An Interactive Detour of the Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition (1909)

Alika Bourgette and Frances O’Shaughnessy’s project will provide an interactive detour and accompanying exhibit of the Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition (1909). Hosted at the present site of the University of Washington, the Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition placed colonized peoples on display in a public spectacle of agriculture, industry, and development. Through an online podcast and exhibit of the Exposition, this collaborative project seeks to reframe the Exposition as a performance of carcerality. By considering how colonized peoples on display viewed the viewer, the interactive detour hopes to engage participants in disembodiments from proprietary, alienating relations under the US Empire, so that ancestors and descendants may perform re-embodiments of loving and caring relations in a different world.