Can the body be a counter-monument? In what ways do sound and movement destabilise textual hegemony? In this panel, three artists will explore the possibilities of performance as it relates to difficult histories and contemporary crises. Hannah Kaya investigates the capacity of “climate grief circles” formed to collectively mourn ecological collapse. In contrast, Mariana Marcassa’s piece explores sound as a conduit of resistance to a colonial past. Finally, Kate MacDonald’s work breaks free of the constraints of genre, demonstrating the world’s many facets and intersections.  

Moderator: Carla Taunton

Performers:

Kate MacDonald

Mariana Marcassa

Hannah Kaya

Kate Macdonald

Kate Macdonald was born and raised in Kjipuktuk (popularised as Halifax). Macdonald studied Performance Acting at Ryerson University in Toronto, ON. At the end of 2016 with the political climate swiftly changing she recognized it was time to have some conversations. 

Out of this desire to create conversation through art activism she Founded and Created The Magic Project. Which focuses on bringing marginalised brilliance to the forefront of social media using the arts. Kate is also a Community Facilitator and Youth Programmer.

Her art practice is vast and explorative. Themes that are of particular prominence in Macdonald’s work are self expression, justice, healing, joy, magic and natural and ancestral connection. In 2020, Kate, Trayvone Clayton & DeRico Symonds created an African Nova Scotian community based, youth-led initiative called The Game Changers. After a year of working together in advocacy, activism, and community they decided to collaborate officially.  Macdonald’s hopes are to remain disruptive and to continue creating space to experience joy and encourage youth to celebrate themselves. 

Abstract:

I could never just write a paper. In truth, I don’t think I wanted to ever follow those rules. My mind sees the world as million intersections, reminders, poetry, directions, recipes, music, discoveries...I want them all to exist in one place. I see in images and always wanted an honorary mention of those within my "papers". Who made these rules? Why can't my text be all? What is in a paper anyways? I want to disrupt the expectations of what my writing needs to be and where it needs to/can only exist. Isn't challenging the structure of traditionally written research part of rewriting the future? Part of moulding scribes written from every margin of society. Find out how I see the world. Find out where I think our magic hides. My proposed topic...the score of my life. Things I cannot understand, things I am musing over, my obsessions, my dreams and my art.

The photo is a digital collage by Kate Macdonald. The title of the artwork is "EXPLORATION".

Mariana Marcassa

Mariana has a PhD in Clinical Psychology and three-year postdoctoral research at Concordia University where she worked with SenseLab, Acts of Listening Lab, Angelique Willkie and the performing arts cluster LePARC. She is the author of the double book BANZO SOUNDS and BANZO LANDSCAPE, an English-Portuguese publication by Grosse Fugue Edition, published in December 2019.

Abstract:

"La voix d’où je tiens ma vie" proposes to explore the sounds/affects of a text through a “voicing experimentation-reading”, releasing everything that language represses (noises, tremors, whispers, breathing, etc.). It is not about eliminating the word, but about the destitution of its hegemony, the disorganization of its hierarchy, the reconfiguration of its function and the way of evoking it. Words are of interest to this performative experimentation - as with Artaud - as breathing and plastic sources of language, considered not only for what they say, semantically speaking, but for their sound and, most of all, as movements: stammerings, babies' vocalizations, ondulations, cries, modal world voices, the strangest variations, noises, whispers.

https://marianamarcassa.com/sound-therapy/

https://cargocollective.com/marianamarcassa

Hannah Kaya

Hannah Kaya is an art-maker, researcher, and young farmer who tries to create resilience in the context of collapse.

Abstract:

How do you mourn ongoing ecological collapse? The language of 'climate grief' has been popularized across the English speaking world, with many in North America beginning to host regular 'climate grief circles'. These gatherings allow for the collective processing of feelings associated with climate-related grief. If the 'grief circle' is one common strategy for moving through personal grief within one's immediate context, the monument scales many of the same functions. Moved by Robert Nixon's provocative question, ‘what is a war casualty?’ (2011: 200), this paper considers how small scale, performance-based commemorative devices might better allow us to see, grieve, and respond to the ongoing more-than-human loss of military conflict. I turn to the durational performance installation and living (counter-)monument Operations (1945-2006): Movements, developed by boundaries/conditions performance assembly (2018, Toronto). Operations is a living monument: its material is not granite or stone, but organic body worked over the course of 12 hours of constant choreography. Dancers repeat a short ballet routine over sod, while the names of every military campaign undertaken by a UN-member nation are projected above their heads. The result is powerful, and, I argue, is more appropriate as a commemorative response to ongoing violence than a state-sanctioned, large-scale, permanent statue. 

Parts of this research were published for Performance Research Journal (March 2020). However, I am increasingly disillusioned by modes of academic research which isolate themselves behind elaborate phrases and nonsensical discursive norms. I am hoping to re-calibrate my research to make it more accessible and to engage in community-based discussions of how the strategies embodied in Operations and similar artistic projects might be made useful on local levels. I am interested in the tensions embodied by an artistic practice that, while moving, is only witnessed by a small, "knowing" group. I would take the opportunity of this conference to revisit my research and attempt to re-align it with my commitments as a climate activist.