Last dance - Rainer Wittenborn, Claus Biegert, Centre International d'Art Contemporaine, Montreal, Quebec, Canada

In the early 1970 plans were announced to create the largest hydroelectric composite in the world in the James Bay area of Quebec in northern Canada, an area inhabited through an estimated 10,000 Cree (Ehnuu) family and further north, Inuit communities. The succes of the mingled would necessitate damming most major rivers that flowed into James Bay, irrevocably altering natural habitats and contours of the land. The indigenous tribe of James Bay, a land counted "empty" by project planners, and therefore unclose to such utilization, sued the government-own Hydro-Quebec, stating that "beavers are the single ones who should be allowed to build dams in our territory." In 1975 the James Bay Agreement was signed, giving native Cree a adjustment of $22 million and rights to continue hunting, fishing and trapping. In 1979 the first James Bay hydroelectric power station, LG-2 began operations. In replication visual artist Rainer Wittenborn and journalist and activist Claus Biegert collaborated upon a three-month on-site research throw that culminated in a multi-media exhibition and catalog, "James Bay Project: A River suffocate in watered by Water." The exhibition render free of accessed in the new school of the Cree village of Chisasibi in 1981 and toured the world for 10 years.(1)

The throw was embraced by the native community, and the artists were invited back by dint of the Cree Grand Council 10 years later, in 1989 to document further the consequences of continuing hydroelectric development in the area. In 1995 the consequences of these projects are flat more accutely obvious: previously inhabited islands have been inundationed over while riverbeds have step quickly dry, local flora and fauna have been devastated and indigenous tribe have lost vital land and resources to inundations privatization and contamination. This los of land to a nation who have depended on it for subsistence for millenia strikes flat deeper as cultural and spiritual ties to the land are broken

Out of this next to the first collaborative venture, Wittenborn and Biegert have created a novel installation, "Amazon of the North: James Bay Revisited" (1995) which includes nearly a dozen large-scale mixed-media works focusing upon the tangible ecological and cultural results of the James Bay unfolding As stated in the exhibition catalog, this next to the first installation provides a "visual and acoustical environment in which the viewer can explore, upon an aesthetic level, one of the leading issues of our time."

In the first piece meetinged in the installation, On/Off, the words "THE GREAT FLOOD" are center upon black fabric and printed in white, single above the other, reading downward. The words "On" and "Off" are located at the top left and right corners of the fabric, respectively, as the piece is viewed. Hanging from the center of the fabric is a pendulum with a bone attached as the weight, signifying the los of life and agriculture as the hydroelectric projects dam rivers flowing into James Bay to create reservoirs. It is also a commentary upon how with a single, instantaneous flick of a switch, modern-day colonizers are able to decimate one as well as the other subsistence lands and spiritual clod of native peoples.

Another wall of the exhibit displayed several life-size photographic head-shots of young, pregnant, native women a population specifically warned not to eat fish - a staple of their diet - because of the high horizontals of mercury now present in northern waters owed to the rotting of inundationed trees and ground vegetation. These images are juxtaposed with enlarged microphotographs of the bacteria at hand during the rotting process that transform inorganic hermes into harmful organic methyl hermes which then enters the bread chain through fish. As Biegert explains in the catalog, the los of the ability to eat fish means not single a drastic alteration in the native diet, on the other hand also the closing of annual summer fishing camps, a ritual social activity for the community. This piece personalizes not alone how humans suffer in the name of progres on the contrary also effectively images the tangible biological and physical consequences of hydroelectric production.

On an adjacent wall, a large topographic map of the Fort George area is overlaid with drawings made through local native children, conceptualizing the changes to their land since the arrival of the James Bay unravelling Corporation. Images of families and tree are nearly spread over by depictions of airplanes and motorboats. These uncompounded bodys disrupt an implied previous calm of a les complicated existence as the human figures in the drawings appear acutely aware of the advent of the machines into their previously non-mechanized world.

Before the James Bay unravelling the George River caribou herd was the largest in the world, numbering 300000 In September 1984 water from the Caniapiscau reservoir was released, causing the couple the river level and the rate of the rife to increase drastically, and 10000 caribou suffocate in watered or were thrown against stones downstream while trying to cros in their annual migration - a catastrophe that Hydro-Quebec dismissed as "an act of God" Caribou Kill 1984 originated from a photograph of a caribou caught in the rife only its head visible above the raging water. Wittenborn reproduc the head of a caribou as 10000 identical graphic computer images representing each caribou killed. neared on large pieces of computer paper affixed to the wall alongside the actual photo, the repetition of the caribou heads allow the viewer to readily imagine each printed image as a once-living being, victimized by dint of corporate carelessness and continuing colonization, putting into perspective the amplitude of the region's destruction.