Sitting within the protected area of the Mabou Highlands, MacKinnon’s Brook is part of the larger conservation region stretching between the towns of Mabou and Inverness on the western coast of Unama’ki/Cape Breton Island. The Mabou Highlands have earned their protected status thanks to decades-long efforts from community members at the local and provincial levels who rallied to protect the area and its five-kilometre coastline from development. The wilderness site boasts an extensive network of community-created hiking trails, maintained by the Cape Mabou Trail Club, that also cross onto Crown and private lands.

For two consecutive summers, Outdoor School, a critical environmental art platform composed of artist Diane Borsato and curator Amish Morrell, has invited artists to lead a residency in MacKinnon’s Brook where the duo is intermittently based. Morrell was born in Inverness and grew up in Inverness County, and the duo now share their time between Toronto and the Island. Outdoor School initiates collective knowledge-sharing experiences, typically outdoors, that enmesh contemporary art and ecology with the aim of spurring participatory learning about the histories and ecologies of a given site. These projects have ranged from snowshoeing on the frozen Humber River in Toronto to swimming with mathematicians in Banff, as well as countless mushroom forays. Some of these creative outdoor activities have taken the shape of exhibitions, courses, and residencies.

As part of their continued exploration into the spaces where art and ecology meet, Outdoor School curated two residencies as an invitation to artists to explore MacKinnon’s Brook for respective two-week periods of land-based research and exploratory study. American artist Amy Franceschini and Belgian artist Lode Vranken, of the collective Futurefarmers, were residents in August 2023. Most recently, Cape Breton-born, Toronto-based artist Sameer Farooq was artist-in-residence in August 2024. 

Artists were hosted in a cottage on the top of a hill off of a dirt road with a view to the west overlooking the Gulf of St. Lawrence and beyond to Prince Edward Island. Tucked away among the trees, the cottage belongs to David Rumsey, the creator of one of the largest private map collections in the Americas, and his partner, Abby Smith Rumsey, a writer and historian. The American couple have been spending time in MacKinnon’s Brook for several decades and participated in its conservation efforts.

Both Futurefarmers and Farooq were visiting the specific region of MacKinnon’s Brook for the first time. Based in the map collector’s cottage, the residents employed their particular artistic approaches to situate themselves in their new surroundings and attune to the network of relationships that make up its ecosystem. After their respective stays, the artists charted their learnings in a double-sided print. Each poster can be read as a type of map of the methods they used to get to know MacKinnon’s Brook, their experiences of doing so, and what they learned about its ecologies.

Resounding (Dis)Orientation

At MacKinnon’s Brook, Futurefarmers extended the collective’s concerns regarding reorienting perceptions of place and of dominant systems that structure human life in relation to nature. Their residency culminated in the participatory work and performance THEN/NOW/HEAR/HERE, where the artists invited the public to experience the environment and trail system they had connected with during their visit, and to create a collective attunement to its elements. On the afternoon of August 13, 2023, a group of approximately forty people—a mix of residents and visitors to the area—gathered at the Mabou Post Road trailhead. The group was led into the vast trail system by Borsato and Morrell, and began the four-kilometre one-way hike into the mountainous terrain, headed toward MacKinnon’s Brook Cove.

The path led the group north, up peaks and down into valleys, through grassy meadows and rocky cliffs, giving way to intermittent vistas of the vast Gulf of St. Lawrence to the west. En route, the artists prompted participants to meditate on their sense of orientation and assigned each participant a cardinal point. Deep into the hike, the group neared the cove and started their descent into the rocky opening, following the river where it meets the ocean. The participants gathered and sat on a grassy cliff ledge looking out toward the water and became spectators to a musical performance taking place below them amongst the rocky crevices. 

Interspersed among the cove, Franceschini, Vranken, Borsato, and their collaborators greeted the group perched on rocks. Sounds echoed from large angular foghorns made out of PVC pipes and funnels, wrapped with canvas to resemble floating sails. The group was accompanied by Electro Jacques Therapy, the moniker of Nova Scotia-based violinist Jacques Mindreau, who crouched closer to the rocks to play Petro-Acoustic Signals (2023)—an instrument constructed with Futurefarmers consisting of piano strings screwed taut across rocks. 

Throughout the performance, Mindreau played the strings using a violin bow or by plucking them, and alternated by playing a violin. Speakers were embedded throughout the rocks to amplify the sounds, which echoed across the cove and wove themselves with the sounds of the cascading river and the ocean waves lapping up against the shore. An experimental orchestra of human and non-human players alike materialized. 

In the resulting print Futurefarmers created, also titled THEN/NOW/HEAR/HERE (2024), the publication opens like a trail map and features snapshots from their experimentations and the public event. In one section subtitled “A Score for Attending to an Ecology of Frequencies,” the artists share the formula they used to orchestrate their eclectic outdoor harmony. Perhaps most revealing in their approach to MacKinnon’s Brook and the encounter they staged is their definition for the term (dis)orientation in their formula: “Imagine the space around you as a field, a conduit, a mesh network, a field of influence upon you, and your influence upon it;”—marking all bodies and elements present as active participants in the work.  

Interbeing on Cape Breton

One year later, Farooq arrived in Cape Breton but on the opposite coast of the eastern side where he grew up in Sydney during the 1980s. As he became secluded in MacKinnon’s Brook and studied the natural ecosystem that surrounded him, the focus of his residency turned to encompass relationships at a more foundational level. Farooq brought the Vietnamese Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh’s texts Interbeing and The Other Shore, which guided his contemplations about the relationships sustaining the ecologies of the brook.

Staying in the cabin, he considered the typical methods used to navigate land and the impulse of “trying to turn the unknown into the known” when one creates a map. Instead, Farooq turned to Nhat Hanh’s Buddhist philosophies around the concept of interbeing—how everything is connected and nothing can thrive on its own—in order to map out how the organisms of the lands of MacKinnon’s Brook were in relation to one another. 

Farooq explains that his research took on an introspective quality as he employed meditation as his main method to orient himself in his new surroundings.

 “A lot of my work is done in meditation,” says Farooq. “So it just felt very natural to evoke those processes again there.”  

He describes the residency as becoming one of attentiveness and presence.

“It was literally about looking at the goldenrods and Queen Anne’s lace and their relation to the wind, to really understand the reliance of these plants on these elements,” he says. “It was slow, repetitive work. It was daily meditations, daily walks, a lot of note-taking, a lot of looking, a lot of tending to.” 

Farooq developed a glossary to put into words his close observations of how elements were relating to one another, which he visually documented through photography to think through the philosophy of interbeing. Through his reflections, he came to realize that, while in MacKinnon’s Brook, he was “sitting in the basin of all these relationships.” He perceived how all plants and elements of the land, including his presence there, were profoundly interlinked and, ultimately, dependent on each other to exist.

