Alexandra Gelis, With – Living Migrant Relations, 2021. Interactive multimedia Installation.
HOME(LAND) is a multimedia exhibition project examining how concepts of land intersect and dialogue with the fluid, and shifting characteristics of identity, belonging, and home across and between races, regions, cultures and nations.
Throughout a series of three exhibitions, HOME(LAND) investigates the complex issues surrounding contemporary cultural discourses on global migration, site, and identity. Artists from diverse backgrounds whose practice and work are infused with unique interracial complexities, examine questions on concepts such as kinship, ancestry, memory, and racialization.
The second exhibition, Terra Firma evokes the earth as a powerful natural element that connects us directly to the land, the territory that we inhabit and where we build and fabric our home. In the foreground, the selected works tackle ideas of symbio-politics, environmental governance, cultural borders, and social displacement and erasure from a perspective of individual resilience and community resistance and participation.
Terra Firma explores how the earth, the soil and ultimately the land becomes an integral part of our identity and very being. Rooted in observation and interaction with natural landscapes, artists in this exhibition explore the notion of kinship as an interconnected and inextricable system existing between the earth, the land and all living things.
In With - Living Migrant Relations Alexandra Gelis exhibits plants, soil, bacteria, and stories of migration in a constant biological, political and reciprocal relationship. This interactive, sculptural-sound and film installation traces the transfer of seeds from their native environment to another, either by natural action (wind, water, animals) or by human intervention. This relocation, informed by notions of resistance in the process of migration, allows plants to become allies who nourish the body, the land and the spirit.
By using threads of human hair in form of braids, Gelis registers the movement of seeds from Africa to the Americas. Enslaved African women of San Basilio de Palenque in Colombia used to hide seeds in their braids and mapped escape routes using traditional hair braiding designs. This resistance tactic helped free African enslaved people in the 17th century. The installation presents plants as storytellers and allies to shape human history. Through an interactive sound component, visitors can also listen to short stories of migrants living in Toronto intertwined with soundscapes of plants like plantain, coffee and guayaba (Guava) in their native environment.
Subsequently, an old water pump triggers a 16mm film revealing the internal chemistry of plants that have been exposed to photographic emulsion and direct sunlight for many hours. This process is called phytography and offers a unique view of plants molecular and chemical exchange. The project invites visitors to interact with the hand pump and to play with the pace of the film.
This work was commissioned for HOME(Land): Terra Firma as part of ArtworxTO and curated by Claudia Arana.
Helio Eudoro, Invisible, 2017 - ongoing. Photo Essay. Lightjet prints mounted on dibond.
Invisible explores the complex and multiple layers of invisibility as a mechanism of power. In this ongoing photographic essay, Eudoro investigates exclusion and sociocultural erasure through different landscapes and settings. By interacting with various symbolic and on-site objects, he immerses himself in environments as an embodied protest against social and moral discrimination, systemic and colonial effacement through the lens of diaspora, sexuality, body image, and aging.
Eudoro’s interventions reflect on ideas of social camouflage and alienation. To “blend in” a particular landscape by behaving differently or suppressing certain ideas or actions is a common response to non-negotiable and oppressive systems. The project invites the viewer to reflect on the different social, political and cultural effacement structures and our physical and emotional response towards them.
Helio Eudoro, O Manto, 2021. Wearable experiential garment. Dimensions Variable.
As an iteration of his previous performative work, O Manto de Invisibilidade 3, Eudoro constructs once again the Manto. This time by using non-gender clothes, he explores bias, cultural segmentation and suppression towards sex, gender and ultimately the body. He invites us to revisit how we came to identify ourselves through the body and how various social and cultural foundations often incite a behavioural need to be concealed or disguised and encourage a way of thinking in exile.
The Manto continues to be a symbolic and active component in Eudoro’s research for cultural inclusion. As a mechanism of power, it protects and reveals, activates the body and allows individuals and their identities to be free.
O Manto de Invisibilidade 3, 2017. Video performance, 00:06:22. Music: Milton Nascimento, Clube da Esquina N2.
In O Manto de Invisibilidade 3, Eudoro continues to explore notions of erasure and defacement perpetrated by multiple socio-cultural systems. He deconstructs clothes donated by his peers and sewes them into a wearable experiential garment also known as Parangolé. Rooted in the marginality of Rio de Janeiro’s most impoverished inhabitants, this term refers to a sudden agitation, an unexpected situation, or a dance party, and was first adopted by Brazilian artist Helio Oiticica in the ’60s. Through a performative gesture, Eudoro wears the Manto and dances. Along a light mirrored swayed motion, the performance evokes an emotional isolation state while creating a safe space where bodies and identities are protected and liberated from stereotypes, judgments and prejudices.
Dana Claxton, Tatanka 1 & 2, 2019. Lightjet prints on vinyl on dibond.
With striking saturated colors, Tatanka 1 & 2 speaks to the history of Indigenous people, the land and its delicate and vulnerable ecosystem. Tatanka — tȟatȟáŋka — is a word of the Lakota community for buffalo/bison. This traditional American species once roamed the lands of the north in vast herds from Alaska to the Gulf of Mexico. For many Indigenous communities, this emblematic and iconic figure of social and cultural significance represents life, spirituality, bravery, kindness, strength, and respect. It provides sheltering with its hide, meat for food, horns for utensils and inner organs for containers and medicines. It nearly became extinct due to colonial brutal tactics during the period of extermination and its value as an international commodity. Their bones were crushed and exported to England to make bone china, one of the finest and strongest of porcelain ceramics. Through multiple reintroductions and programs, herds have been slowly re-established on Indigenous lands to maintain their cultural and spiritual means. The species is freely roaming wild in some regions of Turtle Island.
Nava Waxman, Shared View, 2021 . Performative multimedia installation including AR components, multi-channel projection, video performance, objects, and immersive sound.
Shared View explores notions of identity, liminality, and belonging in a moving symbiotic relationship between Canada, the Sahara Desert, and the Judean Desert. Through video performances, objects, sound and AR components, Waxman examines the idea of a permeable land that constantly negotiates its political, physical and imaginary borders with our memories, bodies and souls. With an attempt to question our sense of belonging, she relocates embodied experiences that intersect with multiple geographical locations and ideas of diaspora, (dis)placement and migration.
As a transitional-being born and raised in-between cultural systems, Waxman shares her personal history through site-specific performances recorded at multiple times and locations over the course of three years. These recordings are projected along a constellation of physical and virtual objects like wood, jars, paint and a flag. The installation brings the viewer closer to an intimate and multilayered dwelling experience beyond borders, cultures, and time.
Muse Arts, Our Home, Our Communities, 2021 . Mix Media Installation - Community /engaged based project. One hundred houses made of cardboard and other recycling materials.
Our Home, Our Communities is an art-based community engagement project exploring ideas of what home means and its inedible connection with the earth and its multiple ecosystems. In this project, home is a place of refuge and it’s where a person feels safe and accepted, it tells a story and expresses a person’s, family’s or community’s interests and holds an emotional connection and a deep sense of belonging.
Through a series of workshops, participants have used cardboard boxes and other recycling materials to build a representation of their home. The extraction of natural resources, land ownership, climate change and the current housing crisis are some of the many conversations that took place during these online and in-person workshops.
An installation consisting of one hundred houses made of cardboard and other recycling materials invite visitors to explore each unique representation of home and reflect on its intimate relationship with the land, the earth and its nature.
