I am delighted to announce that I will be presenting a durational and site-specific performance piece during the New Performance Turku Festival this October 2017: Canadian Silence.
New Performance Turku Festival is an international festival for performance and live art, organized annually around Turku, Finland – this year between October 6-8th.
In preparing for the performance, I consulted with the curator. Having recently learned of a tradition in Swedish culture called kura skymning (or “keeping dusk”; a time when farming families would sit together in total silence to mark the transition between day and evening) I wanted to see whether such a tradition also exists/existed in Finland. Apparently it does not, however, another similar feature of Finnish behaviour, in particular with regards to social interactions, does. It is known as Finnish Silence. It’s not uncommon for Finns to spend long periods of time in the company of others sitting together and not talking. According to the curator, “We just sit, listening to our own thoughts. No one feels the silence is uncomfortable, it is actually more comforting.”
In a kind of cultural exchange, my peformative action is therefore going to be an open invitation for interested citizens of Turku to come join me at the riverfront, while we sit in Canadian Silence. No cell phones or tablets will be permitted; no texting, no picture taking. Instead, in collective non-action, I will accompany those who participate, who in turn will accompany me: observing our thoughts as we observe the river. After having spent this time in a deliberate moment of Doing Nothing, upon a participant’s departure, I will distribute a small leaflet with the question: Do Canadian and Finnish silence feel the same? Participants will then have the opportunity to respond to an email address included in the leaflet. With permission, replies and comments will then be compiled here…
Pictured above, the Cindy boat – the site for our upcoming Canadian Silence.
With special thanks to the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec (CALQ) for supporting my travel to Finland.
This September 26th marks my first foray back into campus-community radio as I join the inimitable Vince Tinguely for a guest spot on his weekly show, The Kitchen Bang Bang Law.
It’s kind of fitting that I should find myself sitting next to Vince once again (this image above was taken when we co-hosted a show some 15 years ago), in part because we share a history of radio together but also because we co-wrote and published a monthly zine in the mid 1990’s with the charming moniker: “Perfect Waste of Time.”
…You can see where I’m going with this…
Already back in 1995, when the zine first appeared, I was (we were, Vince and I) contemplating rampant consumer culture, gentrification, climate change and the role of the artist in all of this… late capitalist… claptrap. We walked everywhere, year-round, taking time to notice our neighbourhood and city; we relished in slow and inefficient. We weren’t in a rush and resisted working too hard (or too much). We were decidedly UN-productive. On purpose.
It was a kind of art-life project that we didn’t name as such although the emergence of the zine sort of did the job for us. It spoke on our behalf as we churned out the little fold-over one-page month after month for about two years… (with a special issue put out in 2005).
Perfect Waste of Time eventually caught some attention and turned into a book (Impure – a whole other story) which took up all of our time, having us work way too hard and then that art-life project came to an end. As all things do. A perfect waste of time (indeed! Harumph).
Jump-cut to the present…
Finding myself on campus at McGill university for the Resting, Walking, Place-Making project (which continues on from the Doing Nothing project), I have come full circle. Sort of. Things definitely got busy somewhere in the interim and now (well, officially since the spring of 2016), I have been actively – and very vocally – trying to reclaim that space/time/attitude and mode of decelerated being and (in my art practice) of immaterial/unproductive making. (As has been studiously documented in the dozens of posts previously published in this blog).
And so now, excitingly, commences my monthly check-in, the last Tuesday of each month on CKUT (McGill’s radio station), when Vince and I will waste time together quite perfectly (and happily) again: Welcome to The Monthly Report About Nothing.
Stay tuned…!
At the invitation of Folie/Culture artist-run centre in Quebec City, I invested the space of The a-Post Office, (Bureau de l’a – POST –), a portable structure set up in strategic locations in Quebec’s city centre. Taking inspiration from the idea of the Post Office, this two-day durational, and relational performance became an annex of research into another kind of Doing Nothing – that of Waiting. Standing inside my little kiosk, this Office on wheels transformed into a site of pause: The Waiting Room / La salle d’attente, where I contemplated what it means to wait, while demonstrating waiting (as we once did when, in a previous era, when we mailed letters and had to be patient about getting a reply).