Farooq’s recently completed poster, Bringing Thich Nhat Hanh to Cape Breton (2025), gives a glimpse into this rich network of relationships, as it showcases series of his photographs studying MacKinnon’s Brook. The repetitive images of his subjects horizontally line each side of the poster in grids resembling strips of a film roll. One side captures the progressive rise and fall of the tide in each frame; the other shows the yellow goldenrods overlaid against a cloudy blue sky, the slight movements of the Queen Anne’s lace in the wind, his foot touching the coursing river, a momentous spruce meeting the horizon line and overlapping where the sky and the ocean split in half. 

Farooq describes his residency experience at MacKinnon’s Brook alongside his recent exhibition The Fairest Order in the World at Halifax’s Dalhousie Art Gallery in 2023 as turning points in publicly presenting his work in Nova Scotia. These projects have affirmed him not only as a Nova Scotian artist, but as a Cape Breton artist, attesting to how deeply his work is informed by this place. 

Farooq relays that the divide between both sides of Cape Breton’s art communities was on his mind when he arrived at MacKinnon’s Brook, specifically the stories that get told or are known about each of them. He referenced the white American artists that came up along the East Coast and settled or spent seasons on the western side of Cape Breton in the 1960s onwards, and how this artistic scene is known much more widely on and off the Island in contrast to the Indigenous or South Asian art he grew up with on the Island. 

“I didn’t grow up with Joan Jonas and Richard Serra and Philip Glass,” he says. “I grew up really around a sort of Pakistani and Indian [and broader] South Asian creativity that was brought to the Sydney area, where there were [all] sorts of expressions of creativity—of painting, of sculpture, of mural work—that wasn’t really promoted in this way in the rest of the Island.” 

Farooq cites individuals like Pushpa Rathor, a miniature painter and former professor at Cape Breton University; Dr. Khalifa, a medical doctor, gardener, and painter; and his own father, an ophthalmologist, poet, and painter, as a few of his notable artistic influences from his community growing up. 

“I’m from part of the Island where South Asian immigrants would come to for work,” says Farooq. 

He describes how art wasn’t necessarily promoted as a profession in the Pakistani and Indian communities of Cape Breton during his formative years, though everyone in his community harboured artistic expression and these featured prominently at gatherings and parties—be it through poetry, music, or visual art. 

“There was just such a deep, deep respect and appreciation for arts among the community that raised me on the Island,” he says. “A culture of practice that looks very different than what Nova Scotia collects and promotes.” 

Coming back to the Island as an artist for the residency in MacKinnon’s Brook helped Farooq harmonize the gulf between both coasts and also redefine his sense of belonging to Cape Breton. He gave an artist talk at the Inverness County Centre for the Arts to conclude his residency, the first artist talk he’s given in his home province, where members of the art community from both sides of the Island gathered.

 “There was a real sense of homecoming. I think people understood very much where I was coming from in my projects as being one of our own, in a way.” 

These stories of disorientation and interbeing while in residence, about the art communities on both coasts, help to attune to the rich and complex histories as well as inheritances of Cape Breton’s broader arts ecology. Perhaps what they all have in common is the land on which they practice, how the coastal lands and environment of the Island influence their practices and gather them in its basin of relationships. 

By Shannon Webb-Campbell

The biannual gathering Shore Time on Fogo Island from September 26 to 29, 2024, was more than a coming together off an island in the North Atlantic, it was an invitation to the otherworldly. Organized by Fogo Island Arts, part of the longstanding Shorefast and international residency, Shore Time brings together artists, architects, ecologists, geologists, and writers to envision possible futures on an island off an island, a place far away from faraway.

Just getting to Fogo Island is part of the experience. Arriving at the recently refurbished Gander International Airport, built in 1938 as one of the first transatlantic refuelling spots, travellers meet the newly renovated, modernist International Departures Lounge. From an exhibition of vintage furniture by German designer Klaus Nienkamper to a piece of a steel girder from the World Trade Center, a contemporary gallery, a theatre, a bar, and a gift shop, the airport is a hub for storytelling. Didactic panels take viewers through the history of the airport. The successful Broadway show Come From Away was based on Gander’s role in the aftermath of the 9/11 terrorist attacks and the airport authority being ill-equipped to accommodate the thirty-eight passenger flights that landed in Gander on September 11, 2001. The exhibition also highlights the many famous passengers who have touched down here, like Marilyn Monroe, Frank Sinatra, Albert Einstein, and The Beatles. Fidel Castro landed here on Christmas Eve in 1972 (Gander was the refuelling stop between Cuba and the Soviet Union) and went tobogganing for the first time. 

From the airport, the journey to Fogo Island begins with an hour’s drive to Farewell Harbour. Fogo isn’t easy to get to, and for many, that’s part of the appeal. If the ferry is on time and weather conditions are fair, the ferry sails to Change Islands where it docks about twenty minutes into the crossing, before continuing on to Fogo Island. The crossing takes an hour and fifteen minutes, and on the deck is where mainlanders and islanders intersect. 

The ethos of Shorefast and Fogo Island Arts is rooted in the poetics and question of how we orient ourselves in relation to the world, the natural environment, our economies and how we connect with each other. As part of Shore Time, folks from all over the world gathered to visit studios, spark new conversations, attend lectures, share community meals of cold plates and fish cakes, and go on guided shoreline architectural walks and coastal hikes rooted in foraging, berry picking, and geology.

Shore Time’s artists and thinkers include: Zita Cobb, innkeeper and founder of Shorefast; painter Nelson White; seaweed lamp and kelp broach artist Nadine Decker; photographer and storyteller Paddy Barry; filmmaker Sharon Lockhart; architect Indy Johar; geologist Jayne Wynne; Fogo Island Inn executive chef Timothy Charles; and past and present artists-in-residence like photographer Ethan Murphy, visual artist Wong Winsome Dumalagan, food cultural historian L. Sasha Gora, and many others. Shore Time drew intrigue from folks based in Singapore, New York, Vancouver, Halifax, Toronto, Prince Edward Island, and across Newfoundland and Labrador. 

A passport-style itinerary designed by Inuk graphic designer, art director, and architect Mark Bennett emboldened the intentional poetics of Shore Time. The olive green and gold-embossed publication featured E.J. Pratt’s poem “Newfoundland,” a beloved poem of many islanders. Pratt writes: “Here the tides flow, / And here they ebb; / Not with that dull, unsinewed tread of waters / Held under bonds to move / Around unpeopled shores— / Moon-driven through a timeless circuit / Of invasion and retreat; / But with a lusty stroke of life / Pounding at stubborn gates.” Fogo Island’s remote, rugged shoreline boasts a population of 2,200 people for 260 square miles. Two pages in the program dedicated to four questions served as our cardinal directions: What do we know? What do we have? What do we miss? What do we love? 

