Klingon Project
2016 - Ongoing
The Klingon Project explores my grandfather's 1993 translation of the Bible into Klingon and its basis in the North American Indigenous Language, Amah Mutsun. The project traces the development of the Klingon language and its foundation in Mutsun to unpack translation as a site of colonization. My grandfather's goal was to create a biblical text he believed could convert actual Klingon's to Christianity. The Amah Mutsun have almost no material history. Their primary artifact is the archived language. Mutsun was first translated in 1797 and used by Marc Okrand to create Klingon for Paramount in 1984. My project utilizes varied biological, historical, and linguistic archives to think through the specific mechanism of cultural erasure. This work is an attempt to make the invisible visible and recreate an imaged history from what remains. The project is dispersed through multiple works, the documentation of the endemic plant collection of the Amah Mutsun Arboretum, an experimental film, the publication of my grandfather’s biblical translation, and other works yet to come. I see each of these elements as part of a final, still unfinished, form.