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thirst-days · 8 years ago

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Attuning

thirstDays No. 12 Ooooszchhhhhht t shuffle klopp shshhhchglugluglushh

It started with a single drum beat. The resonance of deer hide pulled taut around the circle, stretched across time so that each vibration opened another throat of the chorus.

What is spoken, sung or sounded here? How do these tones communicate? How do we perceive them?

I had arrived at VIVO early per the instructions of the organizers in order to spend some time with Alize Zorlutuna’s installation, a touchable distance (2017). The stone meditation space encompassed the entirety of the room, with bean bag chairs, blankets, benches, and configurations of rocks—lines, circles, the shape of an eye—spread about the space. I followed the instructions projected on one wall to carefully approach the stones, noticing them before selecting one to interact with. I returned to a bean bag with the rock I selected: smoothed by the water, round and off-white with dark grey specks. As directed, I placed the rock on parts of my body: my stomach, my clavicle, before opting to hold its cool weight in my hand. I tried closing my eyes and breathing but the awareness of other folks in the space brought me too close to distraction. I instead spent time gazing at Zorlutuna’s video work projected on a horizontal banner hung low in the space. Four scenes of horizons—two water and two land—were activated, one by one, by the artist’s finger tracing the horizon line. I felt the weight of the rock in my hand. I later learned that the videos were taken in British Columbia and in Turkey.

This work became a spatial and visual container for the remaining contributions of Ooooszchhhhhht t shuffle klopp shshhhchglugluglushh, curated by Elisa Ferrari and Stacey Ho. The second work, which I referred to at the outset of this text, became a sonic container, if only temporarily. Lindsay Dobbin’s Drum Voices (2015) literally surrounded the room in sound, bringing me into my body in a way unlike the rock I kept with me for the work’s duration. Whereas the rock’s weight in my palm made me aware of its presence as distinct from myself, the vibrations of sound washed across me, raising the hair on my neck as if someone was whispering in my ear. I think I was supposed to notice this. Zorlutuna and Dobbin’s works seamlessly meshed with one another as different registers of the same temporal experience.

“Sound may be invisible to the eye but because of air it is entirely present to place.” This is something written by Postcommodity and read by cheyanne turions during the Wood Land School symposium at Or Gallery in 2016. Zorlutuna and Dobbin’s works, acting in chorus, presenced places both near and far, ancient and future, making them tangible in sight, touch and sound.

Later in the evening, Zorlutuna took a pair of scissors and cut along the horizon line of each scene so that the projected images of land and water were thrown onto the wall behind the screen, leaving the sky and fragments of the horizon behind. She took the sheared fabric and cut it into strips before beginning to move about the room, selecting rocks and wrapping them in the cloth strips. She then tied these rock bundles to members of the audience in an act that physically collapsed distance between these bodies and conceptually collapsed the distance between the sites previously projected onto the screen with the space at VIVO. Later in the evening I saw some of these stones scattered on the floor throughout the venue.

During this time, and even before, something else was happening. A woman pulled a long white sheet of paper tightly over her face, folding it around the back of her head. Bending her knees, she began to encase herself in it until she was fully contained in this shell. A beat, and then she rose, turned off the camera and motioned for those gathered around to follow her into the washroom. Six or seven of us squished into the space. She set up the shot, camera pointed at the mirror, and then wrote the following on a small whiteboard:

‘Leticia Parente Preparação I, 1975’1

She held that sign up to the camera for a long moment before proceeding. She placed masking tape over her lips and then drew on a new set of lips in red pencil. Then she taped over her eyes, one at a time, and drew a new eye. One eye was drawn better than the other because the second eye was drawn blind.

Guadalupe Martinez, the performer of Triangulation of Desire / Return to the Pleasurable (A032, A061, A097) (2017), moved between these actions and VIVO’s archive for the duration of the event. The performances re-enacted works by a group of intergenerational South American women artists—the first reenactment mentioned was by Carla Chaim, Volumes (2014) along with subsequent reenactments of performances by Ana Mendieta (1972), María Teresa Hincapié (1991), Lygia Clark (1973), Yanni and Nan (1983), Marie Orensanz (1978), and Regina José Galindo (2003).

Martinez staged the performances as closely as possible to the original for the camera, and for the archive. A live streamed video showed the view down one aisle of the Crista Dahl Media Library and Archive, installed on a screen outside of the centre’s offices. The audience could variously watch the screen or look through the archive’s windows to see Martinez preparing bright red folders with letter stickers, which she then inserted into the archive. At one point she held a folder up to the camera that bore the words ‘WHERE IS ANA MENDIETA / DÓNDE ESTÁ ANA MENDIETA’. This folder was inserted into the archive according to the year of the artist’s death. The folders, containing information about the artists as well as the video documentation will remain in the archive. The work performed another act of mapping both connection and distance: of influence, absence, affect, and the affinities between the performances themselves.

Another act of insertion in performance was enacted by Lee Ann Brown and Sonnet L’Abbé’s : SONS : SONNET : SONG : SONIC, described by the artists as a “colonization of text” — an erasure through crowding so that

That time of year thou mayst in me behold When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang Upon those boughs which shake against the cold2

becomes

Tradition has it sonnets’ aims are to glorify love, and lovers. Then how must my forays into these lines make us beholden? When I originally conceptualized this colonization, Will’s leavings were just source, just canon fodder for my fearlessness. My war-like, dominant hankering set upon those poems’ boughs a weight, inch by inch, to reshape and fork their meaning for my gain.3

In song accompanied by guitar or recitation, Brown and L’Abbé explore and expand the sonnet form, responding to Shakespeare's depiction of flowery love or, as in the above example, using the sonnet to reflect upon the process and implications of “colonizing” text. The presentation took up the sonnet as a sonic experience that acts differently upon us that reading text.

Margrethe Pettersen’s sound work, Living Land—Below as Above (2015), more directly inhabited the sonic as a multivalent site of possibility. The work was originally presented as a sound walk on a frozen lake in Northern Norway, commissioned by Arctic Encounters & Dark Ecology, produced and curated by Hilde Methi & Sonic Acts. Stories of snow in both English and Sami—a language that has hundreds of words for this thing, this concept, this being—spoke to a broad realm of existence beyond the human. Spirits that regulate the relation between humans and the local environment. A water plant that conserves energy on cold days by sinking to the lake bottom. Instances of slippery transition between worlds that materialize value and time differently than that experienced in the ubiquity of individualist capitalism. “...flesh becomes action, not because it is material but because it must do so for ears to remain open and low to the ground. Only if the land decides to stop speaking to us will be enter the world of dislocation.”4 I thought of the single drum beat at the outset of the program, and remembered walking on the land in the winter in the prairies, snow crunching under foot. How do these tones communicate? How do we perceive them?

