Miami Art Week Preview 2024: Nicholas Galanin Installation Grounds Luxury Fantasyland
By Chadd Scott
December 1, 2024
Amidst the grotesque wealth and glamour on display at Miami Art Week, artwork with heart and soul and purpose beyond profit can be found if you know where to look.
If you were an Indigenous person in the Western Hemisphere living in a coastal area during the 15th, 16th, or 17th centuries, one of the worst things you could see were sails. Ship’s sails. Sails powering colonizers from Europe to the “New World.” Colonizers who brought murder and slavery along with them.
You may not have known this initially, thinking perhaps these people were friendly. They were not.
They landed all up and down the East Coast of what is now called America and throughout the Caribbean. They landed in what is today Florida. Juan Ponce de León claimed the area for Spain in 1513.
Nicholas Galanin (b. 1979; Tlingit/Unangax̂) returns the sails of conquest to the shores of Florida for Faena Art's 2024 Miami Art Week programming with his monumental, site-specific installation erupting from the sand on Faena Beach: Seletega (run, see if people are coming/corre a ver si viene gente).
“I think of the sails as a form of empire,” Galanin told Forbes.com. “Even in our communities here in Alaska, some of the first visible documentations that have been orally passed down in our communities are of seeing those sails from afar.”
Trouble coming.
Rising 45 feet in height, Seletega (run, see if people are coming/corre a ver si viene gente) will be on free public view from December 3 through December 8, 2024, between noon and 8:00 PM behind the Faena Hotel at 3201 Collins Avenue in Miami Beach. The artwork brings a necessary dose of reality to what is otherwise a weeklong fantasy land of luxury and parties for the super-rich to celebrate their dominion over the world hosted under the guise of fine art.
Galanin’s installation, as has become his signature, critiques the space it inhabits.
“Every location has layers of history and chosen history, narratives that are either upheld and told and shared, or erased, and Miami is no different,” he said. The story typically erased, “Conquest or colonization tied to things like capitalism, tied to conversations of oppression within communities that still have to navigate empire.”
The name “Miami” comes from the Mayaimi tribe once living there, “mayaimi” translating to “big water” or “sweet water,” likely a reference to Lake Okeechobee, 85 miles northwest of present-day Miami.
“Language is a telling tool of what is upheld or not upheld in communities,” Galanin said. “Access to land and the relationship to land from an Indigenous perspective, that is also really telling. When (places) get heavily developed, when (places) get completely transformed, where language is not present anymore, or where place names or even harvesting rights are also completely removed, how do Indigenous communities still retain visibility, even sovereignty?”
South Florida’s most prominent Indigenous people today, the Seminole and Miccosukee, have retained–reimagined or rescued might be more accurate terms–their visibility and sovereignty in no small part through gambling. It was the Seminole Tribe of Florida setting up a bingo parlor and then defending that operation on the basis of tribal sovereignty against Florida’s anti-gaming laws all the way to the Supreme Court in 1981 that set in motion the popularization of Indian-owned casinos across America. The casinos remain an economic lifeline for Indigenous communities nationwide.
Partially buried in sand in the form of a Spanish galleon’s masts, sails, and rigging emerging from below, Seletega (run, see if people are coming/corre a ver si viene gente) connects the ongoing occupation of Indigenous land with the initial invasion of the “Americas” to extract wealth for European aristocracy.
The present day’s global aristocrats invade Miami for Art Week not by galleon under the power of sail, but by private jet under the power of fossil fuel. Miami is the busiest place in the world for private jet traffic during the event. Yacht traffic isn’t far behind. Yachts and private jets being the two most expensive, unsustainable, resource-heavy, and polluting modes of personal transportation.
When vile Spanish conquistador Hernán Cortés led an expedition to Mexico in 1519, he ordered his ships to be scuttled on the beaches. This was done to “motivate” his exhausted crew, preventing retreat. Cortés's actions sent a clear message: there was no turning back. The Spanish expression quemar las naves (burn the ships) means to eliminate the possibility of retreating before a problem.
The masts and sails of Galanin’s galleon evoke a decisive moment, symbolizing a point of no return, where past actions force a commitment to a new, uncertain future. This act, like burning one’s ships, speaks to the irreversible choice to move forward without the option of retreating, of charting a new course and never going back, and the act of giving oneself to a cause or belief.