​by Mayumi Lashbrook (Canada), alumna of Multidisciplinary Residency, 2020 and Virtual Residency, 2021.

In my experience in every creation process I’ve been part of, there’s a cracking moment. A period of time where you know you’re digging deep. Excavating the emotional, charged, tense grit of the human experience. You dig down into the soil of the self hoping to find a gleaming thought to share that could offer profound change.

Each week of our online residency has felt this way. We’ve all said and felt in some way that this isn’t a topic that we alone could bear. Even though each of our practises are built on a foundation of seeking liberation. Through the group’s diverse experiences and camaraderie, we’ve found safe practises to look at the harrowing truths of movement of humans and commodities. I am deeply grateful for this.

I am pushed forward by these discoveries and many more…

The naming of borders I place on myself or have been placed on me.
The recognition of the borders others live within that don’t enclose me and never will. 
There is a fairness committee to cap earnings in sports yet no such regulations exist for the richest people in the world.
The subtle or not so subtle differences between forced and enforced migration. 
Language is the primary means to accessing power. 
Language exists because our senses alone are imperfect communicators, we utilize language to fill in the missing information.
Trees communicate to each other offering warnings and triggering mast fruiting; language used for communal generosity. 
The Queen may be the only person on the planet who requires no passport. 
​The Indigneous creation story of Skywoman tells that she, the original woman herself, was an immigrant.

I recognize we’ve picked a limitless topic. One that crosses over many areas, experiences and faultlines. 

It was brought up about the idea that change is like a boat going through water. It simultaneously moves forward and backwards, ripples emanating in two directions of opposing action. I expect our impact to be of the same nature. I move looking for both, a way of staying rooted in the past while looking ahead to the possible future. A sense of implosion and explosion, safety and danger, progression and regression. 

And yet we keep moving through. Together. 

by Kunji Ikeda (Canada), Alumn of Multidisciplinary Residency, 2020 and Virtual Residency, 2021.

I’ve encountered this idea in multiple artistic practices: 

- voice work (rooting into deep breathe to release the higher falsetto)

- dance work (sending energy down in order to release the upper body into a pirouette)

and hyper-present within this work 

- mutual safety and trust.

I wouldn’t want to enter into a research and creation residency of this nature with just anyone, my talented and passionate co-creators and I have continually proven to each other that there is deep care for one another. It’s a beautiful process of laughing at ourselves, shaking our fists at the clouds, and crying over spilt energy. We’ve been able to console and confront all the ideas and processes that you can read about in previous posts.

Rooting down into each other to see where we can fly

I have felt an artistic circular routine made up of periods of intense research, work, and rest. Without one of those within a pattern I feel at a disadvantage to a creative state. This time together has been an invigorating time of research and work with spacious rest in between our meetings. We’re able to start to shake loose some artistic thoughts and ideas that are too big for me alone. If I tried on my own to research these huge, tiring, political machinations I would be overwhelmed and turn bitter towards my process and ultimately my failure. In this community of unique thought and discussion, there have been floods of revelation, connection, and delight that cannot exist in a vacuum of my own thoughts and experiences; my own lens isn’t wide enough. 

Did we know what we were getting ourselves into?

In theory, yes.

We knew it would be revelatory, thought provoking, and that we would each come away with our own personal gems and seeds to continue working towards.

In our complex multidis, multigeneration, multicultural community we’ve each had the opportunity to inspire and be inspired with one another.

Did we know what we were getting ourselves into?

Not in the slightest.

by Shireen Ikramullah Khan (Pakistan / Netherlands), Alumna of Multidisciplinary Residency, 2020 and Virtual Residency, 2021.

Art has the power to change governmental controversy and deliberation, because it has the power to change each of us. Public debate and sentiment can transform because of it. The contemporary art world is quick to engage with trending topics like migration, but it is up to us as creative composers to keep the conversation going. A question arises, can works of art provide an alternative critical way of thinking on migration, besides the current discourse of democratic entanglement? 

​The mixed media surfaces I have created along my pensive yet ruminative journey, reflect a portrayal of life’s journey of building emotional walls to protect the self, bridging connections with the past
and crossing geographic borders. These inform of explorations of personal and collective transitions and the construction of memory and identity. These abstract arrangements are expressed through mixed media where emerging lines and patterns resonate with the sensitive place of past itineraries. The visual expresses movement and fragmented time within the various formats meant to establish
boundaries and barriers consistent with an ancestral personal history of repression and resilience. A question arises, which ones can be conceptualized as permeable barriers and versus the hard margins?

How can artists and cultural workers critically relate to the effects of globalisation, such as the current migration crisis, gains added significance. At present, almost all cultural activities in European countries, the international programmes of theatres and cinemas, the translated books in the libraries and so on – are in one or other way involved with or affected by international collaborations between artists and cultural workers from different parts of the world. As an artist working abroad, one is inevitably confronted with questions arising from globalisation’s broken promises. The visual arts can be critical without evoking an articulated moral argument or narrative, solely by disrupting dominant discourse formation of any sort.

by Eric Lawrence Taylor (USA), Alumn of Multidisciplinary Residency, 2020 and Virtual Residency, 2021.

The colonial project of what came to be known as the west changed the face of the world in ways that cannot be undone in the modern day. The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade changed the migratory patterns of Atlantic sharks, and whales (Christina Sharp, In the wake), as they learned that if they followed the ships food would always be nearby.