Katherine Kline’s live sound performance similarly foregrounded perception through sound in the use of field recordings of sessions with psychic mediums. Loud and often grating, looping electronic static was perforated with a woman’s voice speaking in soothing, sometimes monotone, tones. Mostly inaudible, the voice offered tantalizing if ephemeral suggestions of communication with a world beyond. The performance’s title, Alpha Particles (2017), refers to the process of radioactive decay when an atom releases a particle (the alpha particle) whose charge and mass attract them to interacting with matter, though they cannot penetrate the body or travel more than a few centimetres in the air. This seems an apt parallel for communicating with non-physical energies through seances and mediums. In fact, radiation detectors as well as sound recorders are often used when “hunting” ghosts.

Kristin Tårnes’ short video, (over)tro (2016), focused on The Eastern Sami Museum in Neiden in the North of Norway. Built in 2009, the museum has not yet opened due to ongoing problems with the building, which have been attributed by some to a trespass of the spirits under the soil by not asking permission to build there. This trespass, this haunting, are debated and in some ways dependent on the perception of the person speaking—I am recalling of a recent conversation I had with Stó:lō scholar Dylan Robinson, who reminded me that perception is not simply a matter of choice. It is dependent on where we are born, the context in which we come into selfhood. We also all exist within a settler colonial perception, at least in the context of North America though undoubtedly this is experienced in similar ways by Indigenous peoples globally. The ongoing problems with the building, the mundane horror of a potentially unsafe or unstable site, similarly reminded me of Eve Tuck and C. Ree’s writing on haunting as “the relentless remembering and reminding that will not be appeased by settler society’s assurances of innocence and reconciliation.”5 Tårnes’ work speaks to these incompatibilities and to the potential agency located in haunting.

The final two works of the final thirstDays program took a decisive turn away from possible hauntings, highlighting the acoustic environment as a site of connection and creativity. The short and sweet work by Tuy’t’tanat Cease Wyss with daughter Senaqwila Wyss and granddaughter Kamaya Anne Cecilia Leo built upon a collaboration between the elder Wyss and Ursula Johnson for the #callresponse project, which I co-organized at grunt gallery in 2016. The initial song was created by by drawing a line on a topographical map from the customary land territory of the local Indigenous peoples—in this case, of the Musqueam, Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh First Nations—to the site of the performance in the urban centre, from which a score is developed. Wyss, Johnson and their collaborator Cassandra Smith performed the song over two hours in a small park behind the gallery, singing back to the land that engendered the work.

For the presentation at VIVO, Wyss and her daughter re-recorded the song together, which names three pollinators: the hummingbird, butterfly and bee. Added to the composition was the ultrasound recording of baby Kamaya’s heartbeat in utero (the first drum beat), her laughter and vocables, as well as sounds from nature: bird song, wind, water. The multiple generations of this family, giving and caring for life, parallel the pollinators’ propagation of life. The work honours this.

Another intergenerational collaboration, Hildegard Westerkamp’s Once Upon a Time (2012) included the voices of her daughter—recorded when she was a young girl—alongside her two grandsons—recorded many years later. This layered fairytale or bed time story told of a girl who loved to sing, her voice pure and true and sweet. A sorcerer, envious of her voice, placed a curse upon the girl so that when she came of age, her voice was lost. The sorcerer returned, disguised, with the gift of a music machine that made the girl forget her sadness at the loss of her voice. So powerful was the machine that its music slowly transformed the entire village, causing people to consume more than they needed, and to work when they were dead tired. They forgot that they could make their own music and that every place has its own sound. They became real zombies. With smiles painted on their faces they observed the world through dead eyes.

One day, a big bird landed on the lake near the village and began to sing a strangely beautiful song. Slowly, the cry and laughter of the loon began to pierce through the music. The villagers fell into a restful sleep and when they awoke, they spoke to one another of their dreams and lives, and listened intently. A woman awoke and remembered that she could sing. The spell was broken. As intent listeners in VIVO, we were lulled by the song of the loon that comprised an extended conclusion of the work. We were wrapped in sound that is often lost in our urban environment.

What stirs within us when the loon cries or when we hear the laughter of a child? What are we awakened to when the snow crunches under foot or when the mallet strikes hide? The final thirstDays attuned us to these sounds as a way to reach beyond ourselves, to transgress our permeable boundaries, to leak into another space. Insertions into archives and histories give presence where there is absence, and map new terrains of connective tissue. Sound vibrations carry story and communicate that which is beyond words, a shared experience of the greater world around us and within us.

Notes 1. The original performance for video by Parente can be viewed here: https://vimeo.com/119148500. 2. William Shakespeare, Sonnet LXXIII 3. Sonnet L’Abbé, “Colonized Sonnets” 4. Margrethe Pettersen, Living Land—Below as Above (2015) 5. Eve Tuck and C. Ree, “A Glossary of Haunting,” in Handbook of Autoethnography, Eds. Stacey Holman Jones, Tony E. Adams, and Carolyn Ellis, 639–658 (Left Coast Press: 2013).

Tarah Hogue is a curator and writer of Dutch, French and Métis ancestry originally from the Prairies. She is Curator with grunt gallery since 2014 and was the 2016 Audain Aboriginal Curatorial Fellow with the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria. She is currently working on #callresponse with Maria Hupfield and Tania Willard along with invited artists Christi Belcourt, Ursula Johnson, and Laakkuluk Williamson-Bathory. She recently curated Unsettled Sites, a group exhibition with Marian Penner Bancroft, Wanda Nanibush and Tania Willard at SFU Gallery. In 2009 she co-founded the Gam Gallery. She has written texts for Canadian Art, Decoy Magazine, Inuit Art Quarterly, MICE Magazine, and others.

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thirst-days · 8 years ago

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vimeo

from thirstDays No.12 | ooooszchh...

Video by Felix Oltean

#video documentation

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thirst-days · 8 years ago

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Photos by Alisha Weng

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thirst-days · 8 years ago

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Ooooszchhhhhht t shuffle klopp shshhhchglugluglushh

THURSDAY JANUARY 26 7.30pm

Curated by Elisa Ferrari + Stacey Ho Featuring/works by Lee Ann Brown, Lindsay Dobbin, Katherine Kline, Britt Kramvig, Sonnet L'Abbé, Guadalupe Martinez, Margrethe Petersen, Jayce Salloum, Kristin Tårnes, Hildergard Westerkamp, T’uy’t’tanat-Cease Wyss, Alize Zorlutuna

I sit in the sun on the balcony. It is 11 am, Saturday January 14, 2017. I have texted you to indicate that our sonic meditation is starting now.

I step out and the stubborn ticking coming from the round clock hanging on my kitchen wall gradually fades out. In my left ear are the sounds produced by a flock of sparrows moving east. In my right ear is the hiss of the water moving through the building’s pipes and the 60hz tone produced by the electrical poles on the sidewalk. If I focus on my breath it is easier to isolate one sound at a time and follow each sound for as long as possible. I notice that my ability to reproduce the pitch of the sound source differs according to the source. It is easier to reproduce vocally the pitch of industrial sounds (the rumble of car engines racing by, a helicopter’s hovering, or the tone produced by train horns echoed on the walls of the south buildings uphill) than it is to voice the frequencies produced by animals or the cracking of ice as strollers and passersby walk on Vancouver’s unusually frozen sidewalks. The steps, the birds (including the crows and woodpecker I heard once a long time ago playing with the barbecue’s metal lid that no longer sits there)—these are the sounds that I can sustain mentally.