Sitting at my station, this fire-engine red shelter became like a miniature observation tower. And observing, as I was, the circulation of schoolchildren, delivery trucks, cars, tourists, retired folks and working parents, I couldn’t help but ponder my performative action through the lens of Resting, Walking and Place-Making. My kiosk was situated smack dab in the middle of a neighbourhood that felt very much like a little village, the same people possibly strolling past me several times in one day. While I observed their walking, some actually stopped to consider my resting, and verbally expressed wonder at what the Post Office – and I in it – were doing here.
This intersection of their walking and my “doing nothing” became the very site of place-making; for at the instance when someone would decide to stop and approach me, their otherwise fluid passage was brought to a temporary halt. Why is she inhabiting this spot, why now?
– “What’s going on here, what are you doing?”
– “I’m waiting.”
– “What are you waiting for?”
– “Nothing. I’m waiting. Just to wait.” (“Rien. J’attends, juste pour attendre.”)
…And from this entry point, The Waiting Room / La salle d’attente became a locus of inquiry; a place that when unnoticed, sat latent (yet attentive), and waited, but when remarked upon transformed into a site where questions, values, reflections, local history, concerns, and confessions, were all conferred not only upon me but the situation as a whole (me, and this little booth).
These punctuations in waiting gave the project of waiting a whole other flavour. It was as if I could (and did) occupy two distinct zones: one of actively spacing out and one of actively listening. The two continuously bounced back and forth and definitely complemented each other; I felt myself go into a calm and comfortable lull (in my own head) staring off into the beautiful view of a steep street lined with staircases and overgrown summer flowers when I was unnoticed… And was reanimated when someone came up to me and started to speak. It made those moments more precious too – because the piece was just as much about the waiting as it was about the interactions (which inevitably had us collectively reflecting on waiting).
These punctuations in waiting were also made possible precisely because of the structure surrounding me – this flaming red booth. If I had been sitting on a park bench, no one would likely take notice at all. So in eking out an autonomous space, and putting a sign on it (two signs: Folie/Culture’s Post Office signature and my little “La salle d’attente”) I contributed to creating a place where these exchanges could occur. It should be noted however, that these exchanges did occur entirely because of people’s curiosity. Clearly the kiosk was an eye-catcher, but I was genuinely surprised by the number of locals (and tourists) of all ages who did approach to ask what it was, and why I was there.
And so this coinciding of walking and resting – punctuating waiting (as it were) – became a place where unexpected conversations between strangers could spontaneously happen, with us then collectively establishing our individual and unique positions (who am I, and who are you, as we now meet in this conversation)? What place we do create and inhabit together – both within this specific conversation, and within the world immediately around us.
(Photos above are by Fabien Abitbol, who also wrote a nice little piece about the performance here).
I often refer back in my memory to my first major art residency, the time I spent a year and half traveling between Montreal and the city of Granby, to the artist-run centre 3e impérial (just south of Montreal, in the Eastern Townships). The reason I do is because that was the place where, for the first time, I experienced the possibility of having a long period in which to really get to know a site in order to propose the definitive form of a work. To be able to delve deeply into a process and recognize this as a form of creative making. It’s a very rare opportunity and one that I have consistently sought out since.
The opportunity occurred again with my project at DARE-DARE last season and, once again, I find myself with the incredible spaciousness of a context that allows me to explore on a slow, meandering path.
In a culture where we are often faced with a pressure to produce (and to do so with a certain acceleration) this kind of movement (while happily encouraged within these contexts) can nonetheless occasionally feel stagnant and faltering; like some kind of failure. These feelings don’t take over for very long but when they do emerge, I can find myself entertaining doubt and a feeling of some kind of deficiency. I’m not doing enough. My doing (or non-doing, as it were) is too invisible.
