Ne:Kahwistará:ken Kanónhsa’kówa í:se Onkwehonwe is a multifaceted research-creation project comprised of a series of site-specific artworks developed in-community (2019–2022) and a Multimedia Panoramic Installation by 2RO MEDIA (2023). Created in collaboration with members of the Six Nations community, the final installation featured a 34-foot panoramic screen, with multiple video projectors creating an immersive visual environment, with 14.2-channel surround (ambisonics) sound. This artwork presents a fictional reimagining of the Haudenosaunee Creation Story, employing a cyclical narrative that interweaves the past, present, and future.

Our Haudenosaunee worldview maintains that history and cultural memory/knowledge is something written on the land—that the landscape is an animate, living, and embodied archive with which we are interconnected. This project explores the ways Onkwehonwe conceptualize and embody an interrelationship with a universe that is ‘alive and filled with spirit’, understanding that today we live in a world increasingly saturated, mediated, and animated by technicity. For Haudenosaunee, the longhouse is an enduring symbol of the strength of our Rotinonshonni (Iroquois Confederacy), as it signifies a way of living together as a League of Nations under the Great Law of Peace—the Kayanereh:kowa. Our enduring sense of community is mirrored in the longhouse structure; it is emblematic of our diverse creative and cultural practices, which are connected back our traditional teachings as much as they are today animated by contemporary technologies and production techniques. With this in mind we created this large-scale installation taking inspiration from the longhouse structure and what it represents to our people. With this project we are interested in the spatiality of storytelling—how stories can be dimensional as well as durational; how narratives are intricately interconnected with ‘place’ and the landscape. As Onkwehonwe we think of the landscape as a living, animate, and embodied archive; with this new project, we wanted to explore the idea of embodied storytelling and the ways in which we can participate with, as well as be immersed in, story. For Onkwehonwe, our knowledge systems are maintained, mobilized, and transferred through our oral traditions, but also through our creative cultural practices (in songs, dances, ceremonial praxis). For us, this project was about mobilizing digital technologies as a means to support the transmission, transformation, innovation, and expression of Onkwehonwea (Indigenous ways of knowing/being), and meant to serve as a way to for us to participate in the sharing of our stories and cultural knowledge with the next generation(s). For this project we worked in/with our community, building on existing relationships we have with elders, knowledge-keepers, cultural organizations, and other artists in the Grand River communities of the Six Nations. This project was, at its core, an artwork made in collaboration with site, place, story, and community.

This artwork premiered at the first annual 2RO MEDIA Festival 23 (October 19-23, 2023).