The longer I sit, the closer I come to various quotidian sound sources around me: I can extend them and stretch myself out while my constructed sense of (mechanical) time looses reliability. I can mentally follow the bikers’ routes, the sparrows’ movements in the sky, or the stuttering voice of the neighbour on their home line. I can do so even when these sounds are no longer within my sphere of audibility. Time is cyclical, plural, intergenerational. I can play with temporality, it becomes flexible, so that there is less separation between them and us—you and me. Between me and the cat sitting next to me or the leafless tree ahead.

Everything is made of air, of particles floating, moving, and colliding. The sound of air is a low bass note that rattles the diaphragm. It’s the feeling of a rough hand rubbing a rough table. The oscillation of a fan in a ventilation shaft. The trickle of water. As our airs merge they produce a combination tone which hovers above all movement and seems to emit both from the space of the room and from the body. Air circulates through these spaces. Inhale, inhale the hummmmmmm, it tickles the brain. Cool vibration. Body buzz. I might be mechanical. Funky yet functional. To breathe in is to listen. To breath out… air meets air taps at the acoustics of earth, plaster, wood, invisible conduits. We circle into each other, tone upon tone. Can sound be a convection? Biofeedback—a whistle quietly sounded through the gaps between the teeth. Something like the shape of a scream, barely articulated at the back of the throat. Frequency intensifies, the resistance of metal on metal sings out for a moment. It’s the same sad tone of longing that you might also hear from an erwu, a mosquito, or a violin.

ooooszchhhhhht t shuffle klopp shshhhchglugluglushh began as a consideration of affinities outside of the human realm, between plants and animals, objects and machines. However, this initial concept soon took on the shape of our conversations and shared interests—subjects such as walking, wandering, and listening. Writing on Margrethe Pettersen’s work Living Land—Below As Above, Britt Kramvig challenges the division of entities into nature and culture, rooting our need for holistic environmental awareness in Sami ontology. She writes “our ears have become dull to the sounds of the land speaking through our feet, it is now incumbent upon us to remember.” This statement resonates powerfully with the artworks presented in this program, not only through practices of deep listening but also in poetic and performance art practices that are invested in healing the fraught relationship between the land and the body.

~ Elisa Ferrari + Stacey Ho

Jan 24-27 (11am-6pm) | Jayce Salloum’s new work untitled part 8: esquina caliente will be presented in the microcinema.

STACEY HO is an artist, writer, and curator living on unceded Coast Salish territories. Her practice considers intersections of culture, history, and embodied experience from a feminist perspective. With a background in photography and performance art, her art often incorporates language, sound, gesture, and everyday objects. She has recently presented her work at Art Metropole (Toronto), Galerie oqbo (Berlin), and RAM Galleri (Oslo). She will be part of Dar’a, a group exhibition about circles curated by Jamelie Hassan at Artcite (Windsor), in March 2017 and is presently working on a novel about plants and robots.

ELISA FERRARI is an artist and curator living on unceded Coast Salish territories. Her practice aims to uncover disparities between historical documentation and experience, and frequently asks how everyday activities become articulated tactics that might enable critiques of institutional power. She works with archival fragments of text, image, and videography to consider the act and implications of retrieval, in projects that manifest through installation, performance, sound, and photography. Since 2013 she has served as Events and Exhibitions Coordinator/Curator at VIVO Media Arts Centre and as member of the Crista Dahl Media Library and Archive Committee.

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thirst-days · 8 years ago

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Nasi goreng with hot dogs

thirstDays No. 11 Eat Rice Yet?

When I was a kid I was allergic to wheat and dairy. In those days, words like “gluten free” were definitely not found on all manner of food packaging or in a dedicated section of the grocery store like they are now. Being a kid, my fondness of vegetables was also limited. So I ate a lot of meat and I happened to absolutely love it. Every Halloween my Opa would give me a dried sausage that I would savour for weeks, taking it out of the fridge every day and delicately nibbling away at it. In any case, my mother had her work cut out for her when it came to getting vegetables in my mouth — even more so because dinner time was my bad temper’s golden hour.

One solution whose flavour has stuck on my tongue was nasi goreng, or “fried rice.” Being from a Dutch family on my mother’s side, Indonesian food was common, a lasting connection to the Netherland’s colonial ties with that country. An amalgam of leftovers with fried rice wrapped in a warm smoky flavour, the nasi goreng of my childhood involved cut pieces of hot dog and frozen peas. I would help my mother or watch as she moved the rice around our heavy yellow wok. Red flecks of chilli. Bright and happy green peas. A bubbling pot of wieners. My mother humming, singing and whistling as she moves about the house, opening the windows to air the smell from the kitchen.

As an adult I introduced nasi goreng to the man who is now my husband, though without the hot dogs and with a great deal more sambal, a chilli sauce that I always have on hand in our house.

Eat Rice Yet? curated by Henry Tsang and Diyan Achjadi, was tightly organized around the smells, tastes, sights and memories of food and drink. The experience of food, of sharing a meal, which has been present to varying degrees in all of the thirstDays events, was here given its full due, allowing the cross-cultural, familial, political, and spiritual nature of food to come to fruition—a rich and complex broth simmering under attentive eyes. I kept thinking about the entirety of the event as a recipe in itself, with all the flavours of sake, horchata and kimbap enriched and accented by the presentation of video, story and song. The star, of course, was rice, taking centre stage with humble grace and gravity as a meal in itself, a side dish, a carrier of delicious sauces, a container for fish and vegetables, full of potential. Each presentation of the evening enriched the appreciation of rice in itself and illuminated profound connections and separations between us. Rice was an active agent within this, a proposition for new understandings.

Michael Rakowitz’s Dar Al Sulh (Domain of Conciliation) (2013) began the evening with the words, “You know it really is a pity how we treat each other now. I know you can’t forgive me but forgive me anyhow?”1 A video document of the restaurant project that operated in Dubai for one week and served Iraqi-Jewish cuisine, Dar Al Sulh refers to a legal territory or domain in which an agreement between Muslims and non-Muslims ensures the freedom of religion, autonomy and protection for all. The project stems from Rakowitz’s ongoing Enemy Kitchen (2003-) where he teaches participants to cook recipes compiled with his Iraqi-Jewish mother, creating the conditions for a discussion of Iraqi culture in America that moves beyond media portrayals. Similarly, Dar Al Sulh presents possibilities for the representation and interaction of Iraqi and Jewish culture in the wake of Jewish exodus from Arab lands in the 1940s. Serving platters sourced from antiques dealers in Israel that survived the journey of the Iraqi Jews out of Iraq, parallel the preciousness of the cuisine served as both the recipes themselves and the Iraqi Jewish Arabic language are under threat of being lost. “You are eating a dying language from the plate of a ghost,” words adorning the window of the restaurant, remind visitors of the implications of the experience they are having despite the conviviality of it all.

