Nicholas Galanin
April 7, 2025
Lingít and Unangax artist Nicholas Galanin creates unforgettable public art encounters that connect language to land. We spoke with him about his much-beloved Art Basel Miami project, Seletega (2024), which cleverly played on the consumerism of Art Week, and how he's addressing Boston's monument landscape.
You created a piece for Art Basel Miami this winter called Seletega (run, see if people are coming/corre a ver si viene gente) that was activated by an intervention by another artist. Can you talk about the conceptual background of that piece?
That work was titled Seletega, and the translation to that title is “run, see if people are coming.” The work was comprised of to-scale masts referencing a Spanish galleon, like the Santa María or Pinta, ships that introduced the colonial exploitation of our communities and lands.
On the masts of Seletega was text in English and Spanish, both colonial languages on Indigenous land. They read, “What are we going to give up to burn the sails of empire? Qué vamos a renunciar para quemar las velas y los aparejos del imperio? What are we going to build for our collective liberation? Qué vamos a construir para nuestra liberación colectiva?”
This temporary installation tied consumer capitalism to the occupation of Indigenous land for the purpose of extracting resources for the European ruling class. It asks us, “What are we going to give up to burn these sails?”
The language I used was very intentional. Terms like “collective liberation” are very relevant today when we look at some of the genocides happening globally right now in Palestine, Congo, and Sudan.
After the work was up, I invited an artist friend of mine, Jaque Fragua, to do an intervention. Jaque does a lot of site-specific graffiti. I invited him to respond to the questions that Seletega was asking. He gave his response in red, with a target on the first sail, and then “Land Back” on the other. That was a great response. It was an answer that aligns with the conversation that recognizes that Indigenous land back is part of surviving and caring for our place in the world. Everyone should be able to survive in a place that's been cared for. Indigenous stewardship of the land is necessary to counter the climate crisis.
Language is essential to recording and communicating shared knowledge and histories. How does language figure in your work?
Language and land are so connected. That’s one of the reasons that language was attacked—to divide and remove Indigenous populations. Language holds so much. It holds knowledge. It holds literal history. It holds place. It holds land, especially the names of land that provide an understanding of seasons and survival. Recognizing that connection between language and land is very important to my practice.
I am thinking about the idea that each language conveys certain concepts that are virtually impossible to access outside of that particular language. Do you have thoughts on that?
In my recent solo exhibition at Peter Blum Gallery, the title of one of my pieces was There is no equivalent translation. The installation used tools, in this case, settler tools, used to measure nature and land. Despite these types of tools, there is an inability to translate an understanding of the land and the connections that we have with it. There is no translation.
There's such a pronounced disconnect between the stewards of the land and the people exploiting it. The folks managing land right now have so little understanding or care to qualify them for that kind of management. It will never end well for the environment in their hands. The bureaucratic process of navigating the settler-colonial occupation requires that we continually show up in forms of resistance and protest to communicate to these entities that they are damaging the land and mismanaging resources.
What do you think distinguishes a monument from the active preservation of community histories?
I think about the statues of the Roman Empire that were erected to convey a sense of permanence about hierarchies and histories. This is true of the US and British empires, too. In Liverpool, I did a series of bronze sculptural works called Threat Return. They were baskets cast in bronze with ski-mask-style cut-outs in the overturned baskets. They were installed overlooking all of the other bronze statues in St John's Gardens, this garden where the wealthiest in the community had hired the finest European sculptors to recreate themselves in these sculptural forms, essentially to convey the story of how they profited off of human trafficking and tobacco, which was deeply connected to the colonization of the United States and the removal of Indigenous people.
The settler-colonial agenda involves not only land dispossession but also the eradication of Indigenous populations’ shared memories and histories. How do you address collective amnesia in your work?
Collective amnesia is a mechanism that has been used for the erasure of the histories of those being colonized but also by the colonizers to actively suppress the acknowledgment of their actions. This allows settlers to participate in colonization without being self-aware of the damage and violence that is required to maintain it. It is present in government, religion, education, history, even the holidays we celebrate. I see my work as illuminating this reality of colonialism.
Colonial history is embedded in Boston’s landscape. Your Triennial project is titled I Think a Monument Goes Like This. How does it respond to the monuments that Bostonians are so accustomed to seeing as markers of histories that don’t always tell the whole story?
An ongoing thread throughout my work has been exploring the use of monuments to address collective amnesia. The versions of history that further the myth of colonial heroes and remove the violence or crimes of settler-colonialism are perpetuated in the monuments honoring them or the holidays that monumentalize them in our calendars.
I engage with monuments in my work through the form and materials I use. For example, bronze is a material that holds a prominent position in the production of monumental artwork partly because it conveys a sense of permanence. This is in contrast to the monumental work of our communities, which was totemic. Totemic work was carved, often in red cedar. Red Cedar would be raised up and then, eventually, the work could return back to the earth. The timeline of totemic work understands that the work survives alongside the community. Totemic work cultivates a living culture that is invited to continue the practice. I keep these relationships between objects and the communities they serve in mind as I make my work.