A hand-woven Native American grass basket of unknown origin was obtained through an auction on Ebay. Somehow, this indigenous artifact had been seized and placed in between the cruel lines of capitalism’s poetic chant that is the bidding contest.  

I’ve defaced the basket by covering it with seals and emblems that were appropriated from some of the United State’s largest corporate entities. A of coating polyurethane (a post-industrial polymer that gained its popularity in American culture through its historic use as a protective overcoat) was applied afterwards, as a sacrilegious gesture to juxtapose the values between artifact conservation against the cyclical order of decay and regeneration. A tape recording of an unknown native American elder reciting the indigenous origin story of Turtle Island is played whisperly on repeat using a General Electronics cassette player/recorder which had been hidden within the closed basket. The empty shell of a map turtle rests on the lid, echoing the harrowing roar of the anthropocentric era of mass extinction.

I crafted this sculpture with the intention to provoke conversations and re-imagining of the possibility of harmonizing indigenous virtues with the institutional system as opposed to its integration within the subversive order of the contemporary system.