Following the screening, Meeru Dhalwala, co-owner of Vij’s and Rangoli in Vancouver, gave a talk—”A Grain of Rice, a Pot of Rice”—about opening a restaurant in Seattle: Shanik. She attracted female staff who were immigrants and refugees from India, Ethiopia and Eritrea by visiting convenience stores and Walmarts and “greeting people who looked Indian,” advertising a safe place for women to work. What was immediately evident in Dhalwala’s talk was a sense of humour and honesty that comes from the practical realities of running a kitchen. She described the restaurant as a “cultural mess,” divided along ethnic lines with caucasian front-of-house staff, Indian cook staff, and Ethiopian and Eritrean cleaning staff. In rapid fire she discussed the many differences that kept these women separated: not speaking the same language, differences in religious beliefs, and dietary practices.

It was a slow and difficult process to bring these women together. The cuisines of their home countries share some common spices, so they learned the names of these in each other’s languages to break down barriers in communication. It wasn’t enough. One day, however, Dhalwala was cooking a simple rice pilaf with basmati, red bell peppers, yellow bell peppers, turmeric, cilantro, jalapeño, and toasted cumin. It was a meal that everyone in the kitchen could eat, and they enjoyed it so much that they began to sharing it around the same table, even enticing the front of house staff to join in. The conditions for conversation were set and the kitchen staff had an unexpected (at least for the audience, perhaps) moment of bonding when Dhalwala casually asked one of the staff, who was Eritrean, if she would be interested in Oguz Istif, Dhalwala’s partner in the restaurant. This sent the entire kitchen staff into a disapproving frenzy because of Istif’s Muslim heritage. Dhalwala’s frankness about this experience of bonding over a shared discrimination against another had the audience laughing together. It was totally unidealized, stemming from long seated prejudices as well as the continued conditions of separation experienced by many immigrants and refugees in the United States as well as Canada. Despite this, their distance was lessened in the simple act of sharing rice. As she spoke, we were fed small cups of rice from Vij’s and shared in the retelling of this story.

First Intermission: I drink a cup of sake and eat kimbap, a Korean seaweed rice roll (or three).

The second act began with a meditative video work by Chee Wang Ng, 108 Global Rice Bowl (2008). The object of meditation is a rotation of white rice in white bowls, varied in shape and size, and shot against a cool grey background. A pair of pine-coloured chopsticks are laid in front, creating a diagonal line that moves off to the right of the screen. The composition is carefully considered. Each well rounded mound of rice is proportionate to its vessel. With each new bowl of rice, a chime sounds—similarly varied in its tone and pitch—and a different country is inserted into the phrase “Made in _____.” China and Japan make multiple appearances along with Canada, Thailand, Vietnam, France and many others. The 108 tones correspond to the number of beads in a Buddhist rosary, aligning the path to enlightenment, or the repetition of a powerful mantra, with the simple grace of rice. The connectivity between places of vast geographical distance is also brought to bare in the repetition of this similar image and object of contemplation, speaking to the movement of bodies and goods that transcend borders.

The video brought the audience to quiet attention and, at least for me, back into my sensing body. Fred Wah’s reading then promptly whisked me away again, and the distinction between the simplicity of Wang Ng’s video and the complex and vivid imagery of Wah’s stories (and the attendant differences between watching and listening) deeply enriched the experience of both works. Wah read from Diamond Grill (1996), a semi-fictional biography about growing up in his father’s restaurant in Nelson, as well as reading some newer material. I have never read Wah’s work before and was enraptured by his descriptions that brought memory and taste so close together that the two became indistinguishable. The selections were part recipe, part biography, observing the life of the town as much as the way the hand remembers the rhythm of cooking, rhythm that Wah brought to life again in words. The final note I wrote while listening to Wah was “the palpable flavour of words.”

I sat that with over the second intermission where I tried a different kind of sake and shared a cigarette in the cold December night.

As I came back in and got another cup of sake, Vanessa Richards took the stage. A Dark Welcome Table: Songs for Grace in Action was a multimedia and layered narrative told primarily from the perspective of a young black girl of Jamaican descent living in Vancouver in the era of the Vietnam War. It was a story about wrong names: about grapes and raisins and techniques for eating rice pudding; about being chased home from school by a white kid who kicked and spit on her door; about Phillis, the young Squamish “Indian” girl, and the story of the two sisters, the mountain peaks that are called Lions even though the narrator thinks they look more like tiger ears. This was the same story told by Mohawk writer E. Pauline Johnson in Legends of Vancouver (1911)2 but inflected with the energy of a shared tale between two young friends. As Phillis explained, the Squamish “let the Haida know they weren’t mad anymore,” allowing peace to come between the two great nations, which led to the creator placing the sisters on the highest mountain range at the end of their life so that we could continue to look upon them and feel peaceful. Richards broke out into song: “heartbeat, it’s a love beat.”3

She told us about an older boy, Adam, who looked like Muhammad Ali. “No Viet Cong ever called me a nigger.” She thought that Adam might knock out that white boy just like Ali, and wondered if Adam and Ali could stop the big war. A video a Ali is projected on the wall: “I’m gunna float like a butterfly and sting like a bee. George can’t hit what his hands can’t see!”4

Finally, Richards was joined by Anna Baignoche on guitar and they sang “Children of Darkness” by Richard & Mimi Fariña (1965), standing in front of a wall drawing of the two sisters, their peaks simply outlined in black with a few m-shaped birds flying in the sky. “Now is a time for your loving dear, and a time for your company. … And now in this age of confusion, I have need for rice pudding!”

Following this enrapturing performance, Hank Williams’ “Jambalaya (On the Bayou)” came on—which is my favourite Williams’ tune—and we all gathered around a table of rice dishes: Nasi Uduk with sweet coconut, Nasi Kuning with savoury turmeric. I drank a final cup of sake, this time from the Fraser Valley where the fertile soil supports rice agriculture, and talked with Henry about my memories of eating Nasi Goreng. I left buzzing on sake and the deep warmth that the sharing of food threads throughout all of history.

Notes 1. Leonard Cohen, “Anyhow,” Old Ideas, 2012. 2. http://digital.library.upenn.edu/women/johnson/vancouver/vancouver-01.html 3. “Heartbeat, it’s a Lovebeat,” The DeFranco Family, 1973. 4. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HXzQqqn-rVc

Tarah Hogue is a curator and writer of Dutch, French and Métis ancestry originally from the Prairies. She is Curator with grunt gallery since 2014 and is the 2016 Audain Aboriginal Curatorial Fellow with the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria. She is currently working on #callresponse with Maria Hupfield and Tania Willard along with invited artists Christi Belcourt, Ursula Johnson, and Laakkuluk Williamson-Bathory. She recently curated Unsettled Sites, a group exhibition with Marian Penner Bancroft, Wanda Nanibush and Tania Willard at SFU Gallery. In 2009 she co-founded the Gam Gallery. She has written texts for Canadian Art, Decoy Magazine, Inuit Art Quarterly, MICE Magazine, and others.

#response

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thirst-days · 8 years ago

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vimeo

from thirstDays No.11 | Eat Rice Yet?

Video by Felix Oltean

#video documentation

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thirst-days · 8 years ago

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Photos by Alisha Weng

#photo documentation

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thirst-days · 9 years ago

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Eat Rice Yet?

