In this initiative, I sought companies (corporations) and organizations that held in their name a twisted pride on our colonial past in Canada. The companies closed down long ago, but the pride in their names expressed a perspective that has been collectively internalized. The plan for this project was to revive these company names and to give them some sunlight, so to speak. The plan was to make applications to Industry Canada (a federal agency) to legally revive these corporations – as a way to call back these company names to our collective consciousness. The intention is to instigate a reaction and a 'recalling' of a coloniality, which we continue to support today. To recall this names legally is important, in order to play out the symbolic value of the undertaking and underline the uneasiness inherent in recalling this precise aspects of our past/present.

I am submitting this initiative as an "unrealizable" artistic project, what follows some thoughts on the two stages planned for it.  First stage, for this work to be successful we would revive corporations such as:  

Coloinal Leasing of Canada, Amazonian Indian Development, Les Portes Colonial and Happy Indian. (info on each is attached).
This is not only a complicated legal matter, but a matter of taking the responsibility of any financial legal problems that the company had before closure, including outstanding liabilities or debt, resolving owner's disputes, and the authorization of the company's last president. The impossibility in this project begins in that the financial and legal responsibility inherent in reviving these corporations is simply unacceptable for anyone to take on. Paradoxically, in order to develop the project in a meaningful way – it seems necessary to assume a level of responsibility.

The second stage would have been consider the company names as if they were "empty factories" and to make them operate differently, to re-write their purpose and give them a new function. To invite anyone to become board of directors for these organizations enter the discussion of the future of the organization.  This exercise would have opened up the allegorical dimension of the corporations' names, underlining an awkward, yet normalized pride in our colonial past. For most people, colonization is an abstracted event that has past. That is not the case, various forms of coloniality exist around the globe in direct and indirect relation to nation’s pursuit of progress and economical development. Interestingly, the task of reviving these corporations, results as complex as the equivalent to addressing the problematic of contemporary forms of colonization and its relationship to the process of modernization of North America, in our case.

For more information please contact: Rodrigo Hernandez-Gomez rodrigohgz@gmail.com culturaldecenter.net rodrigohgz.wordpress.com