Reintroduction
No Ducks 2023
I grew up near the Owens Art Gallery, in the municipality that is now known as Tantramar (or will be, in a generation’s time), familiar with the multi-sensory presence of the isthmus and marshes, whose current names evolved from the description of their soundscape: tintamarre, after the clangour of the waterfowl. Today that uproar is a distant echo. Through French and British colonization, this place has shifted form many times. The dikes that hold back the world’s highest tides are unsteady. According to the Tantramar Wetlands Centre, over 80% of the region’s natural wetlands have disappeared. The town’s primary eco-tourism site, the Sackville Waterfowl Park, was only constructed in 1988.
The concept of wilderness is integral not only to Canada’s colonial national identity, but also its global reputation. Canada is a place where one goes to connect with The Great Outdoors: densely verdant peaks, sweeping tundra, open prairie. But this narrative is fundamentally flawed on several levels. It ignores the presence, knowledge, and custodianship of Indigenous peoples who have tended to this land since time immemorial, and it prunes the complex interconnectivity of human impact on other forms of life, especially in a period of globalisation. No landscape is truly untouched.
What next? If the answer is restoration ecology, to what setting, then, should the marshes be restored? Which knowledge system is followed? Who makes that call, and who is not consulted? The effects of post-industrial global warming are not reaped equally — environmental racism affects the world’s most vulnerable populations first. If the goal is to move forward by considering the past, the multiplicity of that past must be acknowledged. What needs to be reintroduced, to both ecosystems and the public consciousness?
This year’s issue of No Ducks seeks to engage with some of these questions through the theme of reintroduction in both its environmentalist and queer contexts. Queerness reminds us that we have the power to redefine ourselves as individuals and collectively. It reminds us that relationships are reciprocal, communicative, consensual. It is eternal — one of many recalcitrant ecologies affected by, but resistant to, desolation. It makes space to convene with spectres and build heterotopic alliances across social barriers.
For Flora Chubbs, queerness and environmentalism meet in the concept of “ruderal species” as an analogy for Indigenous rebellion and the necessity of being unmanageable. Writing on the work of artists Emma Hassencahl-Perley and Brody Weaver, Chubbs explores the emotional experience of being made visible through one’s work, digital archival, and radical acts of spontaneity. Riley Small, for their part, shares their own path to finding space and an art practice through the concept of Third Spaces. In a personal essay about their experience working at a resort hotel, they advocate for the role of active process and the rejection of marketability. These essays are accompanied by two reviews that extend this conversation into the realms of disability and divergent bodies. Isra Amsdr confronts the politics of space and inaccessibility through the exhibition The Further Apart Things Seem, curated by Shannon Anderson and Jay Wilson for the Art Gallery of Mississauga, and Lexi Delong questions the concept of normative bodies in a review of Le septième pétale d’une tulipe-monstre, curated by Elise Anne LaPlante for Galerie d’art Louise-et-Reuben-Cohen.
As this issue of No Ducks developed, the attacks on the rights of queer people in North America increased exponentially. 2023 marks a record year of anti-trans legislation in the United States, and the same sentiments are growing in Canada. Transness is, in particular, frequently described as unnatural and unwelcome in cis-hetero-patriarchal space. This statement points to another deep misunderstanding of nature and its inherent queerness. Nature is muddled and delicate and complicated and joyful and grieving and beautiful. Messy. Craving balance. Nature reminds us that nearly any binary position is flawed, including bio-essential Man and Woman, inside and out, mine and ours, awe and grief, before and after.
As climate change and solastalgia rage with parallel force, hope lies in collective physical action, with bated breath and creaky spines, rushing blood and beating hearts. Like great works of art missing from history, or species lost to atmospheric change and trodden ground, there is a luck to conservation. Luck and care know each other well. Care is a refusal of the apocalypse, an insistence on building resilient communities, and the firmly planted belief that each presence is as important as any other, including those that are not human, and those that do not conform to the leading definitions of life. Nature will survive humanity, the ungovernable weeds will return first, but this is not over yet. So let us speak, act, dance, ourselves to hope. Not a naïve or ignorant hope, but a necessary one. Let us set places for those we have not yet known.
— Chloe Lundrigan, Managing Editor, 2023
Chloe Lundrigan is an artist, dancer, and nature interpreter of European ancestry raised and currently based in Mi’kma’ki, the unceded and ancestral land of the Mi’kmaq. Their work explores the commercialization of nature, rural Maritime aesthetics, and queer domesticity.