THURSDAY DECEMBER 15 7.30pm Curated by Henry Tsang + Diyan Achjadi

Featuring/works by Fred Wah, Meeru Dhalwala, Vanessa Richards, Michael Rakowitz, Chee Wang Ng 吳子雲

Gathering around food offers the potential of a communal experience, providing a physical bridge towards building real, corporeal community. Shared experiences create space for conversation that allows for both a sense of mutual understanding as well as an articulation of differences. Our program of words, music and food will address the struggle towards generosity and openness in an attempt to provide different ways of nourishment.

Our title, Eat RIce Yet?, is the ubiquitous, pedestrian way of greeting one another in Chinese culture. One asks how you are by inquiring whether you are hungry, whether you have been fed; because if you have not, then we need to be concerned. That rice represents food is emblematic of its role in Chinese cuisine, culture and identity, as it is with over half of the world’s population that considers this ancient grain their staple, their visceral base, their place of comfort and satisfaction.

Over 2.5 billion people live in rice-based societies, many of them in Asia. There are ongoing tensions between increasing population density impacting the access to arable land, as well as the ramifications of contemporary rice cultivation on the environment. Rice requires incredibly heavy water usage: approximately 5000 liters of water are needed to produce a single kilogram of rice. The current and ongoing rhetoric of food security has resulted in major shifts towards genetically modified rice and industrial farming over heirloom grains and traditional cultivation methods. For this evening, we are using rice as a metaphor as a way to consider our relationships with each other, and our relationship to the land.

~ Henry Tsang + Diyan Achjadi

Note: *statistics from http://www.asiarice.org/

DIYAN ACHJADI was born in Jakarta, Indonesia to a West-Javanese father and English-Canadian mother. Her work examines historical prints and surface ornamentation, tracing narratives of cross-cultural imaginings, influences and contaminations, retranslating and reinterpreting them through drawing, printmaking and animation. Diyan is an Associate Professor at Emily Carr University of Art and Design.

HENRY TSANG is a visual and media artist and occasional curator based in Vancouver. His artworks incorporate digital media, video, photography, language and sculptural elements that follow the relationship between the public, community and identity through global flows of people, culture and capital. Projects include Maraya, an eight-year collaboration that investigates the reappearance of Vancouver’s False Creek in Dubai as the Dubai Marina; Orange County, and Olympus, shot in California, Beijing, Torino and Vancouver, exploring overlapping urban and socio-political spaces; and Welcome to the Land of Light, a public artwork along Vancouver’s seawall that underscores Chinook Jargon, a 19th Century local trade language, and the English that replaced it. Henry is an Associate Professor at Emily Carr University of Art & Design.

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thirst-days · 9 years ago

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How to make a mirror shield

Hands Across the Sky ايادي عبر السماء, co-curated by Cathy Busby and Dima Alansari was the most modest program in the thirstDays series to date in terms of the number of works presented, which included a collaborative performance by Busby and Charlene Vickers, a work-in-progress video excerpt by Alansari and Eric Sanderson, and a video poem by Alansari and Dima Mikhayel Matta. The focused selection afforded time for discussion following the presentations and an intermission where Palestinian food from Tamam restaurant was served.

The program connected the cities of Beirut and Vancouver, cities which are themselves active agents — something that has become evident in the arc of thirstDays generally and within the works presented in the tenth event specifically. Each city has its specific histories of place, of violence, conflict, confrontation as well as of resistance, struggle, love and compassion, and the everyday, lived quality of these experiences. The city both amplifies and buries these experiences in the layout of its streets, its sites of gathering, its natural and landscaped environment, its architecture, its economics and demographics. The combination of works in the program thought through the distance and nearness of these two centres, their situatedness within global geopolitics, and how we can regard one another in our similarities and difference across time and space.

As with many of the previous thirstDays events but following especially from the preceding event1 featuring interviews with women water protectors from around the globe, Hands Across the Sky posed possibilities for the role of art in forging connection, expressing trauma or resistance, and as a catalyst for action. Cathy Busby and Charlene Vickers’ performance drew a direct thread with the previous thirstDays as the artists called out to the audience: “Stand land protectors!” “Stand water protectors!” Their voices were literally amplified in what was a largely sonic performance, using cardboard cones painted bright orange-red and variously adorned with gold paint or fringe, as well as a sound station with mics, vocal modulators and sample pads. They handed out blankets and homemade shakers to the audience in an effort to catalyze bodies through direct participation. Although of a convivial and celebratory spirit, it raised questions as to the efficacy or connection of participatory performance with activist strategies of resistance.

I was immediately reminded of the mirror shields created by artist Cannupa Hanska Luger (who was born in Standing Rock) to protect people on the front line and force the aggressive security forces to face the violence they were inflicting on peaceful water protectors. Art, or the processes of art, can both act as a buffer or shield as well as a tool of amplification. In reflecting on the performance the day after the announcement that the proposed route for the Dakota Access Pipeline was rejected by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, the celebratory tone of Busby and Vickers’ performance takes on a new light. As if calling to the water protectors in that place—as well as to those fighting against Site C, the Transmountain, LNG and other major resource extraction projects—their call was heard and responded to in a moment that will sound and resound throughout time.

Reem’s Story (2016), filmed and edited by Alansari and Eric Sanderson, is an intimate portrait of a teenage girl’s struggle to learn English and her responsibility of caring for her family. Reem’s family lives in the stables owned by Ali Sabri Hamadeh in the Bekka Valley of Lebanon after fleeing from Syria. Instead of portraying the family as refugees—a label that is applied to people, not one that is self-imposed—the film (which is still in progress) focuses on the emotional experience of this young woman. Each of the children in Reem’s family: Hamida, 10; Ruukayu, 5; Rukka, 6; and Reem (there is also a baby brother) give short interviews about their interests. They all love their parents, siblings and school. Hamida, the middle child, loves to write and learn. She loves art and travel. Rukka also loves school as well as “the airplane” and “the camera.” Ruukayu sings to the camera, “Mama got a baby.” Similarly, when Reem gives her first interview she stands tall and straight in front of the camera. Her longsleeved red shirt beneath her zebra-print tunic matches the door of their house. A rusty coloured chicken darts across the sunbleached ground behind her. “I came from Syria to Lebanon and so things were different here in Lebanon but in the end I learned that it was beautiful, trees and all.”

As the film progresses, Reem opens up more about her struggles with school. She gives a tearful account of failing her class and the pain it causes her. She speaks about the prejudice against Syrians in the classroom and being told that because she doesn’t know English, she won’t pass. Despite this, Reem hides her feelings from her parents with a sense of duty that one might be tempted to say is ‘far beyond her years’ but that would be paternalistic and I don’t want to level that at such a remarkable, strong and self reflective young person. She cites that “The same problems happen with all the people in the world and their families.” Reem supports and encourages her younger sisters to study hard, and sees promise for them in a good education. In one striking moment earlier in the film, Reem says that she is ‘becoming home,’ which is a difficult thing for my western educated ears to hear. I would rather, however, also see promise for Reem’s future and take confidence in her wisdom that she “can find another road” that will prevail.

