AN ONLINE PUBLICATION
e-fagia organization is pleased to welcome to VOZ-À-VOZ. This publication presents seven inter-media art projects with corresponding critical responses by seven writers, as well as four feature essays that address the embodied experiences of Indigenous people and non-Indigenous racialized im/migrants across the political and geographical borders of North America. All of these projects use emergent technologies and media to recount stories marked by the tension between migration and rootedness, reality and fiction.
Project carried out by e-fagia visual and media art organization.
This
project has been possible with the generous support of the Canada
Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council and the Toronto Arts
Council.
![]() | ![]() | ![]() | ![]() | ![]() |
e-fagia would like to thank our partners in the exhibition and programming:
PAST PROGRAMMING
Friday 18 September- Saturday 05 December 2015
Exhibition @ YYZ Artists' Outlet
Presented by e-fagia organization and YYZ Artists’ Outlet
Co-presented by imagineNATIVE Film + Media Arts Festival
Curated by Maria Alejandrina Coates and Julieta Maria
Online publication edited by Gina Badger and the e-fagia team.
October 29th from 6:30-8:30pm @ YYZ Artists' Outlet
"Inhabiting The North" Screening and Conversation with artists.
North followed by a conversation with Gita Hashemi and other
participating artists on Thursday October 29 at YYZ Artists' Outlet. The
video is part of voz-à-voz, currently on exhibit. We'll screen it from
beginning to end (1hr 26m), followed by a 30 minute Q&A session.
October 23rd from 6:30-8:30pm, & October 24th from 10:00am- 2:00pm @YYZ Artists' Outlet
"Lowriding as Indigenous Ontology" Workshop by Dylan A.T. Miner
In this two-day workshop, participants will explore the
similarities and tensions between decolonial Latina/o-Latin American theories
and Indigenous ontologies. As has been noted, there remain many unspoken antagonisms
between emancipatory Latina/o epistemologies and Indigenous ways of being in
the Global North. This workshop – using
the metaphor and practice of lowriding – will directly engage these tensions
and, hopefully, work through them. As theorized by Dylan Miner, lowriding
engages traditional migration patterns, yet employs late-capitalist machinery (car
or bike) to traverse colonized landscapes. While our ancestors moved slowly
from one place to another, establishing deep roots along the way,
contemporaneity and coloniality presuppose that we must hurriedly rush from
place to place. Instead of hastening from one place to another, lowriding, as
an Indigenous ontology, actively engages the process of slow-movement. Participants
(Indigenous, settlers, and newcomers, alike) will think about their own relationship
to place, understand their personal and communal migration stories, map out
personal and communal narratives, begin to better understand their own
relationship to place, and slowly lowride (literally, as well as metaphorically)
across time and space. The first day will be theory and dialogue-based, while the
second day will include walks or other slow movements through Tkaronto/Taronto/Toronto.
Please RSVP to Maria Coates at alecoates@gmail.com
is a Wiisaakodewinini (Métis) artist, activist, and scholar. He is Director of the American Indian Studies Program and Associate Professor at Michigan State University, as well as member of the Justseeds artists collective. Miner has been featured in more than twenty solo exhibitions and was granted an Artist Leadership Fellowship from the National Museum of the American Indian in 2010. His book Creating Aztlán: Chicano Art, Indigenous Sovereignty, and Lowriding Across Turtle Island was published in 2014 (University of Arizona Press). He is presently working on two books – one on contemporary Indigenous aesthetics and a book of poetry, Ikidowinan Ninandagikendaanan (words I seek to learn).
October 20th @ 6:00pm at YYZ Artists' Outlet
Artist Talk by Skawennati.
e-fagia
is exicited to host an artist talk by Skawennati, who will highlight
passages from the various texts written for the VOZ-À-VOZ exhibition and
respond with illustrations from TimeTraveller™.
Skawennati makes art that addresses history, the future, and change. Her pioneering new media projects have been widely presented across Turtle Island in major exhibitions such as Now? NOW! at Denver’s Biennial of the Americas; and Looking Forward (L’Avenir) at the Montreal Biennale. She has been honored to win imagineNative’s 2009 Best New Media Award as well as a 2011 Eiteljorg Contemporary Art Fellowship. Her work in is included in both public and private collections.
Born in Kahnawake Mohawk Territory, Skawennati graduated with a BFA from Concordia University in Montreal, where she is based. She is Co-Director, with Jason E. Lewis, of Aboriginal Territories in Cyberspace (AbTeC), a research network of artists, academics and technologists investigating, creating and critiquing Indigenous virtual environments. This year they launched IIF, the Initiative for Indigenous Futures.