In preparing for a course I’m teaching this fall I came across a quote in an interview with installation artist Ann Hamilton. I was looking at her work for another set of reasons but to my surprise, I found this helpful bit of creative wisdom. What resonated for me was the way in which she described entering into her process of making. In detailing this trajectory, she clearly emphasized the importance of a kind of meditative reception as an integral part of her uncovering the work that will be made. This process is essentially one of waiting. She states:
“I listen to all the millions of small things that give a place its sense. I try to walk it into my body, to feel it, to understand it by moving through it, rather than looking at it. I make lists of words that describe the physical circumstances. I look for their metaphoric possibilities. I wait. That is the practice – to be blank and to listen – and to wait.”
To be blank and to listen, to my mind, is a form of actively doing nothing. At least on the visible surface (as we have repeatedly come to understand that “Doing Nothing” basically masks a whole host of imperceptible, yet present, processes). Her description of “walking it into the body” – hence a direct correlation between walking and receiving (from a space) as a way to reveal the (art)work to eventually be made also acts as a timely inspiration, while I tentatively become familiar with my new residence “home.”
And so this is how I have decided to begin my process in residence at McGill; to walk, and look, and sit, and listen, and wait. To rest, while I receive this new place (and the people who populate it).
Also very timely – and serendipitous – in all of this mix is an intervening performative art project that I have been planning to carry for artist-run centre Folie/Culture’s season opener: Bureau de l’a – POST –. My proposed project has me in the province’s capital of Quebec City over the next two days, occupying a traveling kiosk disguised as a Post Office. The Office on wheels will be my site of pause: A Waiting Room (Salle d’attente) where I consider what it means to wait, and demonstrate waiting (as we once did when, in a previous era, we mailed letters and had to be patient about getting a reply). As I spend this time thinking about waiting, I will also sit and wait, and invite people to come and tell me their stories about waiting…or to simply sit and wait with me. Eventually, something will come.
Sept. 1, 2017: Day one on campus at McGill University. … Honestly, I feel like I am visiting another city. McGill is of and in Montreal (with the great landmark of Mount-Royal looming majestically behind it) but McGill is, for real, its own universe. This isn’t groundbreaking news, but it nonetheless surfaces as the most striking sensation while I sit at a picnic table up on the hill of McTavish, outside the Faculty of Education. I’m overlooking the recently relandscaped reservoir and noting:
1. How new this all seems to me, like a place I hardly know;
2. How easy it is to just completely zone out;
3. How the security guard across the way leaning against the railing seems to be zoning out too. It’s been a good ten minutes that he’s been standing, more-or-less motionless, staring at the field. (This last doesn’t present any kind of problem to me. More so I’m interested in having inadvertently witnessed someone in their own bubble – in the middle of their workday – in a moment of momentary “downtime”);
4. How so many of the people (not student-y looking but tourist-y and of various ages, younger, elderly) make really great use of the benches, sitting down to rest, before continuing on their way up the hill.
… I’m from Montreal but didn’t attend McGill, so my dealings are indirect; I’ve been a user of various resources and spaces (seeing concerts at Pollock Hall, visiting semi-precious stones in the Redpath Museum, eating lunch on the grass just inside the Roddick Gates) so it’s no wonder I feel like a visitor now. But a visitor, plus. For it is not completely unfamiliar, just… like I’m moving temporarily into the house of an old friend; I’ve known this person and been in their home several times, it’s just not the same as (now) living here.
…So this is what I’m most struck by, on my first day on campus: the intensely familiar revealing something new.
In late August, I had the opportunity to participate in a workshop facilitated by Jean-François Prost, founder of Adaptive Actions (AA), an artistic laboratory, that “gives voice to marginal causes, alternative urban lifestyles, counter-conduct and citizen artistic creation by which imagination and personal creativity influence daily life.” As the continuation of a project initiated in Mexico, AA set up shop in Montreal in partnership with the Leonard & Bina Ellen Art Gallery, and carried out its current research – STOPPING/MONTREAL – with the collaboration of seven participants: Renee Baert, Mélanie Courtois, Marilyn Forget, Thomas Ouellet Fredericks, Alexandre Jimenez, Maya Nohra, and yours truly.