Not only did these questions set the tone for an intersectional gathering of art, design, ecology, foodways, and economy on a small archipelago scattered off of Newfoundland, but these inquiries deepened the talks, walks, visits, and conversations throughout Shore Time. Over the duration of the gathering, I asked myself what do I know? Depending on my whereabouts on the island and the elements I faced, whether it be the land, the water, or weather, I wasn’t sure. All I knew is I felt both estranged and completely at home. What do I have? Most days, it was cold hands in need of knitted mittens and a warm heart. Certain hours, I felt I had nothing, and suddenly, I’d align with a panoramic vista and become filled with gratitude. What do I miss? This place. This island. The wind. The water. My family. The cod. The tuckamore. The 420 million years of geologic history. My mother and grandmothers’ voices. What do I love? These archipelagos. Ktaqmkuk. Every single wildflower. Mostly, while wandering around the island, I felt overwhelmed by the raw beauty of the place, on the cusp of tears. Grief-stricken by what’s been taken by colonization and the erosion of time.

Fogo Island is like the majority of Ktaqmkuk’s, or what is colonially known as Newfoundland, outport communities, being accessible only by boat. Little Fogo Islands were a fishing base for Indigenous populations and early settlers alike during the summer months. Mostly, Indigenous folks migrated elsewhere on the larger island in order to survive the winter. Being a Mi’kmaq-settler poet belonging to Flat Bay First Nation (No’kmaq Village), I noted the land acknowledgement included Shore Time’s passport-style publication: “Fogo Island being on the ancestral homelands of the Beothuk, whose culture has been lost forever as a result of colonization.” The ancestral homelands of many diverse populations of Indigenous Peoples, including Mi’kmaq, Innu, and Inuit, Newfoundland and Labrador was also ground zero for colonization. 

As 2024 marks the seventy-fifth and much-celebrated anniversary of Newfoundland and Labrador’s Confederation with Canada, Indigenous Peoples from the island of Newfoundland aren’t celebrating. At the time of Confederation in 1949, the provincial and federal governments made no provisions for the new province’s Indigenous groups. The Terms of Union, which determined how Newfoundland and Labrador would operate as a province, did not mention Indigenous people. As a result, Innu, Inuit, and Mi’kmaq people living in Newfoundland and Labrador were unable to access the same rights, programs, services, and funding the federal Indian Act made available to other Indigenous groups in Canada. The exclusion of Indigenous people in Confederation was not just a political oversight but part of a much broader and longer narrative about the depletion and absence of Indigenous people in Newfoundland and Labrador.  

Fogo Island Arts’ Shore Time programming included a talk with former Fogo Island Arts artist-in-residence Nelson White, member of Flat Bay First Nation, and a reception for Wutanmiunu – Our community, a solo exhibition depicting the beauty and joy of our Mi’kmaw community. As the didactic panel shared, Wutanminu – Our community is “a tribute to the strong networks of familial and relational ties within Indigenous communities.” White’s solo exhibition of paintings features community leaders, doctors, lawyers, and musicians and captures the community relationships and their essential roles in fostering a sense of belonging and dignity. White’s father, Elder Calvin White, has been a leader in ensuring rights and recognition for the Newfoundland Mi’kmaq. He recently published One Man’s Journey: The Mi’kmaw Revival in Ktaqmkuk (Memorial University Press, 2023), which features his son Nelson’s painting of a canoe on the cover of the book and a portrait by Nelson as his author photo.

Daily sunrise yoga in the Fogo Island Gallery at Fogo Island Inn in Joe Batt’s Arm with instructor Jennifer Charles of Seven Seasons Farms was an option for shore-goers. As I was lying on the mat in savasana with my eyes closed, I imagined White’s portraits of the potato dancers and of visual artists Jordan Bennett and Amy Malbeuf with their children, of Senator Judy White and of the teepee builders coming to life along with the pop art flowers in the background of the portraits and dancing together like a constellation forming above the building, which is perched on stilts. 

What do we know? What do we have? What do we miss? What do we love? 

After morning yoga there was an opportunity to visit local studios, art organizations, and galleries in each of the communities around the island, including Deep Bay, Fogo, Joe Batt’s Arm, and Tilting. Artists-in-residence opened their workspaces—Long Studio, Tower Studio, Bridge Studio, and Squish Studio—and local artists opened their sheds and studios for visiting hours. Each of the Fogo Island Arts studios is architecturally unique and requires a jaunt over the hill or a kilometre’s walk in and out. When I visited Ethan Murphy at Squish Studio in Tilting, he generously shared insight into his photographic process and showed negatives and prints of new work. During his three-month residency on Fogo Island, he started a new long-term project photographing the interiors of sheds. As part of Newfoundland’s culture, the shed is a gathering space, a workshop, and a refuge beyond the domesticity and confines of the house.

From enriching talks between art historian Tom McDonough and artist Danh Vo, to a Food Fishery Circle, to Zita Cobb in conversation with Indy Johar, an architect and co-founder of 00 (project00.cc) and Dark Matter, an international field laboratory focused on building institutional infrastructures for regions, towns, cities, and civic societies, Shore Time explored new approaches to community economic development and sustainability. Johar, who reminded us that we are billions of years of extraordinary unfurling, asked an important question: “How do you go from control theory to learning theory?” As a way of moving from control toward a model of care and ultimately love, Johar shared his wisdom: “The real revolution is how we imagine ourselves.”

An offshoot of Shore Time was a new installation, It’s a Trap! by artist Jason Murphy (a.k.a. The Souper) at the Red Shed in Shoal Bay, which featured two different vegan soups (a green split pea and orange ginger carrot) made and served by the artist. Murphy’s installation draws from the colours of the crab pots used as materials and also features the words “Spotless Hands and Sterling Silver Forks” drawn on the shed’s old floor in ritual salt by OK Sea Salt. As we gathered together, all bundled up in our layers of sweaters and coats outside the shed, sipping our soup on the lip of the North Atlantic, I was surprised there wasn’t a breath of wind. The weather is an unpredictable element of life on Fogo Island.

Highlighting the intersectionality of art, ecology, and the climate crisis was a visit to Liam Gillick’s “A Variability Quantifier (The Fogo Island Red Weather Station, 2022),” an artwork that functions as an operational weather station along Waterman’s Brook Trail. On this guided weather station hike, Andria Hickey, Fogo Island Arts and Shorefast Head of Programmes, and Lorie Penton, Lead Outdoor Activity Guide at Fogo Island Inn, shared insight into the weather station, the flora and fauna, as well as their own relationships to the variable weather systems on Fogo Island. Gillick’s “A Variability Quantifier (The Fogo Island Red Weather Station, 2022)” is part of the World Weather Network, set up by twenty-eight art agencies around the world, and has been acquired by the National Gallery of Canada. Due to the climate crisis, the significance of Gillick’s installation is monumental to Fogo Islanders and the larger weather network now more than ever. Prior to the installation of Gillick’s weather station, news of the weather conditions came to Fogo Island from Twillingate, known as iceberg alley, one hundred kilometres away.

