A vast collection of documents, surveys, maps, photographs, and films in the U.S. National Archives and Records Administration defines and codifies the territory of the United States. Produced and collected by the state, these materials have long played a role in constructing, reinforcing, and circulating a mythical image of U.S. American culture on a global scale. Among these holdings is a series of documentaries produced by the U.S. Department of the Interior in the 1950s that portray the transformational role of infrastructure in reshaping landscapes according to U.S. American values. Screened across the Global South during the Cold War as part of large-scale, U.S.-funded development initiatives, these films functioned as propaganda to advance an environmental imaginary of the modern landscape, while obscuring the impact on communities and setting aesthetic grounds for decades of enclosure, displacement, and dispossession that persist today.

American Remediation revisits this environmental imaginary by re-presenting a selection of these now-disintegrating films along the paths of their circulation and consequence: in Oaxaca, Mexico, where the films were once screened; and in Arizona, where Oaxacan workers now labour in the very fields mythologized in the original films. Through re-projecting, re-filming, and re-framing, the project generates new political meanings and new publics within the American landscape. What emerges is a territorial continuum—of an America beyond the U.S.-centric projected image—and a re-mediation of American identity through landscapes and their images.

Curator: Andy Lu Lee, 2024–2025 Emerging Curator

The CCA gratefully acknowledges the support of the Ministère de la Culture et des Communications du Québec, the Canada Council for the Arts, Conseil des arts de Montréal, Power Corporation of Canada, and the Architecture League of New York.