Reading the description of the workshop call, I clearly recognized a kindred spirit and saw a timely occasion to be part of an exciting dialogue: “With a strong interest in the singular reality of the grassroots creative appropriations found in the fabric of different cities, AA proposes an action-workshop based on the concept of stopping. Stopping is an activity that can be carried out in different ways by all as a gesture of resilience in a world designed primarily to encourage work, consumption, perpetual growth and efficiency…”
And so getting to know more about AA’s previous endeavours while meeting with this group of artists/cultural workers to exchange on ideas around what Stopping means to each of us (and how we could each carry our own brand of “Stopping Action”) ended up not only being an ideal way to wrap up the summer (of largely Doing Nothing), but also a perfect manner in which to create a bridge between my first official cycle of the Doing Nothing project with DARE-DARE artist-run centre, and the second cycle which is just about to begin at McGill University.
…In fact, while I hadn’t made the direct connection leading up to the conception and final carrying out of my “Stopping Action,” I clued in as I was describing it during our post-actions presentation that my repeated venturing into the middle of the intersection on a red light, to stand and stare dreamily at the cars and horizon stretched out in front of me, effectively encapsulated all the components proposed for this second cycle. Namely, Resting, Walking, and Place-Making.
The flash of this image of standing still in an intersection came as my response to the Stopping proposal (as outlined by Jean-François, and further elaborated upon by our group). That proposal included the notion of “interruption” – that a thing occurring as a break in an otherwise steady flow could constitute either an imposed pause or an unexpected one; a kind of disruption (of routine or conventional behaviour). Further, I was interested in the tension that could emerge from this interruption. These ideas became keys that unlocked this particular image: a situation in which stopping is inherent – yet limited; where a pre-determined “rule” would be re-interpreted through an exaggerated response. The light turns red, cars stop. The light turns green, I walk. The light turns green, cars go. The light turns red, I stop. But what if I walk on the green light, to then stop my walking in mid-path, in front of the cars, and stay still? Obviously I can’t stay still for longer than a set amount of seconds, otherwise, I risk being hurt (or at the very least, being honked angrily at). Hence an inherent (even if subtle) tension. We know that a stopping will take place, but the drivers – momentarily faced with me in front of them – are themselves now faced with the reality of their own stopping (at this red light) as something newly acknowledged possibly beyond a given: “I am here, sitting in my car. I am stopped by a red light.” A possibility for a certain self-reflexivity. We both (all) hold that space of stopping, together.
A few interesting things occurred: Because I continually walked back and forth, stopping in the middle each time before continuing on to the other side, I noticed that entering from one side of the street was vastly different than the other. Who would have thought? For reasons I have yet to understand, one side was easier, while the other more challenging, and it meant that my experience of standing in the middle was never quite the same either – depending upon which side I entered from. My experience of standing in the middle also varied depending on how many cars were stopped in front of me; and the kinds of vehicles they were. A motorcycle had a different impact than did a bus. In fact, I found the bus so imposing that it became nearly impossible to feel any kind of “rest” in this position; I felt my whole body go into “high alert” and like I couldn’t wait to complete my 10-15 seconds of stillness to then find safety on the other side of the street.
With most of the other moments of stopping, however, I felt a tremendous sense of relaxation, like I could just sink into that spot and stay there. For several minutes. Which obviously I didn’t do. But this revealed a secondary interruption; the reality that I had to stop my stopping! I didn’t want to terminate this break but wanted it to keep going. So several rounds of crossing back and forth were each continuously interrupted, a stop-and-start conundrum that could (if I chose) keep going indefinitely, with the non-stop changing of the traffic light from red to green, and back again.
And the connection to Resting, Walking, Place-Making? Well, in describing the experience after the fact, I saw all the components emerging, and merging: walking in a continuous loop to stop and receive (quite profoundly at that) the horizon in front me, while inadvertently reconnecting to an intersection that at one time of my life was integral to my everyday. The intersection in question, on Clark Street at Mozart (a couple of blocks away from AA’s famed terrain vague in Little Italy, Montreal), being the precise location of an apartment where I once lived six years ago.
Recognizing a need to continue this line of inquiry around the complex quest to Do Nothing (and taking this on as a lifelong preoccupation), I decided to look back to previous projects, to see how work from my past was actually paving the way for this current endeavour to come into being.