Shore Time’s closing party, held at J.K. Contemporary, a fine art gallery in a restored schoolhouse originally built in 1840 that exhibits local, national, and international artists in the hub of Joe Batt’s Arm, had shore-goers wandering in the erratics together. Drawn from the Latin verb errare, “to wander,” erratic is a geologic term for nomadic boulders carried thousands of years ago by glaciers. Erratics II, a biannual group show of artists who both work and live in the erratic, featured the beautiful moonscape-like oil paintings and graphite remapping islands series of M’Liz Keefe, Erin Hunt’s colourful abstracts; photographer Karen Stentaford’s tintypes of fences in Tilting; and Bruce Pashak’s stunning, feminine portrait “Wachet Auf: Grete and the dress of life.” Wachet auf is a cantata by J.S. Bach, known by its English translation, “Sleepers Awake.” Grete is the sister of Gregor (who turns into a beetle-like insect) in Kafka’s novella The Metamorphosis. 

Erratics II highlights artists with unique ties to the place, who may not be originally from Fogo Island but have either called it home or spent an extended period of time on the island’s shores. Erratics II deeply resonated with me, and perhaps all of us who wandered to Fogo Island for Shore Time. 

Shannon Webb-Campbell is of Mi’kmaq and settler heritage. She is a member of Flat Bay First Nation (No’kmaq Village) in Ktaqmkuk/Newfoundland. Her books include: Re: Wild Her (Book*hug 2025), Lunar Tides (2022), I Am a Body of Land (2019), and Still No Word (2015), which was the recipient of Egale Canada’s Out in Print Award. Shannon holds a PhD in English/Creative Writing from the University of New Brunswick, and is the editor of Visual Arts News Magazine and Muskrat Magazine.

Through my own art practice and experience with producing and participating in socially engaged art projects, I understand that collaboration, participation, and social engagement have the capacity to create transformative experiences and dynamic artwork. 

Yet, I have felt the edges of collaboration and the discontents of participation. Whether an artist intends to trivialize, tokenize, and even harm someone they invite into their process does not mitigate this effect. Conflict, misrepresentation, and refusal can be a transformative opportunity for learning and reflection that completely change the direction of a project. The facilitation of socially engaged art, collaboration, and participation is complex. After all, there are deadlines to meet, shows to hang, reports to write, and funders to appease. 

For better or for worse, there are few, if any, formal ethical codes that direct the engagement of artists working with people and communities. What exists instead are developed practices and personal guidelines. Detailed in this article are socially engaged artists Kim Morgan, Mo Phùng and Mo Glitch, Camille Turner, Jessica Winton, and Leesa Hamilton, whose practices variously include: centring participant autonomy; the ability to withdraw participation; adapting projects to feature built-in space of debrief and care where intense subject matter is present; engagement frameworks that enable fun, recreation, and joy; long-term engagement to allow trust and relationships to build. They also focus on skill building and community building rather than tangible, product-based outcomes. 

As artists increasingly work outside the institutions of the art world and directly with communities, it serves all parties to draw on the acquired knowledge, experiences, and practices of those who have been doing this work for years. 

Kim Morgan’s Blood Portraits (2021) hangs above the elevator in the Health Sciences Centre of Dalhousie University. For over a decade, Morgan has made artwork with the scans of human blood personally donated to her. She is exploring if it’s possible to understand our relationship to one another by looking at blood samples and body materiality through a microscope.  

“You can’t,” says Morgan. “But through this process of collecting, scanning, looking, and discussing with people what we are seeing, other stories come out, and a relationship is formed through this process.” 

In Blood Portraits, the deeply personal nature of blood is abstracted through an ambiguous, microscopic view. What might initially be mistaken as stock medical images are in fact attributed to the people (Grace, Kirsten, Gary, Juss, Annie, Ceilidh, Couzyn, Mona) who have donated their blood cells to the artist for this installation. 

“I’m drawn to difficult material that has complex layers. I use blood as a metaphor for how we consider each other,” says Morgan. “If we see blood through a scientific lens, will it take precedence and dominate other biases that we have about each other? I wasn’t being naive, maybe idealistic.”       

Typically, in contexts of medical imaging, the examination of bodily material is from a deficit-centred perspective. In Blood Portraits, something else is at play. Morgan asks us to see our cells differently. She exercises ethical consent when collecting blood samples and through the presentation of donors’ personal information. Morgan also informs participants about the intentions of her work, and she leaves room for anyone who wants to donate their blood for viewing purposes but omits the material if they aren’t comfortable with her using it in her art practice.  

“There’s an exchange that happens. It’s a blood donation. Think about that. I can’t think of a more intimate thing.” In Blood Portraits and the several other works for which she has used blood, she is aware of her own responsibilities as an artist to use this material with sensitivity and care.

“That’s one of the ethical and moral things about blood. Should people be paid for, or pay for, blood donations? A donation is a ‘gift’ while a payment is a sales transaction, part of the tissue economy,” she says. “These are two very different value systems that conflict regarding the exchange of blood.  I think that relationships involve exchanges too.”

In Seeking Sanctuary (2023), artists Mo Phùng and Mo Glitch worked collaboratively with the participants and subjects of the installation in its development. Supported by the artist-run centre Eyelevel Gallery and exhibited at the Khyber Centre for the Arts in Halifax from July 4 to July 22, 2024, the installation featured nine trans people (Arielle Twist, Excel Garay, Calendula Sack, Jacquie Shaw, Carmel Farahbaksh, Bria Miller, and myself) depicted in large-scale, hand-drawn portraits. Employing a collaborative process through group and individual engagement sessions, the artists recounted phases that resulted in the exhibition:  invitation, connection and visioning, photo shoots with participants, drawing the portraits, and designing the exhibition. 

“Making work about trans people without having them involved in the making of the work was non-negotiable,” Glitch says, turning to Phùng. 

“We have a sanctuary that we’ve created between ourselves,” says Phùng. “But there [are] so many people who have contributed to what I think of sanctuary to be, and that is collaboration and connection and friendship.”  

The duo collaborated on the facilitation of the engagement and execution of the portraits, which were first photographed by Phùng and later drawn by Glitch. 

“People had the opportunity at any moment to say ‘not that photo’ or ‘not that drawing’ or maybe ‘I don’t want to have it in the show at all,'” says Glitch. They note that this consent-based approach to representation can lead to uncertainties and tensions, as it is a balancing act of meeting deadlines while staying true to the needs of the group and honouring everyone’s autonomy. 

“It’s always weird to pay someone to do something for you. There’s a power dynamic there,” says Phùng. 

The power dynamic being described is an inverse of what might be historically true for the creation of portraiture, as Glitch points out. 

“I don’t feel like the precedents are particularly clear around this kind of model of participation and engagement,” says Glitch. 

“When it comes to care, it looks different for every single person. It’s something that can’t be predicted,” says Phùng, highlighting that formulaic approaches to care are often unresponsive to the context-specific nature of different participants and collaborators.

Artist and scholar Camille Turner was drawn to socially engaged art because of its expansive nature.      

“I was completely blown away by this field of art making,” says Turner. “You can actually do things that are meaningful. Not just objects, but create relations with people and create change in the world.”      

