TUESDAY November 8th, 15h00-17h30 

Site-Specific Scenographies of Resignification:

Feminist, Decolonial and Transnational Spatial Practices 

Site-Specific Scenographies of Resignification: Feminist, Decolonial and Transnational Spatial Practices brought together a panel of artists, activists and scholars to exchange and discuss site-specific research and creation practices that care for/ disrupt/ decolonize/ and/or memorialize (urban) spaces that have been sites of trauma, colonial violence, and oppression. Participants reflected upon their positionality within their respective research and creation practice(s); speaking to their projects, the stakes, ethics and challenges, as well as the socially transformative potential of the research and creation work they are undertaking.

With: Paola Ovalle, Selena Couture, Roewan Crowe, Laura Levin & Sunita Nigam, Maria Jose Contreras

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Maria Jose Contreras

Talk to the Future

In my site-specific performance work, I aim to create the conditions for embodied resonance with the space and with others. I embrace feminist methodologies for designing, creating, and performing my work. My work always emerges from my own positionality as a female artist that was born and grew in the context of the inflammatory political landscape of Latin America. The spark of my work is always political, and so are the formats of my interventions. I am committed to decolonizing the performance-making process while offering caring and careful encounters for vibrating together often in the margins of hegemonic institutions and spaces. In this presentation, I reflect on how my site-specific performances offer alternative modes of being together to conjure a more just, equitable, and caring future.

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Selena Couture

Performative Signifying in Coast Salish Territories 

This presentation focuses on the incomplete resignification of Indigenous lands by the city of Vancouver’s first archivist James Skitt Matthews (1878-1970) in his efforts to create a benevolent British whiteness through performances and monument Stanley Park in the mid-twentieth century. Local Indigenous nations' protection and maintenance of their unceded, ancestral and traditional territories has both been consistent throughout years of illegal European settlement, and intensified recently, following successful court cases (including the Indian Residential School Class Action Settlement). Spurred by the TRC Calls to Action, the Vancouver Parks Board’s adoption of UNDRIP and commissioning of a “colonial audit” in 2018 is part of a process to designify colonial commemorative monuments and place names. This audit, along with continuous Indigenous and anti-colonial practices of performance are expanding the community of interpretants who understand the Indigenous signification of these sites.

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Roewan Crowe 

hum of the blue hive

As a pandemic survival project and in response to the commodification of her back alley, Crowe ripped up the front lawn to create a potager garden, a space to grow food and to tend to vegetal creatures and pollinators. There she steps into the wonderous, humming life of the urban garden to labour, be lost, and breathe. The first video of the series, “hum of the blue hive,” is a pixelated poem to the sounds of dreams falling apart interplanted with the sounds of liveliness in the garden. After being in the presence of the borage plant at every stage of its life; and watching the humble bumble bee release pollen; Crowe explores queer biomimicry for vegetal relations; co-becoming, engaged in pleasingly strange encounters. Entranced by the soundscape, the artist makes oddkin with plants, birds, pollinators and feminist/queer artists/thinkers who have asked similar questions, thought similar thoughts. Wondered similar wonder.

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Paola Ovalle

Healing the Land. Trauma, Memory and Public Space. 

A massacre is an event in which an individual or an armed group kills several people who are in a state of defenselessness. In this paper I present the results of the process of psychosocial accompaniment that I have been carrying out with the survivors of different massacres. One of the pillars of these processes is the intermediation between victims' collectives, communities and family members, together with Academia and artists. From the time when these places were marked by the horror of a massacre, the self-repairing force of those who resist the war became present in their desire to mark the wounded territory with traces of memory that enable public mourning. The accompaniment that I carry out, attends to the need of these collectives to transfer to the space, by creative means, the commemoration of their victims and their claims of justice. Muralism, experimental video and embroidery have been the techniques through which the will of memory of the affected communities is materialized.  These spaces are open wounds in the Mexican territory. But just as healthy land and life prevail over death, the affected communities struggle to take care of life despite the continuation of violence and impunity.

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Laura Levin & Sunita Nigam

The Politics of Performing House: Transnational and Scenographic Interventions

We will offer an overview of our recent issue of Canadian Theatre Review on “Performance & Housing,” and reflect on the feminist, decolonial, and transnational methodologies it proposes for approaching houses as sites of political and embodied spatial practice. Engaging with “house” as a scenographic projection of identity, and as a site of both normative and resistant creativity, we argue that houses of all kinds must be treated as processual, performative practices that enact and disrupt the material contexts in which they are embedded. We make a case for paying attention to scenic design alongside movement vocabularies, housing scripts, and the gendering and racializing of domesticity, and argue for site writing that reads house through local, transnational, and hemispheric frameworks. In doing so, we assert that the performative politics of housing reveals shared experiences of dwelling, citizenship, and belonging that cross—and, more crucially, contest—colonial and geopolitical borders. 

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