HAITI / SWITZERLAND / FINLAND

Karakia - The Resetting Ceremony, 2015. Video, 5 minutes 20 seconds.

Mother Throat, 2017-19. Video, 10 minutes 30 seconds.

Supported by the Arts Promotion Centre Finland. In 2015, Sasha Huber travelled to the Agassiz Glacier on the South Island of Aotearoa, the ancestral Mãori name for New Zealand.

In 2015, Sasha Huber travelled to the Agassiz Glacier on the South Island of Aotearoa, the ancestral Maori name for New Zealand. The artist organised a resetting ceremony there, with a karakia (incantation) offered by Jeff Mahuika, a Maori greenstone carver. This incantation served to symbolically unname the glacier and free it from its association with the glaciologist Louis Agassiz and the racist views he advanced. Subsequently, the artist travelled to Algonquin First Nation and endeavoured to symbolically unname Lac Agassiz (Lake Agassiz) located about 350 km northwest from Montreal, Quebec. She did so in collaboration with Silla, an Inuit throat-singing duo based in Ottawa, featuring Charlotte Lamaniq and Cynthia Pitsiulak. Based on the Inuktitut word Sila, meaning air, climate, or breath, their name speaks to all that connects us to the natural environment. Performing a selection of traditional and contemporary throat songs, they collectively sought to reclaim the site from its legacies of colonialism and racism. The works are a part of her ongoing De mounting Louis Agassiz Campaign started in conjunction with Hans Fässler.