Christos Dikeakos’ artistic practice has played an important role in the development of conceptual photography in Vancouver since the late 1960s. His photographic series, Sites and Place Names was shot in Vancouver, Saskatoon, Athens, Thessaloniki, and Berlin, and considers the palimpsestic nature of memories, histories, and nomenclature within contemporary urban habitations.
Sites and Place Names Vancouver, 1990—2015, comprises a series of 43 large-format chromogenic prints, each picturing an overlooked or seemingly innocuous urban and/or industrial landscape from in and around British Columbia’s Lower Mainland. Each photograph is overlaid with floating texts stating the locations’ place names and important flora and fauna in hən̓q̓əmin̓əm̓, Sḵwx̱wú7mesh sníchim, and English, which the artist gathered over the course of extensive conversations with Indigenous colleagues, friends, and Elders.
With the seeming disjunction between the image and text, Dikeakos surfaces the violent erasures enacted upon these unceded Indigenous territories. The artist challenges the colonial viewpoint that these modern urban locations are non-Indigenous, emphasizing rich and intricate ecosystems, histories, and land use concealed within seemingly ordinary places. In so doing, the artist also critiques the presumed veracity of the photograph.