Turner’s Afronautic Research Lab (ongoing since 2016) is an installation and site of community-based education that is responsive and responsible to the local histories of the places where it is activated. In the Lab, viewers become researchers who bear witness to archival documents that evidence Canada’s participation in transatlantic slavery. 

“There are a lot of documents that are silenced or suppressed that don’t make it into the museums or history books,” says Turner. “And they completely reframe the country that we’re in and the histories that we’ve been told.”      

In 2021, Turner brought the Afronautic Research Lab to the Bonavista Biennale, a monthlong presentation of contemporary art in rural Newfoundland, where the Lab focused on the site’s connection to the construction of nineteen slave ships built on the coast of the island between 1751 and 1792. Participants of the Afronautic Research Lab don’t engage with the materials alone. They are guided by performers that the artist has named the Afronauts.

“The Afronoauts embody this idea of Black futurity, or a future in which Black people are present and central, conjuring a world in which Black people are fully liberated,” she says. “Their presence is important to anchor this exploration of the past.” 

Key to the artwork for their engagement with one another and the viewers of the work, the Afronauts are often young Black artists, performers, and activists. “There’s something really beautiful about coming together and sharing this experience,” says Turner. “Being there to witness the people who are taking part in this experience.”  

In the Bonavista iteration, and unlike previous instalments of the Lab, the Afronauts were presented not in person but as a projected film that guided viewers’ experience through the materials and place. Reflecting on the role of the Afronauts as caretakers of not only the past, but also of viewers of the work, Turner recounts a memory from within the Lab. 

“I remember this one woman, a young Black woman, she sat down and took her glasses off. You could see the tears forming. One of the Afronauts put their hand on her shoulder,” she says. “The other one and myself, we joined them and we nodded and put our hands on our hearts and had that moment together in the space to help her go through what she was going through.” 

Responding to such heightened moments, emotional safety, and the ability to debrief the documents of anti-Blackness and Black resistance is integral to the Lab. Turner creates separate break-out spaces for checking in and holding space for conversations as soon as things come up.

“The first time I did that was at York University. So, they could be in the main room with the Afronauts and then afterwards people would come in and we would talk,” says Turner. “What happened here? How are you feeling, and what’s going on? It was a really good experience to be able to have that space to process.”

Art educator and social sculptor Jessica Winton’s foray into experimenting with parades as a site for community art came through observation of the spectacle of the Natal Day Parade; she is a resident of the portion of North End of Halifax that is on the parade route. 

“Each summer, I would see my street get parked out and all of these people going down the hill to the beginning of the Natal Day Parade. It would be completely packed,” says Winton. “At the same time, I was thinking about how to get regular people to see art and experience it without being intimidated.” 

Beginning with Ris Publica presented in the Natal Day Parade of 2016, Winton has experimented with parades through what she describes as a participatory practice. 

“It is amazing to be in a parade,” she says. “You walk along, and everyone’s smiling and clapping, cheering you on. It’s like you’re a hero. It’s the greatest thing ever. You don’t need to prepare anything or do anything.” 

Participants and collaborators have had varying degrees of agency in what is presented in different projects of Winton’s. In 2017, Winton was an artist-in-residence at the Halifax North Memorial Public Library, where she engaged a fluctuating group of attendees in envisioning a float. She recounts how her usual process took an unexpected turn—a group of participants coalesced to make decisions about what the parade float would look like.

“It didn’t get titled by me. Someone else named it and came up with the form and everything,” she says. Winton recounts her anxieties when few of the participants who created the ideas for the float arrived on the day of the Natal Day Parade to perform.

“Not everybody wants to get up early on a Saturday and get to an event, or even feel like they’re ready to put their bodies in public,” she says. “I recognize that it was difficult for me to do, but I was not quite aware that it was also difficult for other people to do.” 

In Poetry on Tiptoes presented as part of the Quiet Parade in Nocturne 2022, Winton engaged participants in the editing and transposing of lines of poetry created by collaborator Sophie Glover, which were carried by participants and choreographed as walking stanzas across Fort Needham Memorial Park in Halifax. Winton explained that unlike in previous projects, these participants were paid an honorarium and that this shifted the nature of their involvement in nuanced ways.

“The impetus to attend was because they were getting paid, not because they wanted to participate,” she says. “It felt really different, and I wasn’t keen on the feeling.” 

In Murmured Futures (2023), Winton collaborated with Tanya Davis, poet laureate of Prince Edward Island, to create a similar walking-poetry parade. With this iteration, she opted for a different form of remuneration. Reflecting on the ethics of her engagement with participants in the creation of parades, Winton underscored the importance of a clear, honest, and grounded invitation. 

“I made a bunch of copies of the poem on fine art paper, and I made a varied edition, hand-painted them all a bit differently. I had them in a stack ready to give out at the end of the performance,” Winton says. “That did feel really great.” 

Leesa Hamilton has been involved in socially engaged art practices as an educator, facilitator, and mentor for many years. “Because I have been doing this work for a long time, the language around work has changed a lot from twenty-five years ago,” she says. 

With a background in experiential education models, Hamilton recalls her early years spent volunteering to build physical infrastructure, like bridges, latrines, docks, and stairs in communities that needed them. 

“I would learn from and with the community,” says Hamiton. “Many of the skills that I gained were not ones that I came in with.” 

These experiences led Hamilton to her formative experiences of working in communities with “art as a tool,” as she describes it. This included programs for homeless and street-involved youth to create theatre productions and the creation of a ”free art school,” mentoring and equipping young people with tools of entrepreneurship and art practice to help transition into post-secondary education. 

“Some of the young people that I was working with in these programs I had worked with since they were very young, sometimes since they were twelve or thirteen, and then through their university degree,” says Hamilton.

For the Noisemakers Program in 2019, Hamilton facilitated a project with eleven newcomers in Halifax, which explored identity and storytelling through fashion and jewellery making. 

“That project was most fulfilling for me, from beginning to end, because the work felt really personal for each participant. We worked together for a long time, so we built relationships,” she says. “That exhibit, for me as a person of colour who’s connected to a post-secondary institution, it felt really exciting to have images of people of colour on the walls. 

“When we opened that show, there were buses that came in from newcomer communities that our participants were involved in. They brought families and friends into the gallery, many of whom had not been there before.” 

Reflecting on best practices and wisdom acquired from her many experiences doing this type of art facilitation, Hamilton shared the importance of long-term projects that honour the time needed to build relationships. 

“One of the most important things is creating a collaborative project where the methods that we use, the tools that we’re employing, and the outcomes are developed collaboratively,” she says. 

Hamilton recognizes the reality that collaborative project design often results in projects that don’t produce tangible outcomes. As she sees it, that is not the point—it’s about community building and skill building. “There is always skill in the room. When we’re working with a particular media, many of the community members in the group have skill in that area,” Hamilton says. “Everybody’s teaching and everybody’s learning.”

“As a kid, and all throughout my life in some capacity, I was always making and creating. Somewhere between being a kid and right now [there have been] a lot of life things and existential angst,” say Tian-Morris. “And somehow I ended up in art school a couple of years ago. Some may call that rock bottom—I joke!” 