The result is a second cycle of the Doing Nothing project, expanded to include other processes that have informed my art-making, and, in my perception, encapsulate what I think of as The Invisible, Liminal Spaces in Art.
In an incredible turn of events, this next foray into Nothing has found another home: The P. Lantz Initiative for Excellence in Education & the Arts Artists in Residence program at McGill University (in the Faculty of Education).
Resting, Walking, Place-Making, therefore identifies three major components that, whether taken on their own terms or seen as intermingling within a single trajectory, each underscore the implicit mandate of revealing the more invisible aspects of artistic process.
Resting emerges (as readers familiar with this blog have already encountered) as the continuation of the yearlong project The Sanctimonious Sect of Nothing Is Sacred. Collectively enacted moments of downtime in a variety of public locations in Montreal were carried out alongside a program of curated dialogues (Talking About Nothing With…), both of which generated extensive discussions around the complexity of this quest. A general consensus repeatedly rose to the surface: that there is a need to carve out such spaces (and times) for deep pause within our personal lives and within our professional sectors – albeit that this is a very difficult thing to actually (or consistently) do. Sitting with the intricacies of these questions affirmed that (non)activity is an inherently political act: one that challenges notions of productivity, of what constitutes “failure” (and success) and our capacity to comfortably engage in “non-productive” uses of time.
Place-Making issues forth from a series of residencies in Quebec and beyond in which geopoetic meanderings and one-on-one interactions considered such questions as: What consciousness do we bring to places we occupy? How do places inhabit us? How do we interact with the surrounding environment – and with others who we may encounter there? In a mindful habitation of successive sites, I undertook several accompanied trajectories; transactions that consciously situated themselves in relation to both “the other” (as we each become the other to one (an)other) and to the context in which we found ourselves. Unpacking the process of how we come to understand a place – and the conditions required to feel some sense of “belonging” – this was an inquiry into how “place” is indeed constructed. The goal was to activate these sites by introducing a performative element via a relational exchange – collaboratively working toward expanding a moment in time while collapsing an already diminishing space between the artist/audience and art/life. The art frame (while more-or-less imperceptible) provided an invaluable context and container within which to carry out this research – a rather delicate form of personalized social engagement.
Walking is the inexorable by-product of both of the above. As a conscious act within these varied projects, walking has occupied the role of an embodied encounter with the surrounding environment: at once a means to get from point A to point B, while also creating connection to (and understanding of) “place,” through subtly integrating aspects of the particularity of “places” in a circularity of identity construction (place informs who I am; I imprint my identity onto a place). Walking is also, however, the most banal of pursuits, a “non-action” sitting at the threshold of liminal space as it exists as a largely invisible activity. Walking is slow, inefficient, unproductive. Rebecca Solnit writes: “[T]hinking is generally thought of as doing nothing in a production-oriented culture, and doing nothing is hard to do. It’s best done by disguising it as doing something, and the something closest to doing nothing is walking.” This succinct correlation accurately highlights the role of walking not only in my most recent research but also as a process that has become an increasingly central element of my post-studio art practice.
…Bringing the foundations of these lines of inquiry to the Artist in Residency program, my desire is to continue exploring these themes within a collective framework. To examine the roles of rest (slowness, stillness, spaces of pause and interval), connection to place (the way we invest of ourselves in the environments that frame our day-to-day activities both professionally and personally) and walking (an everyday activity that at once serves a practical function but also allows for freedom and fluidity of thought), as parallel forms of creative and intellectual expression that can enhance pedagogical methods while providing valuable tools for social engagement and change.
I am delighted to announce that I will be presenting a durational and site-specific performance piece during the New Performance Turku Festival this October 2017: Canadian Silence.
I often refer back in my memory to my first major art residency, the time I spent a year and half traveling between Montreal and the city of Granby, to the artist-run centre 3e impérial (just south of Montreal, in the Eastern Townships). The reason I do is because that was the place where, for the first time, I experienced the possibility of having a long period in which to really get to know a site in order to propose the definitive form of a work. To be able to delve deeply into a process and recognize this as a form of creative making. It’s a very rare opportunity and one that I have consistently sought out since.
The Sanctimonious Sect of Nothing Is Sacred 