NICKEL & DIME
Nickel & Dime is a participatory installation that reflects on the notion of land ownership and the capitalization of nature, in relation to colonization, nation-states, and extractive industries.
Viewers could take coins from the box of soil as a souvenir or exchange them for a donation, which was directed to support the Standing Rock movement in North Dakota and the Shuar community in the Ecuadorian Amazon. Both communities continue to resist the mining and oil industries that threaten to contaminate their territories and displace them—contexts in which their cosmologies and ways of understanding land are juxtaposed with those of corporations and states.
After the exhibition closed, the soil box became part of a community garden.
Colonization of the Americas began in 1492 and it continues today. Colonization was not an event; it is a structure. It is land-centered; it destroys to replace. Being a settler is not an identity, it is a position of power within that structure. Governments and extractive corporations continue to invade indigenous territories in the name of economic growth. The land and its minerals are assigned capital value, a price. As a result of the imposition of Western economic systems, many of these communities are impoverished. Extractivism pollutes the land and the water, disrupting the interdependence between the land and its people. It is cultural imperialism.