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.

e-fagia is pleased to host a screening of the performance video Inhabiting the

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

Dylan Miner

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/colonial machine in her communities. She is the news editor for Indigenous Waves radio show on CIUT 89.5FM and practices law as her day job.