Finally, filmed on the rooftops of Beirut, Mikayel Matta’s poem to Beirut, “Water my Memories so that they Grow,” is a painful and passionate expression of her relationship with the city. This is a relationship imprinted at birth, as a “birthmark, the speech shaped island on my thigh.” The city brings Dima into being as it violently marks her and her family: “What came with you Beirut? Bullets before my mother’s milk. An uncle kidnapped, killed. Bullets and no more milk from my mother.” An image of ill fated lovers pervades the poem (“It hurts to touch you, Beirut”), of two bodies traumatized and holding one another in fear, grief, necessity and an often self destructive love. Dima asks the city to heal and offers herself to it: “I will ignore the passers by. They don’t know you like I know you, Beirut. … Heal, Beirut. I am here.” She releases balloons with words from her love poem into the sky. “You and I it’s a love story for the books. I spill into you but you fill me, you fill me, you fill me.” As the video ended a cluster of balloons was released in VIVO, poetically reaching across the sky to join Vancouver and Beirut in its own form of relation.

Notes 1.Video documentation at: https://vimeo.com/191095562

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thirst-days · 9 years ago

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vimeo

from thirstDays No.10 | Hands Across the Sky ايادي عبر السماء

Video by Felix Oltean

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thirst-days · 9 years ago

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Photos by Alisha Weng

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thirst-days · 9 years ago

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Hands Across the Sky ايادي عبر السماء

THURSDAY NOVEMBER 24 7.30pm Curated by Dima Alansari + Cathy Busby

Featuring/works by Dima Alansari, Cathy Busby, Dima Mikhayel Matta, Eric Sanderson, Charlene Vickers

As in the previous thirstDays program, dying of thirst, we feel there is an urgency to what we’re doing, as women, artists and activists.

Performance, sound, film, spoken word, and hospitality will be our means as we delve into expressions of trauma, remembering and healing our embodied selves across our various cultural backgrounds. We think of trauma both personally and politically. thirstDays with its thematic of love, intimacy and (com)passion in a geo-political context motivates us in this exploration with Cathy Busby in Vancouver and Dima Alansari in Beirut.

Jayce invited Cathy and Dima to work together – we’d never met, but started meeting and talking over tea. Then earlier this year Dima unexpectedly had to move from Vancouver back to her home in Lebanon. Syrian refugees were desperately streaming into the country and for thirstDays, Dima wanted to highlight one outcome of this mass migration – the loss of education, with its particularly devastating consequences for girls.

Meanwhile, Cathy saw a compelling site-specific performance where Anishinaabe artists Charlene Vickers and Maria Hupfield performed with props, sound and body movement in the midst of the Lalakenis exhibition (Belkin Gallery, March 2016). Later she saw Charlene perform with musician, Chad MacQuarrie at Griffin Art Projects (August 2016). Cathy asked Charlene if she’d like to develop a performance for thirstDays, continuing in this vein of artist collaborations.

Part of the concept for thirstDays required that we contribute images of objects that were meaningful to us and choose one for the poster. Cathy had a Bedouin woven tent panel that came from her Aunt who she was very close to growing up. Johanna Korlu was a nurse and midwife with the International Red Cross and in the early 1950s was given this panel by Bedouin people she worked with in Saudi Arabia, Jordan, or Syria. Appearing as a free-floating object on the poster, Cathy and Dima are pleased to be giving it a new function as a linking device between these two regions of the world. And Cathy and Charlene will activate the actual panel in another way within their performance.

As co-curators, Dima and Cathy are very interested in histories of objects and how they can prompt stories and memories. We like that this tent panel might be mistaken for a carpet, but that it was made to be part of a nomadic desert shelter. We relate to the labour, traditionally women’s labour, of weaving and the signature of place that’s held in the pattern of triangles with occasional rectangular sections. We know now that few Bedouin people continue to live their traditional nomadic life. And then we think about what is going on here at the site of thirstDays as we the artist/participants and audience muse collectively on the idea of love, intimacy and (com)passion in the geo-political context. Today, Nov 3, 2016, Amnesty International published “Out of Sight, Out of Mind: Gender, Indigenous Rights, and Energy Development in Northeast British Columbia, Canada”, reporting on resource development and the particular burden this creates for Indigenous women and girls, specifically in the Peace River region, which is noted as a microcosm for resource development Canada-wide. This report is another example of the steady stream of criticism of current practices in resource development. We feel that performatively connecting struggles, sharing stories and feelings, and making new connections is also a significant way of contributing to the constructive resurgence of a collective multi-lingual voice at this moment.

~ Cathy Busby + Dima Alansari

DIMA ALANSARI is an actor, theatre and filmmaker originally from Al Quds, Palestine. Dima was born in Beirut, Lebanon where she is currently acting in a 4 month long performance of Kafas (Cage) a story of 5 women written by Joumanna Haddad and directed by Lina Abyad. Dima has also produced and co- created and performed in her first theatre play in Canada Return Home which premiered in Toronto & Kitchener for SummerWorks Theatre Festival and IMPACT 2015 and she will be co-performing This is Not A Conversation, a play about the Palestinian/Israeli conflict with co- writers and co-producers Itai Erdal and Ker Wells at the Spark Festival February 2017 in Victoria, Vancouver Island. Whilst in Canada for the past 6 years, Dima has produced and directed several documentaries and short videos about various cultures and peoples that share space and place in Vancouver; working with various community centres, Aboriginal incubators and think tanks as well as Immigrant community facilitators. Dima is a Chevening scholar and has an MFA in Film from Goldsmith College, University of London, England 2007

CATHY BUSBY grew up in the suburbs of Toronto and as a teenager, moved to the Yukon to be part of an alternative school and community. She gravitated to social justice movements and was able to develop her critical and creative skills and perspectives at art school graduating from Nova Scotia College of Art and Design in 1984. She completed an MA in Media Studies, a PhD in Communication (Concordia University, Montreal, 1992; 1999) and was a Fulbright Scholar at New York University (1995-96). She is currently teaching in Visual Art at UBC and lives in Vancouver. Her art process expands the traditional visual arts presentation context to include other cultural and civic possibilities: a former pickle factory / artist centre in Beijing (2007; 2008), the Laneway Commissions in Melbourne, Australia (2009), the Institute of Art, Religion and Social Justice at Union Theological Seminary in New York City (2012). Her works are a number of collections including National Gallery of Canada.

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thirst-days · 9 years ago

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Atoms, Vibrations, Rain

thirstDays No. 9 dying of thirst

Mni Wiconi is the name given to the baby girl recently born at the Standing Rock Reservation in North Dakota. Her name means “water is life.” The phrase is seen everywhere throughout the camps near Standing Rock. Faith Spotted Eagle, an Elder from the Yankton Sioux Reservation of South Dakota, describes the sacredness and memory of water, saying, “One hundred years from now, somebody's going to go down along the Cannonball River and they're going to hear those stories … They're going to hear those songs. They're going to hear that memory of what happened here at this camp."1

This statement was echoed by Lee Maracle in her video interview for thirstDays. She described how water remembers its duty, attaching itself to tiny particles of dust that join together to form clouds. Even where rivers have been covered by city streets, raindrops know where the rivers are and continue to fall there, causing floods. The water remembers. She also spoke about song as a force that holds the galaxy together in its vibrations. If vibration is the fabric of the universe, song—or even noise—is the infinite expression of the universe. When we sing, pray, scream or mumble, we join the chorus of the universe. This is connected to the memory of water and the need to honour and protect the water through prayer, song, and/or direct action.

