X
Site: Mississippi River Bluffs
Curator: Risa Puleo
As an artist and architect, X (Coushatta/Chamorro) understands the built environment as a temporary event. His tabula rasa approach upholds the sanctity of the land above the human archive while his architecture of undoing rescales human progress to the time of the Earth.
For Counterpublic 2023, X imagines the shape of the land before and after human intervention. The bluffs atop which Jefferson Avenue is built were carved by river from stone over millennia. Today, the bluffs are a site of industry that misunderstands the one-to-one relationship between human longevity and the earth’s durability. His light and sound installation, (a river) will flow, returns the industrialized area along the Mississippi River below Jefferson Avenue to the shape of the river’s design and rescales viewers as one part of a larger ecosystem—with the potential to intervene in the river’s future through acts of unbuilding and reimagining what mutuality with the land could be.
ABOUT the artist
X is an Indigenous futurist, multidisciplinary artist, and architect specializing in land, architectural, and new media installation. His work illuminates the liminal space between the ancestral plane and our accelerating post-human world. X is a 3Arts Award Winner, a 2020 New City Top 50 Artist, and the first Native American contributor to the Chicago Architecture Biennial. His work has been exhibited and collected internationally by the Museum of Contemporary Native Art, Ars Electronica, and the MCA Chicago. In 2020, X was commissioned by the U.S. State Department as the lead artist of The American Arts Incubator Brazil.
Artists Links
Website: santiagox.com
