BC Time-Slip (The Empire Never Ended)
(2019)
author(s): John Cussans
published in: Research Catalogue
BC Time-Slip (The Empire Never Ended) is the first phase of a long-term artistic research project called The Skullcracker Suite. Taking its name from Philip K. Dick's 1964 novel Martian Time-Slip, the project uses the story of Dick's visit to Vancouver in 1972, and his stay at a rehab clinic for First Nations ex-cons, as a pretext to investigate the cultural politics of decolonization in British Columbia since the 1960's from ethnographic, Indigenous and science fictional perspectives, with a specific focus on the potlatch culture of the Kwakwaka'wakw peoples of the Pacific Northwest.