Tania Colette B.
New Henge
November 2021 - January 2022
For her residency at lower_cavity, Seattle-based artist Tania Colette B. has constructed New Henge, a sculptural installation in two parts. Arising from Colette’s interest in the improvisational structures and defensive barricades erected by demonstrators to impede state forces during mass protests and revolutions, New Henge re-stages some of the material strategies employed in such assemblages within lower-cavity’s post-industrial spaces. By temporarily re-framing these constructions—images of which are widely disseminated via social media—through the context of sculpture, Colette generates a frictive dialectic between contemporary art practices and the fraught aesthetics embedded in operations both of and against state violence, as it protects the interests of global capital.
Reflecting the contingent, whatever-is-at-hand strategies that necessarily inform the construction of these defensive barricades, Colette has worked only with material available onsite in the former paper mill lower_cavity occupies. The first part of the installation, comprised of over 1200 individual bricks salvaged from the building itself, recreates the miniature henge-like structures employed by Hong Kong protesters to impede police vehicles during the recent crackdowns by the Chinese government. Densely distributed across the entire 3000-square foot space, the modest structures appear deceptively formal in their sculptural qualities, until one attempts to physically navigate the installation.
The second half of the project is comprised of a massive, forbidding barricade entwined through the architecture of lower_cavity’s main space. Echoing the form of defensive barricades used all over the world, from the third French Revolution to the recent unrest in Myanmar, the structure is assembled from a chaotic assortment of discarded construction materials, furniture, and domestic objects. Incorporated into this mass are several video projections: one showing social media footage of recent protest actions; the other a click-through of various mediated or contested boundaries captured on Google Earth.
The following is a conversation between Tania Colette B. and Anthony Discenza about the New Henge project, moderated and recorded by Nathaniel Hitchcock:
Tania Colette B. is an American artist, writer, and researcher. Her work explores the sculptural byproducts of political capitalism and state power. With sculpture, installation, found photography/video, and a broad range of other media, she re-stages sites of economic failure, environmental exploitation, and social resistance in order to examine them from a material vantage point.
Her current projects center on tactics of “sculptural resistance”: barriers and monuments built by protestors in order to circumvent, resist, and critique state violence. These spontaneously constructed barricades are rapidly assembled by civilians during periods of political revolution in order to block the advancement of government forces and give themselves tactical advantage. In recent years, imagery of these structures—captured with smartphones by civilians and journalists on the ground, and shared instantly across social media—has operated not only as documentation of protests "past", but as a kind of insurrectionary instruction manual for citizens around the globe fighting their own localized battles.
Colette holds an MA in Culture Industry from Goldsmiths, University of London (2020) and a BFA in Sculpture from California College of the Arts (2014). She lives and works in Seattle.
https://www.taniacb.com/