Keynote Dylan Robinson

 

Dylan Robinson is xwélmexw scholar and artist (Stó:lō/Skwah)
Drawing from the tel sqwéqwel /his own true story section on his website we know Dylan identifies as a scholar of sound studies and visual studies, as a collaborator on interdisciplinary research-creation, and as a facilitator (curator/dramaturge) of art and gathering. In the area of Indigenous sonic culture, his research centers the epistemological stakes of listening positionality. His work in this field has been germinal and well acknowledged for its generative and space making praxis. He was the recipient of the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association’s Best First Book Award (Hungry Listening), the American Musicological Society’s Ruth Solie Award (Music and Modernity) and the Society for Ethnomusicology’s Ellen Koskoff Prize (Music and Modernity). His research on Indigenous public art is characterized by a focus on inter-arts forms (text-based art, sound art and devised performance) that engage multiple senses. This work questions how Indigenous rights and settler colonialism are embodied and spatialized in public space. His most recent work in this area examines public art and civic beautification initiatives in Canada that  interpellate settler subjectivity by re-materializing colonial history. Doing so enacts violence toward Indigenous lands as a non-human relation that such work is situated upon.’ In all these areas my aim is to prioritize Indigenous resurgence and to re-envision dominant scholarly modes of dissemination (writing, gathering, festival and exhibition curation), working toward forms of expression that convey the sensory experience of Indigenous life, and address Indigenous publics.