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VIVO Media Arts and Video Out are pleased to invite you to join us for Kinship, a selection of video work drawn from a call for submissions that was circulated in the fall. The call, Needs To Be Seen, invited video producers to submit works regardless of the production date, an invite for media artists to look back, to think which one of their works needs to be seen in the light of the current moment. Internationally, nationally and locally we received many excellent submissions from which we have drawn together the following screening program.
Sqilxw Woman: Emerging from the Water (2020)
Mariel Belanger
3:46
This video was created as part of the MITACS project EarthDiver: Digital Landbased Worlding, with PI Dolleen Tisawii'ashii Manning (Queens), Co-I Mary Bunch (York) and Native Women in the Arts (community partner) featuring the voice and talents of Hodari Newtown as sound designer/composer. In a multiverse version of reality, Mariel floats on the stars and tells a captikwl - animal story of The Earth Diver while practicing stand up paddling in a Salishan Sturgeon Nose Canoe made by Dr Shawn Brigman on the Columbia River when an actual earth diver, a beaver smacks his tail on the water surface before deep diving again.
Marsh Dreamer: Fox revives the Transformer in the Dream Marsh Pluralverse (2021)
A Second Life Sqilxw Woman digital performance by Mariel Belanger
4:35
Marshlands provide key housing materials and harvest location for the creation of tule mat tipis in Syilx territory. The advent of ‘private property’ and ‘bird sanctuary’ reduced our capacity to maintain these survival practices, reducing our knowledge of the water filtration systems we helped manage. When I talk about harvesting reeds in a digital marsh, it makes me want to be with the reeds physically. In captikwl – animal stories, Fox revives the transformer to ensure the stories get distributed as they should. Often it feels like Fox finds me in an emotional pile, jumps over me three times, and lately pulls me out of this landless, futureless capitalism into sqilxwcentric reality, literally and digitally. In the pluralverse, I theorize through digital gesture and defy gravity and colonization in the Second Life mainframe. I use this performative process of visual storytelling in Second Life to take back the narrative within the digital landscape. How powerful are thoughts when we play them out digitally? As a mixed syilx person, I understand what it feels like to be walking the edge of futures lost, through colonial erasure. Capitalism is creating a gap in knowledge separating people from land in their heads, “these People-To-Be won’t know anything and might even turn into people eaters so we must always infiltrate their dreams and put visions in their heads to find the gifts the ancestors left for us to find”. (Belanger, 2021)
Nobody Knows Me Like the Blues (2002)
Terreane Derrick
6:13
Nobody Knows Me Like the Blues offers an intimate window into the world of Linda-Sue Wilson, a blues singer from the Okanagan Nation. A journey to discover what it means to sing the Blues. Discovering the self, channeling the pain, evolving and becoming are the ideas that this work is focused on.
Your Future is Filled (2021)
Andy Zuliani
11:11
Your Future is Filled is an ongoing project exploring the healing potential and corporate baggage of self-help and new age culture. It operates under the guise of a tailored motivational service and ambient music series, whose products promise to increase productivity, eliminate stress, and ready individuals for the contemporary workplace. This video includes an introduction to the program, three motivational sessions — whose “positive affirmations” were created by feeding hundreds of business-oriented motivational statements into a predictive text generator — and ends in a stirring musical finale.
privacy-GrDN.info (2021)
S4RA
8:00
By placing automation within this simulated i̶d̶l̶e̶ garden it arises the complexity of what being human is in this electronic age. Learning, leisure and work share the same interchangeable framework in this post-truth dynamic where operations are engineered in an ambiguous way to praise & glorify the strenuous path of c̶o̶n̶t̶e̶m̶p̶o̶r̶a̶r̶y̶ labour system.
{ hybrid emulation that deals with coding as the backbone structure of a semiotic < container > / . }
VIVO is located in the homelands of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam) Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), and səl̓ílwətaɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) peoples in a warehouse space at 2625 Kaslo Street south of East Broadway at the end of E 10th. Transit line 9 stops at Kaslo Street on Broadway. From the bus stop, the path is paved, curbless, and on a slight decline. The closest skytrain station is Renfrew Station, which is three blocks south-east of VIVO and has an elevator. From there, the path is paved, curbless, and on a slight incline. There is parking available at VIVO, including wheelchair access parking. There is a bike rack at the entrance. The front entrance leads indoors to a set of 7 stairs to the lobby.
A wheelchair ramp is located at the west side of the main entrance. The ramp has two runs: the first run is 20 feet long, and the second run is 26 feet. The ramp is 60 inches wide. The slope is 1:12. The ramp itself is concrete and has handrails on both sides. There is an outward swinging door (34 inch width) at the top of the ramp leading to a vestibule. A second outward swinging door (33 inch width) opens into the exhibition space. Buzzers and intercoms are located at both doors to notify staff during regular office hours or events to unlock the doors. Once unlocked, visitors can use automatic operators to open the doors.
There are two all-gender washrooms. One has a stall and is not wheelchair accessible. The other is a single room with a urinal and is wheelchair accessible: the door is 33 inches wide and inward swinging, without automation. The toilet has 11 inch clearance on the left side and a handrail.
To reach the bathrooms from the studio, exit through the double doors and proceed straight through the lobby and down the hall . Turn left, and the two bathrooms will be on your right side. The closest one has a stall and is not wheelchair accessible. The far bathroom is accessible.
Before the MFA and PHD, Mariel was first trained in sqilxw storytelling and performance culture as a child by her grandmother, Mary Abel, as a teen actor with director Lynn Phelan at Senklip Native Theatre, and as language student with Dr Jeanette Armstrong. Observing other Indigenous performance practice, such as Geraldine Manossa’s Roots of Cree Drama and non-Indigenous Stanislavski method by Matthew Harrison at the Actors Foundry, key themes or principles of performance I pull from this training that is relevant to Second Life worlding as a digital performance practice include recognizing common gestures like how avatars move in dance and how the sky, land and underwater are all livable spaces in which captikwl grew from through the lives of those that came before us all the way to ameba memory. According to our stories we have been here ‘since time immemorial’, to me that is an indication of how long matter retains memory through movement throughout evolution.
Terreane Derrick came into the arts both by accident and design. She is of Gitxsan and German ancestry and lives with the attributes of being born with cerebral palsy. At an early age, Terreane's first foray into the performing arts was puppetry. She currently explores the mediums of writing, painting and drawing. She also has training in film production. Terreane is also an accomplished public speaker and facilitator and has sat on government boards as a special needs/disability advisor. Terreane appreciates the medicine of art and is currently focused on personal governance.
Andy Zuliani is a media artist and composer working at the zones of overlap between electro-acoustic music, video art, and text. His current practice draws him in the direction of medieval music-making and the invention of seasonal rites.
S4RA is a non-binary && genderqueer digital artist that spent endless hours fighting monsters & strolling through mazes. so, it only felt natural 2 evolve through an experimental & explorative process of gaming visual culture & popular gif files. also feeds on social media platforms 2 engage animations into the depths of gender role play & political plots. still plays old school video games.