Wren Tian-Morris has a witty sense of humour, which shows up in their playful, collaborative, and experimental work. With a solid focus on craftsmanship, the artist doesn’t take the work too seriously, which, in my opinion, is refreshing. For example, their most recent exhibition, Our Work, Our Pleasure,  Ourselves and Others, an undergraduate show which opened at the Anna Leonowens Gallery in March 2020 (pre-pandemic), was written in a style similar to a personal ad. 

MEET ME IN THE BEDROOM/ PAST THE BATHROOM AND A LITTLE DOWN THE HALL

Aspiring artist, curious about:

– the intersections of public, private, and pleasure;

– the way Queer (+ Trans) history (especially in the context of Halifax) has informed everything from 

Through various media such as photography, printmaking, sculpture, zine-making, and conceptual work, Tian-Morris’ show Our Work, Our Pleasure, Ourselves and Others re-imagined queer eroticism and subcultures to centre and celebrate Trans folks and People of Colour. Their attention to detail and adroitness shines through in the sharp aspects of the exhibition, which featured the zine “Fag Boy Seeks Same,” in which the artist stickered and photographed historic gay cruising sites in the city. An artist talk was also part of the exhibit, and involved the performance of boot-blacking, which is known in BDSM communities as the act of a submissive partner polishing someone’s leather boots or shoes. Rooted in the overall themes of centring trans and people of colour in queer subcultures, and kink, the various elements of the exhibition flaunted a remarkable cohesiveness. 

Tian-Morris’ ability to home in on a unifying theme, combined with their creative dexterity and their deep care for their community, are skills and commitments they brought to Eyelevel Gallery, where they recently worked as a Summer Programming Assistant. 

“I think art school has actually shown me that I don’t necessarily care for gallery shows or contemporary art. And more so that I crave community, collaborative working, playing, and not defining myself by a certain practice or medium,” says Tian-Morris. “I have to remind myself art is not this one thing, and that it can be a communal act of healing, or playing in some ways, which is why I do think collaborative working and re-framing in art is so important.” 

They cite members of their community—artists like Lux Habrich, Raven Davis, Carmel Farahbakhsh, Darcie Bernhardt, Kris Reppas, Arielle Twist, and Jean Serutoke—as influential to their own practice “[A lot of] their work often informs mine through the investigation of mediums, themes, aesthetics, etc. But beyond formal artistic elements, or simply adoring their work, I would say having conversations, spending time together, hearing them speak, and reading their writing inspires. Artists like Farahbakhsh, Habrich, and Davis, these artists (whether directly or not) help me learn and relearn what it means to be in community, to imagine new worlds, to be making art, why I’m making, and what art can be,” they say. “These artists push me to interrogate all parts of my life, which in turn, eventually informs my art. I think creating can be so many things and does not have to be confined to what we assume when we think of art, but instead can be a term full of possibilities.” 

Part of their contribution to Eyelevel was creating Co-Incidence, a publication dreamed up as a result of the Heat Waves, Eyelevel Gallery’s mini summer residency program. Tian-Morris notes that there were many incredible applications from 2SQTBIPOC applicants, but they did not have the space to accommodate everyone. They find the incredible whiteness of artist-run centres, the arts scene, and even the queer scene in Halifax to be disappointing because of the many amazing (QT)BIPOC artists who are creating brilliant work, but are often under-represented. As a response, they decided to reach out to some of the artists who applied for Heat Waves, as well as a few others for further collaboration. 

“I feel really lucky to be working with Avery Morris, Ben Mitsuk, Calen Sack, DeeDee Clayton, and Excel Garay on this Co-Incidence. All of these artists bring so much brilliance to the table. There are days when I feel angsty about art, but getting to see the work all of these artists truly brings me joy, and reminds me that creating has a place in this world and can be incredibly powerful.”

On exploring the intersections of art and magic, Tian-Morris finds art to be a way of conjuring meaning and feeling. “In the publication, Calen Sack talks about the ways that white people often inquire about Two-Spiritedness in ways that they are essentially fetishizing and fantasizing Indigenous culture. There is obviously magic in being queer and being brown but it’s not in a smoke and mirrors way. It’s something that’s felt through community and in your body. It can vary from person to person but really, at its core, it’s a feeling. It’s something you can’t explain. It’s in the ways that you know somehow your ancestors are looking out for you, or the knowing glance of being the only QPOCs in the room.”

Upon reflection of the magic in community, Tian-Morris feels that they have newly found 2SQTBIPOC community in the past year. They recall a moment when it hit them how connected they felt to their community. 

“There was this moment when it really hit me where I was so overwhelmed with joy and it felt so magical and kind of spiritual, to be honest. I’m saying this because I think talking about this kind of joy and magic is important. Right now, the art world is pretty into consuming the work of racialized queer and trans artists but only under the premise that it’s about our trauma. The artists in Co-Incidence, this publication, touch upon the ways that art and magic intersect for them and how that magic shows up,” says Tian-Morris. “There’s also a lot of talk about the intersections of culture and queerness and how that plays into this kind of magic. I really wanted this publication to just be a space for the artists. I wanted to pick their brains a bit and show off their work.” 

For Tian-Morris, Co-Incidence feels like a way of building community, “even if it’s just in little pieces.” 

This event occurred on October 14th 2020, as an Anchor project of Nocturne Halifax.

Meeting Waters: Cross-Cultural Collaborations on Environmental Racism with Ingrid Waldron was an online event centering Black and Indigenous solidarity through cross-cultural exchanges on environmental racism in Mi’kma’ki. Speakers and performers were brought together to share stories and experiences of environmental racism through storytelling, dance, spoken word, song, and graphic art. Collaborators describe their experience and presented their original creation in the form of a Zoom event followed by a panel discussion presented in partnership with Visual Arts Nova Scotia.

Featuring collaborations:
Africville – Irvine Carvery and Rebecca Thomas
Pictou Landing First Nation – Michelle Francis-Denny and Kwento
Sipekne’katik – Dorene Bernard and Liliona Quarmyne
Shelburne – Vanessa Hartley and Leelee Oluwatoysi Eko David
Design and graphic recording by Bria Miller

With support from Lindsay Dobbin & I’thandi Munro.

0:11 LINDSAY CORY

Kwé and Hello. Welcome to Meeting Waters: Cross Cultural Collaborations on Environmental Racism. My name is Lindsay Cory, I’m the director of Nocturne and before we begin I would like to acknowledge that I am an uninvited guest to K’jipuktuk here in Mi’kma’ki. While this event is taking place virtually the Nocturne: Art at Night festival takes place in K’jipuktuk, the ancestral and unceded lands of the Mi’kmaq people. This land, and the waters that surround it, are covered by the Peace and Friendship Treaties signed between the British Crown and the Mi’kmaq, Maliseet, and Passamaquoddy peoples in 1725 to 1779. The 1752 rendition of that treaty is what governs K’jipuktuk, where I am coming from today. We are all treaty people. That means that we have a shared responsibility to uphold the agreements laid out in those treaties. Furthermore, we have a responsibility to stand in solidarity when those treaty rights are in question.

