Where Water Meets Land: Water’s Time and Place’s Thought in Rebecca Belmore’s <i>Fountain</i>
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Commemorations, by their definition, assume a truth about beginnings and endings. Through an assumption of singular national remembering, Canada’s celebration of its 150-year anniversary marks a symbolic violence against First Nation’s sovereignty and the effects of settler colonialism. In Jean O’Brien’s theorization of process called, “firsting and lasting” of Indigenous people and spaces, she details how settler national memory relies upon the myth of “non-Indian modernity and Indian extinction.” Following O’Brien, this essay examines a contemporary “first”: Anishnaabe artist Rebecca Belmore’s place as “the first aboriginal woman of North America to represent a country” at the Venice Biennale in 2005. Through a reading of Fountain, a performance that interrogates the weight of Canada’s colonial history, this essay shows how her performance destabilizes the singular event of colonial discovery by using materials, like water, blood, and fire, to show its messy, reiterative structure. In doing so, I argue for a reconsideration of the work of art and representation, such as the international Venice Biennale, as a site of staging mythical modernities.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.022 | 0.028 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".