HOW TO EXPERIMENT WITH HOSTING WHEN WE OURSELVES ARE MANUHIRI?
HOW TO EXPERIMENT WITH HOSTING WHEN WE OURSELVES ARE MANUHIRI?
While we work transnationally, we stand on the whenua of Aotearoa. Aotearoa is a settler colony. I (Rachel) am sixth generation Pākehā; my European ancestors included militia and missionaries who played a central role in the violent theft and abuse of Māori land. I (Tehseen) am fresh-off-the-boat tauiwi; my Gujarati ancestors never came here (although they did also encounter Rachel’s missionary ancestors). Neither of us are Indigenous to Aotearoa; both of us are complicit in its coloniality. Following Te Tiriti o Waitangi, we both consider ourselves here as manuhiri and therefore as obliged - and honoured - to uphold the authority of iwi and hapū. At Lentil Lab, we therefore explicitly entangle our (g)hosting experiments with also be(com)ing a ‘good guest’. Our lab journal is a space of ongoing critical commentary on this entanglement, and therefore on the de/coloniality of Lentil Lab itself.
HOW TO RECLAIM EXPERIMENTATION IN THE REMNANTS OF A COLONIAL LABORATORY?
HOW TO RECLAIM EXPERIMENTATION IN THE REMNANTS OF A COLONIAL LABORATORY?
Settler colonies were and are enforced through not only military violence and cosmological violence, but also an epistemological violence conducted in the name of 'research'. The British Empire was a global laboratory. Through a desire-to-Know, a desire to control, Indigenous knowledges, practices, lands, psyches, bodies were and are treated as lifeless specimens to be mined, stolen, fragmented, distorted and sold (back) for the benefit of White supremacy - sometimes explicitly, often inadvertently. At Lentil Lab, we want to take experimentation away from these 'Enlightened' practices. To do so, we hold their violent potential close-by, asking it to keep us accountable as our own laboratory unfolds. Our lab journal is a space of ongoing critical commentary on this accountability, and therefore on the de/coloniality of Lentil Lab itself.