Assembly 2021
World of Colonial Hills: Past, Present, and Future
Monday June 7, 1pm PST
Rebecca Copper and Minus Plato (AKA Richard Fletcher)
World of Colonial Hills: Past, Present, and Future extends from the project Auditing Ohio, where Rebecca Copper worked with teacher Kevin Acton and 4th graders at Colonial Hills Elementary to audit their social studies textbook. Minus Plato (also known as Richard Fletcher) and Rebecca are joining forces through the guise of Minus’s radio project, Dear Fellow Settler Colonizer, to engage the residents of Colonial Hills community to question the naming and history of the Colonial Hills in relationship to colonization.
Minus Plato is the alias of Richard Fletcher, Associate Professor in the Department of Arts Administration, Education and Policy at Ohio State University. Trained as a classicist, Fletcher created the blog Minus Plato as part of his research into ancient Mediterranean cultures and contemporary art. Following collaborations with artists (including Paul Chan on the book Hippias Minor or the Art of Cunning, Badlands Unlimited 2015), Fletcher left classics and turned Minus Plato into a platform to develop arts education. His current work is focused on an ongoing dialogue with documenta 14, the global art exhibition that took place in Athens and Kassel in 2017, for a forthcoming exhibition and book project called Whisper into a Hole, as well as a self-critical analysis of settler colonialism through collaborations with global Indigenous artists, in Potu faitautusi, a reading room at Columbus Printed Arts Center and dear fellow settler colonizer, a radio show on Verge.Fm. Minus Plato’s first book No Philosopher King: An Everyday Guide to Art and Life under Trump was published in 2020 by AC Books.
Rebecca Copper’s art practice incorporates socially engaged art, writing, film-photography, and time-based media. Rebecca is interested in experiential knowledge, how people are influenced in different mediated ways. She works through themes such as: phenomenology, ontology, intersectional/transnational feminist politics, US child-education, unlearning, and approaches of care. She is currently an MFA candidate in Portland State University’s Contemporary Art Practice: Art and Social Practice Program. Recently, she worked as a research assistant for the Art and Social Practice Archive which is housed within PSU’s special collections and finished a fellowship with the Columbus Printed Arts Center in Columbus, Ohio.