Spirit Mound
large-format camera, photographic negative on transparency, video, sound, and prose

A chance meeting on the streets of South Sioux City, Nebraska devolves into a tense conjunction between a man from the Ho-Chunk/Winnebago Tribe of Nebraska, who presented himself as a warrior with diminished capacity, trying to thrive in an environment poisoned by invisibility and abuse, and a modern-day inhabitant of settler-class heritage caught off guard by the heat of history. Spirit Mound echoes this contact zone, the large-format, wooden camera—a relic from an era when photography was used to document indigenous peoples and romanticize them—evokes the amnesia that covers the fingerprints of attempted genocide.