Burnt Creek: Experimental Audiovisual Approaches to Indigeneity and More-than-Human Ontologies in Northern Québec Mining Communities

Andrea Bordoli

This project takes place in the mining town of Schefferville and the adjacent Innu and Naskapi indigenous communities of Matimekush and Kawawachikamach, Northern Québec. Its main focus is the impact that mining had and still has on the territory itself and on the life of the indigenous people inhabiting it. More precisely, the aim of this project is to explore the human and nonhuman ontologies that compose this territory while dealing with the concept and the experience of indigeneity. 

 Transnational mining corporations, iron ore, caribous, toxic water basins, Innu and Naskapi communities, railways, bears, hydroelectric infrastructures…How to propose an analysis sensitive to this complex natureculture assemblage located the very periphery of capitalist production, yet integrated into the global extractivist network that is Schefferville? How to explore and pursue an anthropological-based storytelling capable of translating the complexity of such assemblage while also carefully engaging with questions related to indigeneity, identity, colonialism, and resource exploitation? 

 Combining a territorial analysis of extractive operations carried out on ancestral lands in the immediate vicinity of indigenous communities with a significant attentiveness for perspectival ontologies and more-than-human entanglements, I will explore an inclusive storytelling accounting for the sensitive territory of Schefferville .On a methodological level, my project will employ experimental audiovisual practice as a creative research tool: through the implementation of collaborative audiovisual approaches, sensory ethnography, and ecological filmmaking, this project will explore the human, nonhuman and infrastructural worlds– as well as the past, possible and future tenses – coexisting in this specific sensitive territory, this frictional “contact zone” where multiple beings and activities coalesce.