The New Kahnawake
2010 - Film & Video (Film & Video)
42 min
Olive Martin and Patrick Bernier
The Mohawk, the emblematic Frontier river in the period of American colonisation, is here a cable of data transmission, and the 7 Sultans Casino is a virtual destination, one of the three hundred online casinos hosted by the servers located in Kahnawake, a small native american indian reserve to the south of Montreal. Incorporating poker, challenges to the law, a struggle for the control of a new territory where the stakes are high, our film ‘La Nouvelle Kahnawake’, between fiction and documentary, pushes these analogies with the Western to explore both our relationship to the figure of the ‘Indian’ and the confusion of our perception of space that new information technology has brought about. As the artists state: “We are neither anthropologists nor journalists. We didn’t want to make a documentary on the Mohawks; we’ll leave that to the Mohawks themselves who haven’t waited for us to develop operational systems for their cinematic and audiovisual productions. Describing our last film, Manmuswak, we say that it is at once a fiction about the life of ‘invisible’ immigrants and a documentary about our way of perceiving them: this is the viewpoint that we would like to keep in this new film. If this is a documentary then the subject is us. We are documenting ourselves, in an ‘extrospective’ rather than introspective way. We are a multitude of things: a man and a woman, a heterosexual couple, the mother and the father of a little girl; we are the descendants of the working class and of the bourgeoisie, of white colonialists and black slaves, we are consumers, creators of cultural wealth, polluters, militants, internet users; we are French, we are European, we are westerners… So, in some respects we are similar to those who appear in the film, to the Mohawks, to the Quebecois, and to the gamblers, and we differ in others. Our film is a way of posing ourselves certain questions. In what way does this story interest us? That is, in what way does it involve us and concern us? In what way can it inform us? That is to say, teach us about ourselves and our place in the world process of globalisation.”
Patrick Bernier and Olive Martin are a duo of artists collaborating since 1999. Their shared practice is mainly research-oriented and project based. It spans across video, photography, performance, installation and sound. Concerned with questions related to identity, migration and belonging, Bernier and Martin produce works that stem from their immersion in specific contexts and their collaboration with professionals from various fields outside of contemporary art. They address the tight but often obscure connection between contemporary images and cultural practices, as widely as cruise travelling ( Je suis du bord , 2016) or traditional Senegalese knitting technique ( Le Rêve du Paquebot , 2020), with broader contemporary or historical narratives. Their installations and films, which they qualify as “monsters”, investigate and highlight historical or personal counter or sub-narratives that help understanding the social, cultural and political structures of our societies. The duo were artists in residence at Kadist San Francisco in 2010.
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