Matthew Buckingham
Muhheakantuck – Everything has a name, 2003

Artist
Matthew Buckingham

Title
Muhheakantuck – Everything has a name

Year of creation
2003

Technology and duration
16mm film installation, 40 minutes with sound

Year of acquisition
2005

Acquisition of the foundation

The film installation Muhheakantuck - Everything has a name is a poetic helicopter tour over the Hudson River that deals with the colonization of the area, the discovery and immigration and the simultaneous extinction of Indian culture. The descendants of the Hudson Valley's indigenous people, the Leni-Lenape, were one of the first cultures to be displaced by European colonizers. The approximately forty-year period in which the Leni-Lenape came into contact with the trading company Dutch West India Company is the historical background of the film. The pink-colored images interact with the text, which sounds from the off and contrasts different narrative styles and reflects historical narration. Based on the region's bloody colonization history, historiography and geographical cartography are juxtaposed as descriptive elements, but at the same time mixed, and the text thus raises questions that focus on the effect of a map on the viewer and the perception through the abstraction of mapping.

At the same time, Buckingham's allusive film makes the contrasts between social, collective and individual memory evident and addresses the process of attributing certain meanings to past events, which make memory appear as a very personal construct. The importance of perception and memory for defining the present usually goes unconsidered. The history of names and the representation of power through naming are other points of contact that Buckingham's work triggers, and the knowledge about the history of names seems to correspond with the images, so that the work is a journey in two respects - but a journey to places also on cultural history.