Half tongue-in-cheek absurdism and half deadly earnest, Culture Capture: Terminal Adddition continues New Red Order’s ongoing project of “culture capture,” recruiting viewers to participate in a program of practical strategies to counter the “salvage mindset,” which sets aside Indigenous culture and sovereignty by consigning it to the past.
These strategies include using new, accessible technologies, such as smartphone apps that produce 3D scans of objects, both of Indigenous materials held by museums and public monuments that celebrate and re-affirm the norms of European settler culture.
The title of the work, Terminal Adddition, highlights the difference between addition and removal. The concept of “removal” is central to current debates about whether to remove problematic historical monuments— for example, Confederate war monuments in the South. It was also in the name of the Indian Removal Act, signed into law by President Jackson, which resulted in the displacement and death of thousands of Native peoples in what we now call the “Trail of Tears.” Both present removal as a quick fix. With Terminal Adddition, the NRO recognizes that acts of removal inevitably contain contradictions, and proposes an additive approach instead.