In the program notes for the event, curators Tannis Nielsen and Jenny Fraser write, “In dying of thirst we wish to compel the viewer towards taking action in the protection of our planet because ‘we are all the earth’s descendants’ and there are numerous international sites of struggle that are in need of our collective defense.” How—or does—art compel us to action? In The Land We Are David Garneau argues that “Art moves us but does not necessarily move us to action. Gestures in the aesthetic realm may symbolically resist the dominant culture, but there is little empirical evidence to show that art leads to direct action or that viewing it makes us better people. And yet some of us do feel changed, and we continue to make and enjoy the stuff as if it mattered, as if it made a difference. What art does do—and what is difficult to measure—is that it changes our individual and collective imaginaries by particles, and these new pictures of the world can influence behaviour. Queer pride parades and Idle No More round dances do change how we see and treat each other and ourselves.”2

The ninth thirstDays event was, in some ways, less artistically driven than previous events, though with some notable exceptions, including a moving performance by Lori Blondeau, a video poem by mother-son collaborators Mique’l and Nick Dangeli, and two video works by Nielsen. Following from Maracle’s contribution, the evening was primarily structured around a series of interviews with Indigenous women from near and far about their personal, cultural and political relations with water. The videos were screened in quick succession, framed by Nielsen’s Binaakwe-Giizis/falling leaves moon (2014), wherein reflections of light off water were projected in horizontal bands on the walls. This flickering of light and dark became a static, electrified energy always in the peripheral view of the videos.

The videos themselves spoke to urgent and formative contexts: the foundation of ways of being in and with the world, and areas where these lifeways are under threat. A stated aim of the program was that, “by sharing these subjectivities/histories and prophecies from particular territories … we may begin to recognize each other and unify, in solidarity, to honour the diversity amongst our collective consciousness, as we work together toward building an encyclopedia of international environmental, social, and political emancipatory strategies.”

Many of the women spoke of personal and cultural connections to water. Fraser shared a Picabeen Basket made by women in her territory from palm leaves which, when soaked, become waterproof and can be used to boil water over a fire. The ingenious design is both strengthened by and a carrier of water.

Jules Koostachin shared a difficult lesson in NiiPii — Water Teaching (2016). Living on the land with her grandparents, Koostachin and her brother had to fetch water to boil as part of their daily chores. In the winter this meant travelling long distances with her Kokoom to find fresh snow away from their well trodden tracks. While roughhousing with her older brother in the kitchen one day, Koostachin accidentally knocked over the pot of water. Although she spoke only Cree, the look of disappointment on her Kokoom’s face was enough to fill Koostachin with guilt and remorse even without words. It was a powerful moment of recognition of the central importance of water in their everyday life, and a lesson that Koostachin has carried forward with her.

Rona Scherer, Alex Wilson and Helen Knott each spoke to the detrimental impacts of development and resource extraction upon the environment. Schrerer discussed the need for both innovation and remembrance of Aboriginal knowledge of the land in the face of centuries of mismanagement.

Knott’s interview was recorded following a protest of the Site C dam, which would flood vast areas of the Peace Valley that support agriculture, farming and fishing for many First Nations and other communities. Knott talked about Treaty 8, signed by the Dane-zaa in 1900. Her great- great- great- grandfather was the last person to sign the treaty, a treaty which Site C directly violates. Knott described walking on the land with her family and believing there would be something there for the future generations. She fights to protect the land and water where she goes to care for herself and to learn. Blood memory is activated on the land.

Wilson spoke about and stood next to the Saskatchewan River Delta, one of the largest freshwater deltas in the world. The delta has been called the lungs of the world because of its peat moss habitat that filters toxins from the air and water. In her Cree language, Wilson explained, there are words that describe the beginning of the river as well as both ice ages, firmly grounding her people in those surroundings for thousands of years. She further described how language is a collection of atoms and molecules, the same parts that constitute water and life itself. I thought about Maracle’s description of water clinging to dust particles that collect together to form clouds that create rivers. I thought of universal frequencies distilled into words.

Poet, activist and self-described “(un)settler” Rita Wong organized a “Feast for the Peace” during the intermission in solidarity with the Treaty 8 land and water protectors. Her presentation was both a record of her collaborative work around water and an immense resource to further compel us toward taking action for our environment through education and action. I will re-share these links with you here:

https://reclaimthewarrior.wordpress.com/ - Helen Knott’s blog on reclaiming, revitalizing and decolonizing https://www.kwiawtstelmexw.com/ - Programs and initiatives to strengthen Sḵwx̱wú7mesh artistic, cultural, language, or heritage practices. http://ohtheplacesyoushouldknow.com/ - Sḵwx̱wú7mesh language place name map http://twnsacredtrust.ca/ - An initiative of the Tsleil-Waututh Nation mandated to stop the Kinder Morgan Trans Mountain pipeline and tanker project http://thetyee.ca/News/2014/07/05/Lost-Salmon-Streams-Vancouver/ - Revitalizing Vancouver’s lost salmon streams http://keepersofthewater.ca/ - First Nations, Metis, Inuit, environmental groups and watershed citizens working together for the protection of water, land and air for all living things in the Arctic Drainage Basin. http://www.desmog.ca/2015/12/18/photos-destruction-peace-river-valley-site-c-dam - “In Photos: The Destruction of the Peace River Valley for the Site C Dam” http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/site-c-dam-davod-suzuki-1.3400543 - “Site C dam protest joined by David Suzuki” http://www.amnesty.ca/outofsight - Gender, Indigenous rights, and energy development in northeast British Columbia, Canada https://docs.google.com/forms/u/0/d/1-IrDb2PAVEpVEcOA71fIpvzIpcI7miH-8w3Oh-x4jtQ/viewform?edit_requested=true - Host a Feast for the Peace! http://www.poetsforthepeace.ca/ - Poets, artists, musicians, established series and concerned individuals of all talents add their voice to the fight for the Peace

The remaining presentations of the evening got me thinking of the combination of aesthetic and activist strategies, of ways of compelling and being compelled. Upon entering VIVO, guests were greeted by Nielsen’s video work Deluge (2016). In the video, Nielsen is dressed in white against a white backdrop. She frantically throws her body around the space, spraying black liquid on the walls and darkening her dress. Shot in high contrast black and white, the video is sped up and abstracted so that it almost looks like an illustrated animation. The result was both beautiful and brutal, a visceral vision of the connection between violence against Indigenous women and the land.

