​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.