Publication Launch: October 16th, 2015
Reception from 6:30-8:30pm. Curator's talk at 7:30pm;
Featuring a special performance by Cheryl L’Hirondelle and Joseph Naytowhow at 8pm. Programmed as part of the imagineNATIVE Art Crawl, October 16, 2015, 5:00 – 8:30pm, 401 Richmond Building. Visit www.imaginenative.org for full details.
Cheryl L'Hirondelle & Joseph Naytowhow (kiy collective), yahkskwan mîkiwahp (‘light’ pole tipi), Scarborough Bluffs, 2014
yahkskwan mîkiwahp (‘light’ pole tipi)
by Cheryl L’Hirondelle and Joseph Naytowhow (kiy collective)
Many
stories and ceremonial locations around Turtle Island give some sort of
evidence that many giant beings once roamed the land and had many and
various special places they called home. These giant beings are
prophesized to return and once again need a home, a lodge – one that is
future-oriented while rooted in the past—a beacon to welcome the
returning giants. I had a dream many years ago where I saw a giant tipi
made of light. My vision was somewhat similar what is sighted atop many
reserve-based casinos, though the main difference with this tipi is that
it was community raised and manifested. With this action an idea is
pondered: perhaps the giant is returning every time we collectively act
together in a life-affirming manner, showing that we-as-community can
do-it-together, and make a sign of albeit temporal significance, that we
are still here and in doing so create a place of refuge, reflection,
expression and knowing.
To date, the light tipi has made
appearances worldwide: Millennium Bridge – Thames River, London UK;
University of Waterloo – Waterloo, ON; Scarborough Bluffs – Toronto, ON;
North American Indigenous Games – Regina, SK; Woodhaven – Kelowna, BC;
The Fieldhouse – Vancouver, BC; and Bush Gallery, Secwepemc Territory,
BC.
Cheryl L’Hirondelle
is an Alberta-born mixed blood (Cree/Metis/German/Polish)
community-engaged multi / interdisciplinary artist and
singer/songwriter, who has been presenting and exhibiting her work since
the 1980’s. Her creative practice investigates a Cree worldview
(nêhiyawin) in contemporary time-space. L’Hirondelle uses song, voice,
audio and more to develop endurance-based performances, interventions,
site-specific installations, participatory projects while she keeps
singing and writing songs where ever and with whom ever she can.
Currently Toronto-based, Cheryl has performed and exhibited her work
widely both in Canada and abroad, and her previous musical efforts and
new media work have garnered her critical acclaim and numerous awards.
Joseph Naytowhow
is a gifted Plains/Woodland Cree (nêhiyaw) singer/songwriter,
storyteller, dancer and voice, stage and film actor from Sturgeon Lake
First Nation in Saskatchewan. He is renowned for his unique style of
Cree/English storytelling, combined with original traditional-style
First Nations drum, flute and rattle songs. Among many accolades and
awards, Joseph is the recipient of the 2006 Canadian Aboriginal Music
Awards’ ‘Keeper of the Tradition Award’ and in 2009 he also received a
Gemini Award for ‘Best Individual or Ensemble Performance in an Animated
Program or Series’ for his role in the Wapos Bay series (Dennis &
Melanie Jackson, producers).
Redshift & Portalmetal
Performance by micha cárdenas, with Jelani Ade-Lam
October 8th, 2015 @ 6:30pm at YYZ Artists' Outlet
micha cardenas' performance will be based on Redshift & Portalmetal, her online, interactive game, including film, performance and poetry. The live performance takes the form of a live playtest of the interactive interface, with cárdenas performing poems and movement scores that accompany the poems. Enacting a live experiment in post-apocalyptic collectivity, the audience must decide together how the performance will unfold by making choices in the game interface, which is projected on to the walls.
micha cárdenas is a performer, writer, student, educator, mixed-race trans-femme latina who works with movement as a technology of change. Cardenas is a Provost Fellow and PhD candidate in Media Arts + Practice (iMAP) at University of Southern California and a member of the art collective Electronic Disturbance Theater 2.0
Ravyn/Jelani Wngz is an African/ Black, 2Spirited Being who loves herself. She is an empowerment movement storyteller, based in Toronto. She is dedicated to the liberation of Trans, Queer and Self-Identified people by sharing her journey of healing in this lifetime
DJ Zehra is a community organizer/media maker/music lover born and raised in Toronto. She has been playing music for the past 8 years all over Canada, she likes to eat yummy food w/ her community and family, find good remixes and continue to challenge the white supremacist/capitalist/
This project has been possible with the generous support of the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council and the Toronto Arts Council.
![]() | ![]() | ![]() | ![]() | ![]() |
e-fagia would like to thank our partners in the exhibition and programming:
October 13th, 2015 00:04 by Julieta