The explosion of wealth that the Americas introduced into the already globalized economy, triggered massive inflation and thus an economic crisis around the world. The Ottoman Empire, and even the Spanish Empire suffered economically from the plundering of two continents. This has been my suspicion of capitalism of late. Not that it generates prosperity and innovation for those in places of power and privilege. But rather it is very efficient at manufacturing poverty where there is none to begin with. This was because of silver, the mountain of it the conquistador found in their violent expeditions of South America. Silver was the life-blood of the Spanish empire. And as the Egyptians believed “Gold is the Flesh of God”. And through the acquisition of these medals impoverished the world.

As we live in a period of introspection, resistance and struggle, it becomes clear that those, later called Europeans, who came to colonize the Western half of the world were, simultaneously, overthrowing their own colonizers. The islamic Nasrid Kingdom fell in 1492, in fact, the same year that Christopher Columbus, mass murderer, “sailed the ocean blue”. The Reconquista was a 700 year period that ended with what we now know as the Spanish Inquisition. North African Moors, and Berbers, had lived in the Iberian peninsula (modern day Spain) for such a long time that they were indistinguishable from their Christian counterparts. Many Moorish Kings though African in ancestry were said to have  had blonde hair and blue eyes. 

This is the first time in which our modern conception of race came into political life. It is not a biological reaction to in-groups and out-groups. Nor has it existed since the beginning of time. But rather a specific movement to religious, political and economic power within a certain group, a group that for the first time one can claim belonging to not by language, tradition, or culture, but by phenotype. This might be why 500 years later it could be argued that so-called ‘white-identity’ (especially in the Americas) comes at the expense of one’s own language, tradition and culture.

For centuries prior the diverse religions and cultures of western Europe had been consolidated under one banner. The Roman Empire. The first colonizer. From whom the language I am now speaking is based. They are the clearest progenitor to ‘white-identity’. Perhaps this is why the Neo-Nazi movement in America, the Alt-right. lionize the romans. The people that colonized them thousands of years ago. However, it is common in schools to attribute Europe’s technological and scientific renaissance to the Greeks, such as Socrates and Aristotle, ideas traveling along trade routes by way of roman subjugation. Europe only received Christianity from Greece which was translated into latin. While the vast majority of science in the form of mathematics and philosophy came from Islam. For example, Trigonometry was developed to approximate the circumference of the earth so Muslims could determine which direction to face when they pray to Mecca. Such knowledge was recorded in the first colleges that were built in Africa and the Middle East.

This was erased by colonizing European scholars who integrated what would ultimately be called racism into every aspect of the science they observed. For example, even the word “Africa” (which now describes an entire continent) comes from latin, meaning “land of dark-skinned people” and at the time only described modern day Tunisia, northern Libya, Algeria and Morocco. Perhaps it is not clear why this is relevant to the construction of borders and trade today. Our modern cultural and territorial borders are traced on the scars of empire. Violence that is evidenced by people, and sometimes even by the land itself. It may lead you reader to believe the world and the superstitions of its inhabitants are in any way natural. I also say this to remind you reader, that scars can also be evidence of survival of restoration and repair. The colonial project would have this, our collective story being one of our inevitable and unending conflict with one another. But through memory, through repairing what has been lost, cultivating what never can be lost or erased we are generating a choreography of liberation in the future. Our future. The one already written for use in the lands of our ancestors.

by Kunji Mark Ikeda (Canada), Shireen Ikramullah Khan (Netherlands), Mayumi Lashbrook (Canada) and Eric Lawrence Taylor (USA) - Alumni of Multidisciplinary residency, January 2020

We embark on a journey with no destination, traveling to wherever our minds take us. 
 
This is often what it feels like in a research phase of creation. This is the time to let our minds wander. To unleash our curiosities and follow our impulses.
 
Borders, Borderlands and Crossings is a 7-week multidisciplinary virtual residency. We are made up of four multidisciplinary, multicultural, multi-generational artists seeking research in a shared realm of interest; the movement and curation of precious metals, seeds and humans across borders both imagined and real. Where we’ll travel to and where we’ll settle is still yet to be known. 
 
We share this process with you, inviting you into our sketch books and minds through a series of blog posts and a final showing on August 7th (detail below). This kind of intimacy in the process is sacred. Be kind and open hearted as we will be too.
 
One of the first things we decided as a group and remind ourselves each and every group session is that we’re here to prioritize humanity over productivity. Indigenous practises teach us that our current usage of time is a colonial structure. And as artists we’re constantly proving our worth which often looks like a focus on product and outcome. The first agreement we made in our virtual space together was to centre our curiosities, desires and impulses.
 
What constructs stop the flow of people, seeds and precious metals?
What does it mean to be borderless?
What happens when we move across space and time?
What movement is allowed or not allowed?
Why is there compliance? And who enforces them?
 
When you think about the fault lines within the flow of commodities, the volume of current crises is infinite. Each of us intersect directly with a historic event that changes the migrational pull that brought us to where we are now. 
 
Through the residency, we’ll continue to look at these fault lines and share our personal connection to displacement and movement of commodities. We have so much to discover. Join us in this rich and complex exploration of Borders, Borderlands and Crossings. 

Date: Saturday August 7th
Time: 11:00am MT / 1:00pm ET / 7:00pm CEST
Location: Online through Zoom, FREE!
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For more information and to register click here.