Lori Blondeau’s performance, offerings (2016), was more solemn and contemplative—though no less active. A Globe and Mail article about the late Inuk artist Annie Pootoogook was affixed to the wall. “‘I cannot draw anything that I myself did not experience,’ she once said.” Pootoogook’s body was found in the Rideau River. Blondeau entered the performance space dressed in a black long sleeved velour dress, heavy with water. Her hair, slicked back, let fall droplets of water down her face. Kneeling, she carefully unwrapped a mackerel from its brown paper packaging, its silver flesh fresh and firm. She took a fillet knife and cut off the fish’s head, cut open its belly and removed the intestines. The room began to smell of blood, the sharpness of cold water and steel. I thought of the skill of the hand and the self-sufficiency of living on the land. Blondeau then took a length of brilliant blue cloth and began tearing narrow strips from it, beginning each strip with a cut from the fillet knife. This work took time. We all watched quietly as this purposeful labour took place. The fish and the cloth strips, piled there like fish guts or waves of water, were left on the floor as an offering. Much was encompassed and contained within these gestures, which overflowed with generosity, grief, and determination.

While Blondeau’s performance was a meditative and personal response, Aks Gyigyiinwa̱xł (Water Prayer) (2016), a collaboration between mother and son Sm Łoodm ‘Nüüsm (Dr. Mique’l Dangeli) and Tim-kyo’o’hl Hayats’kw (Nick Dangeli), moved from the reflective to the active call. Walking barefoot in the water, adorned with copper and cedar, Mique’l’s voice filled the room with a prayer in Sm’algya̱x, the Tsimshian language. She asks, “What are people without water?” and, turning to face the camera, the video concludes with her question, “What do you think?”

What do you think?

Notes: 1. Jessica Ravitz, “The sacred land at the center of the Dakota pipeline dispute,” CNN, November 1, 2016. http://www.cnn.com/2016/11/01/us/standing-rock-sioux-sacred-land-dakota-pipeline/

2. Gabrielle L’Hirondelle Hill and Sophie McCall, The Land We Are: Artists and Writers Unsettle the Politics of Reconciliation in Canada (Winnipeg: ARP Publishing, 2015): VIV

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thirst-days · 9 years ago

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vimeo

from thirstDays No.09 | dying of thirst Video by Felix Oltean

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thirst-days · 9 years ago

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Photos by Alisha Weng

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dying of thirst

THURSDAY OCTOBER 27 7.30pm Curated by Tannis Nielsen + Jenny Fraser

Video by & featuring: Lee Maracle (Stó:lō nation), Mique'l Dangeli + Nick Dangeli (Tsimshian), Jenny Fraser (Yugambeh),Helen Knott (Dane-Zaa + Nehiyawak), Zoila Jiménez (Mayan), Jules Koostachin (Cree/Attawapiskat), Tannis Nielsen (Métis/Anishnawbe + Danish), Rona Scherer (Mamu + Kuku Yalanji), Alex Wilson (Neyonawak Inniwak Opaskwayak Cree), Rita Wong (Cantonese in Canada)

Performance: Lori Blondeau (Cree/Saulteaux)

Our intention is motivated by a need to reaffirm the urgency of defending land and water, now and for the next seven generations to come. Water is the life-force/blood of all living things. It is the one, primary, elemental fabric that binds our interconnectedness, and to ‘it’, we are necessarily bound.

In dying of thirst we wish to compel the viewer towards taking action in the protection of our planet because ‘we are all the earth’s descendants’ and there are numerous international sites of struggle that are in need of our collective defense.

dying of thirst is an international epidemic.

Edward Said, stated. “For the intellectual the task, I believe, is explicitly to universalize the crisis, to give greater human scope to what a particular race or nation suffered, to associate that experience with the suffering of others.” (1) This quote has inspired our intent with the invitation of participants who represent the voices of international Indigenous women’s struggle and resistance.

Indigenous women hold a profound relationship to land and water because “as women, we are the direct manifestation of earth in human form” (Winona LaDuke). We know that the land is our mother. She is the living, breathing infrastructure that provides us with the essence of our being. To sustain the health of the land is to sustain the health of the Mother. In honoring and protecting the land and waters we are honoring and protecting our Mother, our Women, our daughters, and safeguarding our inter-connectedness, with the sacredness of all living things. Indigenous Peoples everyday “in practicing our spirituality, (…) assert our relationship to the earth in a way which challenges the right of mining and timber companies to rape and exploit her” (2) and yet this practice, a basic human right, is violated daily by corporate militarized forces.

The participants of dying of thirst are living their sacred responsibility of actively engaging and living as protectors of the planet. Together, they speak against the colonial, capitalist resource extraction industries that rape their ancestral territories. They speak toward the seen and the known and are animated in their resistance by the fires of prophecy, the love of the land, the people(s), and all of our relations.

Together, these voices exhibit an immediacy of need in defending land/water citizenry, as well as the recognition and respect of indigenous sovereignty. We hope that by sharing these subjectivities/histories and prophecies from particular territories that we may begin to recognize each other and unify, in solidarity, to honour the diversity amongst our collective consciousness, as we work together toward building an encyclopedia of international environmental, social, and political emancipatory strategies.

~ Tannis Nielsen + Jenny Fraser

Notes:

1. Edward Said, Representations of the Intellectual, 1994

2. The Fourth World: Site Of Struggle And Resistance In The Fight Against Global Capital, Statement To The World Social Forum, Porto Alegre, Brazil, January 19, 2001

JENNY FRASER was the first Murri to have her video art broadcast into outer space in the 2015 Forever Now project – a follow-up to the NASA Voyager Golden Records sent into space in 1977. She has a PhD in the Art of Healing and Decolonisation from Batchelor Institute in the Northern Territory (Australia). Jenny recently received the 2016 Mana Wairoa Award for Advancing Indigenous Rights, and she received an Australia Council fellowship for her project Midden in 2012. She founded the online gallery cyberTribe in 1999, the Blackout Collective in 2002, and World Screen Culture in 2015. She is on the National Advisory Group for the Centre for Indigenous Story, and is an Adjunct Research Fellow at The Cairns Institute.

TANNIS NIELSEN is of Metis (Anishnawbe) and Danish ancestry. She holds a Masters in Visual Studies from the University of Toronto. Her dissertation addresses the need for asserting localized Indigenous contexts accurately within the structures of the academy by illustrating the negative consequence of colonial trauma on Indigenous culture, land, language, familial relationships, and memory. Tannis’ thesis also sought to decolonize the structures of an English literacy, by repudiating the politicized devices of punctuation and capitalization. In doing this, she refused to use the language of the colonizer because "to use the language of the colonizer was to pay homage to them” (Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o). Tannis currently teaches at The Ontario College of Art and Design University.

thirstDays is a project conceived as the rain falls and covers us in a slick substance transduced from the skies, moist. How can this, how can we, contribute to the establishing of a momentum that may have once been here in waves or pieces but over time was squandered, and defeated, with the imposition of capital triumphantly declaring its colonial (un)consciousness in our enclave by the water. Surrounded by a possible serene beauty, grief and sadness, love and hate, what encounters do we inscribe into our psyches and into our beings, what can art do to fulfil a mandate of hope and agency. What can we contribute.

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