I also want to acknowledge the significant foundations in infrastructure and culture that Black and African Nova Scotian communities have played in building this province and country. Nocturne stands with Mi’kmaq grandmothers, land and water protectors, and social justice seekers. As I learn more about this place I am committed to using my platform through Nocturne to amplify, connect and collaborate with the many art communities that live and work here in Mi’kma’ki.

Nocturne is also dedicated to providing safer spaces at our events and gatherings – even the virtual ones. Our aim is to host spaces that are widely accessible, amplify marginalized voices and leadership, and actively prioritize anti oppressive principles wherever we can. That said, we can’t promise a totally safe space for all tonight. If you are experiencing any difficulty or need support, you can reach out directly to me in the chat and my name is Lindsay Cory again.

We also have a technical support assistant you can access and their name in the chat is TECH SUPPORT. You can message them directly if you are having issues connecting and they can try to help. If you can’t find TECH SUPPORT, then message me and I’ll try to help you as best as I can. We are also very grateful to Karen Staples and Ayoka Junaid, our ASL interpreters, for their work this evening and prior to in preparation for this event. Let us know if there is anything else we can do to make your access to this event more barrier free. Where possible we’ll be adding text to the projects that you’ll be witnessing tonight in the chat so you can access those, all. If you want to move your chat to the side of your screen for better viewing you can do so by turning off your fullscreen if you’re using a desktop and that should move it to the side for you. If you’re looking for the chat button it’s right at the bottom in your toolbar.

Your host tonight is Dr. Ingrid Waldron. Ingrid is an Associate Professor in the Faculty of Health at Dalhousie University, the Director of the Environmental Noxiousness, Racial Inequities, and Community Health and the director of The ENRICH Project. Her research, teaching, and community leadership and advocacy work in Nova Scotia are examining and addressing the health and mental health impacts of structural inequalities within health and mental health care, child welfare, and the environment in Indigenous, Black, immigrant, and refugee communities. I wanted to thank Ingrid for her leadership in this project and her guidance throughout the whole process.

Lastly, I’d like to thank our curator, Lindsay Dobbin who collaborated with Ingrid to conjure up this expansive project. I also want to thank our project coordinator, I’thandi Munro, who has been a dedicated collaborator throughout the process. Each of the speakers you will hear from tonight will be introduced by Ingrid and they have brought so much grounding and passion to the process. I really just want to thank you all for working through this with us.. And with that, I am very pleased to welcome you to Meeting Waters: Cross Cultural Collaborations on Environmental Racism. I’ll pass it over to Ingrid.

5:20 INGRID WALDRON:

Good Evening everyone. I would like to welcome you to Meeting Waters: Cross-Cultural Collaborations on Environmental Racism.

I would like to begin by acknowledging that we are in Mi’kma’ki, the ancestral and unceded territory of the Mi’kmaq People. This territory is covered by the “Treaties of Peace and Friendship” which Mi’kmaq peoples first signed with the British Crown in 1725. The treaties did not deal with surrender of lands and resources but in fact recognized Mi’kmaq title and established the rules for what was to be an ongoing relationship between nations. We acknowledge this land not only in thanks to the Indigenous communities who have held relationship with this land for generations but also in recognition of the historical and ongoing legacy of colonialism.

The collaborative pieces between speakers and performers that you will see this evening ask an important question: How do we forge meaningful relationships and build solidarities across differences by listening and through self-reflection to create the necessary partnerships that allow us to challenge environmental racism and other land-based struggles that have harmed the land, our communities, and our well-being?

Over the next hour and half, we will centre Indigenous and Black solidarities through cross-cultural exchanges on environmental racism in Mi’kma’ki.

We bring together speakers and performers to share stories and experiences of environmental racism and other land-based struggles in Mi’kma’ki through storytelling, dance, spoken word, song, multimedia performances, and graphic art in four communities. These communities are: Africville, Pictou Landing First Nation, Sipekne’katik First Nation, and Shelburne.

Let’s begin with Africville. Irvine Carvery was born in Africville to a large family who were landowners and community leaders. He was the President of the Africville Genealogy Society. Under Carvery’s term, the Africville community received an apology from the city of Halifax for the razing of the area in the 1960s. The Africville church was also rebuilt.

Rebecca Thomas is an award-winning Mi’kmaw poet. She is Halifax’s former Poet Laureate (from 2016 to 2018) and has been published in multiple journals and magazines. I’m Finding My Talk is her first book. For Thomas, a Mi’kmaw woman whose father is a residential school survivor, poetry has served as a powerful tool for educating about the racism and the inequality that still haunts many Indigenous peoples in Canada. She has two books slated to be released in the fall of 2020.

I will read their piece. Their piece is called The Planning of Environmental Racism in Africville. This is a collaborative piece by Irvine and Rebecca. A fertilizer plant and city dump are just two examples of how the city of Halifax took the most harmful and unwanted pieces of infrastructure and placed them next to the vibrant community of Africville in a long legacy of environmental racism in Nova Scotia. From the chemical with water sprayed on the unpaved roads of the community to the unsafe levels of soil toxicity in 2020 from that very water, this legacy is one of Canada’s ugliest. However, the spirit of Africville lives on, its former residents and its descendants also live on. Irvine and Rebecca will deliver an oral history of and spoken word piece on Africville respectively. Welcome Irvine and Rebecca.

10:24 REBECCA THOMAS:

Hello, thank you for having me.

