The dust at your edges

Close looking in backcountry locations tells a story of expansive resource extraction. I have spent the duration of my lifetime imbricated in systemic theft of land from humans, and of more-than-human bodies from land, participating in ecologies of excess. As a child I was indoctrinated into myths of wilderness, accessing locations far away from metropolitan centers on what are termed in the province of British Columbia as “Forest Service Roads.” These roads, spliced into the surface of forests and along mountainsides for industry access to extraction projects, have enabled access to some of my most joyous memories.

This photographic essay is a critical reflection on this contradictory experience of navigating backcountry locales whose access is dependent upon destruction in excess. Through an act of close looking at and being with the surface of land, the photographs are an entry point for me to textually reflect on the contradictory conditions inscribed onto land when examining backcountry recreation. I address my complicity and entanglements through the embodiment of dust in locations of immense clear cut logging practices that have dried up otherwise damp pacific northwestern forests.

The work delves specifically into the Eternal Fountain Recreation Site managed by BC Parks in partnership with Western Forest Products, located on the northern end of Vancouver Island on Kwakiutl First Nation territory. My photographic essay demonstrates the murkiness of sites legislatively termed “Recreation Sites:” pockets for backcountry recreation amidst expansive Crown land that has first been stolen from Indigenous nations, only to be leased for exploitative resource extraction. The place of the Eternal Fountain is home to a series of landforms known as karsts that result in disappearing streams flowing underneath the land’s surface, an apt metaphor both in name and form through which to address my complicity with exploitative land theft and resource extraction.

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Madalen Claire Benson is a PhD candidate in Visual Studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Benson’s research concerns land-based contemporary art practices; critical settler and Indigenous studies; the politics of land; liberalist legality and rights theory; extractive capitalism and environmental justice. With a Master of Arts in Art History, Theory and Criticism from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and a Bachelor of Arts, Honours in Art History and Philosophy from the University of Toronto, Benson is a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada Doctoral Fellowship recipient (2023-27). She has published in Visual Studies, Journal of Modern Craft, Environment, Space, Place, and Scroope: Cambridge Architectural Journal, and currently sits on the editorial board for Refract: An Open Access Visual Studies Journal. She is an organizer of the Climate Exchange Platform through the Sandberg Instituut at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie. In addition to her scholarly work, Benson is a writer and photographer who has a background in arts organizing having worked on projects such as the Skeena Salmon Arts Festival and Capture Photography Festival.