Gender & Space// Yuan-Chi Chang:Terra Nullius
Terra Nullius (lat. no one’s land) is an imaginative portrait of the mountainous area in Taiwan around the Spanish colonial period. The silhouette of nature in the painting resembles a feminine body, suggesting the fundamental correlation between patriarchal and colonial gazes and how they both reject the autonomy of the other in order to benefit themselves.
Inspired by Silvia Federici’s text Feminism and the Politics of the Commons, I delved into the history of land privatization and explored how early colonial documentation referred to indigenous land as Terra Nullius, thus justifying colonial extractionism.
The rhetoric of Terra Nullius and the enforcement of the idea of land possession gradually narrowed down the relationship between human and land. By only recognizing active and productive usage of land as land ownership, European colonizers erased the indigenous practice of rest and respect for the land which has been in place for centuries prior to their invasion.