Woven like a thread held in continuous tension between tradition and modernity, between the white immensity of the North and the metallic heights of urban girders, Mobilize by Caroline Monnet is a wordless emancipatory narrative in which Indigenous bodies break free from historical and archival confinement.

Rowing, running, cutting.

Gestures emerge from the land — not to tame it, but to respond to it — within a continuum of intimate and local relationships that Indigenous peoples maintain with their ancestral territories and with the human and non-human presences they coexist with.

In Mobilize, the gestures of weaving snowshoes, stripping birch bark, crossing the forest, and then entering the city invite us to an Indigenous epistemological reading of time — a cyclical and relational time — breaking away from the Western progressive temporality.

This relational perspective on the forest, on life, and on the land suggests continuity and a dismantling of the dualisms between nature/forest on one side and modernity on the other. Through this visual song that is Mobilize, Monnet offers us a possibility to redefine modernity from an Indigenous perspective by re-inscribing the gesture within a forest ontology. Nature, the city, and the human body cease to be separate worlds: they respond to one another, extend one another, translate one another.

It is now up to us to answer the call: to mobilize our connections, to engage with Indigenous agencies in the present time, and to shift our ontological readings of the forest — to see it not as a mute resource, at best contemplated, at worst exploited, but as a thinking partner, an interlocutor, a living ally, a thought in motion.

Leila Afriat
Community Relations Advisor
Educational, Civic, and Cultural Outreach
McCord Stewart Museum