10:27 IRVINE CARVERY:
It’s a pleasure to be here indeed. Rebecca and I have worked together on this and I’ve agreed to go first. First of all I want to acknowledge the ongoing struggle of my brothers and sisters in the Mi’kmaq community. Tonight as we speak, they are exercising their rights for self government in declaring their own fishery and the establishment continued to deny their rights. We stand in solidarity with our brothers and sisters. It’s going to be a long struggle, but we will stay in the struggle with them, until self governance has been fully achieved by my brothers and sisters. The topic of Africville environmental racism and the reason why we use the title ‘The Planning of Environmental Racism’ is because that’s exactly what it was. In the mid 19^th Century, <inaudible> of slavery, there began a new type of discrimination and it was called scientific racism in which science was used to downgrade people of African descent to be less than white people. Planning became the focus point for, or it should have been the focus point for, the betterment of lives of people in Halifax in planning institutions, play spaces, recreational spaces. But because of this scientific racism, Africville was not considered to be important enough – or we were not considered to be on the same par as white people here in Halifax – so when planning for the unwanted services for the greater society, the placement of those services was put in and around Africville. Beginning in 1870, with the siting of an infectious disease hospital directly above Africville with its sewer line running down to the shores of the Bedford Basin in Africville, emptying at the high water mark. That was the beginning. The railroad went through Africville, dividing our community and taking our land, and all of the smoke and the filth coming from the railroad going through your community was inflicted upon the people of Africville. Slaughter plants. Fertilizer plants. And we know fertilizer is detrimental to the environment, all we have to do is look at the bombing with fertilizer being used as an explosive. There was a quarry built in and around Africville. The dumping of human waste was done above Africville, in Africville I say. All of these unwanted services for the city of Halifax, by the planning department, the planning department looked in their planning to better the lives of the citizens of Halifax. The planning department looked around the city of Halifax and many locations were rejected because of health concerns. Those same concerns were not afforded the people of Africville. They were placed in Africville. 1950. 1955. The city of Halifax had to relocate its open dump and again, once again, sites were looked at and rejected because of health concerns. That dump was placed in Africville 300 yards from the nearest home in Africville. People in Africville became sick from that dump. People from Africville died because of that dump. All of the toxic waste in Halifax, waste coming from not just residential areas but all of the industries, all of the hospitals, was dumped on that site 300 yards from the nearest home in Africville. My oldest brother was killed by a truck going to that dump in Africville. He was 12 years old. If the dump wasn’t there, my brother may still be alive today. Poison was brought to the dump in Africville and given to the men who worked on the dump. Those men took that poison home and mixed it with their seed beer and three of them died because it was poison. There was an inquiry held as to found out what happened. The inquiry concluded that it was not the makers of the poison who was at blame, it was not the deliverers who was to blame, but instead it was the victims who were to blame because there was a bylaw in Halifax that stated that people were not allowed on the dump. That was the findings of the inquiry. We’re talking about the 1960s, we’re not talking about the 1700s or the 1800s, we’re talking about the 1960s. You see, we as people of African descent in this city have always been treated as lesser than. The destruction of our community began, or the planning of the destruction of our community began, in 1915. Not in 1960 when they came in and destroyed it, but in 1915 with the planning of the destruction of our community. But it was not enacted until the 1960s. So we had to live with all of this industrial waste, all of this pollution. Ingrid in introducing us talked about the road systems in Africville. Where the pavement ended, Africville began. And they used to come out in the summer time to spray down the roads to keep the dust down. They sprayed it with some kind of a mixture. Now we’re talking about the 1960s. We did an environmental study in 2010 to find out if the land was environmentally friendly, and in 2010 the remnants of that poison that was poured on our roads was still present to the point that it was recommended that no one live there over a 24 hour period because the land was still polluted. That’s what we had to put up with. And the reason why? Because they didn’t see us as equal. We were less than. We were no longer slaves, but we were still treated as slaves, as chattel. We were disposable. Our land was disposable. The city of Halifax and their planning department felt that our land was underutilized, so therefore the value in the land wasn’t there for the city of Halifax, so they had to get us out of there so that they could get the true value of that land for the coffers in the city of Halifax. But still, the land sits empty and it will still stand empty until it is returned to the people of Africville. Thank you very much.

19:30 REBECCA THOMAS:

We’lalin, and thank you so much, Irvine, for that, and I hope that my poem honours what you said, honours you, and honours the descendants of Africville. So with that, I’ll begin.

This is isn’t my story.

But I’ve been placed in a position.

I have the honour to tell it.

And I implore that you listen.

This isn’t my story.

But I feel a connection.

Don’t miss this chance to be taught a lesson.

It’s about resilience and lineage.

Unbroken by those born into privilege.

Let’s set the scene.

Paint a picture of a little place, east on the continental map.

Where we have a vibrant Black community and city council fat cats.

Because of their Loyalty to the crown,

Because their melanin was on the other side of brown,

Because they had escaped to freedom and would never go back.

Because they were Black,

The city of Halifax planned it’s attack.

In order to control a race,

You need to control a space.

And control the space they did.

They began by denying services.

They viewed the community as nothing but squatters.

The year the Baptist church went up, the mayor of the time went on to found Halifax Water.

Ensuring Halifax residents a safe drinking supply was the mission,

For this newly established commission.

Who wilfully ignored the Campbell Road Settlement’s petitions.

If only running water was the soul denial.

But Halifax had plans that were much more vile.

A railway bisected Africville’s streets.

Who was responsible?

Raise a glass for the Mayor of the time, Mr. Alexander Keith.

Next came the hospital full of infectious disease.

That filled the community with a sense of unease.

Then a prison to overlook the residents.

That left a correctional legacy rooted in prejudice.

Where decedents are carded and harassed

Because their homes were razed from the grass.

With Africville continuing to grow,

The city calculated it’s next blow.

While toxic chemicals were sprayed on the unpaved streets,

Children followed along on their bikes at top speed.

Into the earth those chemicals leached.

In 2020 can still cause disease.

Decision after decision,

Cut the teeth of politicians,

These transgressions were targeted,

The harm was marketed,

As though it were benevolent help.

Toasted with water from poisoned wells.

This was methodical.

This was logical.

It’s a matter of historical fact!

The evidence is stacked.

They went from self-sufficiency to government dependency.

A people’s humanity was reduced to policy.

White council members voted no on Black survival,

A throwback reference with modern day revival.

Sewer pits and a slaughterhouse

A city dump and future freeway routes.

No amount of engineering could bridge the gap

Between was what taken and what can never be given back.

Their taxes paid for the garbage trucks that moved them.

To where white neighbours angrily refused them.

Broken promises of relocation funds.

Calling their home the city’s worst slum.

Halifax thought they were nothing but weeds.

And it might of damaged the tree when it cut off the leaves,

But Black roots are known to grow deep.

Whole communities sprung forth from the scattered seeds.

No amount of racism could quell the uprising,

At this point, Black success shouldn’t be surprising.

Because Halifax poisoned, destroyed, isolated and denied everything they could.

But the spirit of Africville lives on in neighbourhoods.

The square and the park are full of laughter.

Descendants are writing the next chapter.

Through professing and politics.

In their athletics and kinetics.

Speaking their truth in Scripture.

Blowing minds in art and literature.

Are you now finally getting the picture?

You can move the people and take away their things.

And I’ll point to 1000 examples of how they were and will always be amazing.

But this isn’t my story

And even though there are tales of glory

Of success and triumph,

We can never forget what was done.

To a community that committed no crime.

Whose land was eroded, taken and razed over time.

This isn’t my story but I’ve been asked to tell it.

About a community whose descendants will never forget it.

The colonial beast may have sharpened it’s teeth on our hides.

But from an L’nu to a Scotian, I see that twinkle in your eye.

Because we wrote the books on how to survive.

Then delivered a masterclass on how to thrive.

So from the pen of a Mi’kmaw poet, I put forth a motion.

That Africville be remembered and paid it’s due by every single Nova Scotian.

Thank you. I hope you liked that, Irvine.

24:08 IRVINE CARVERY:

Oh my God. You’ve got to send that to me. That is <inaudible>. Thank you, Rebecca. Thank you, thank you, thank you.

24:16 REBECCA THOMAS:

We’lalin. Thank you so much.

24:18 IRVINE CARVERY:

We’lalin.

24:19 INGRID WALDRON:

Wow. Thank you, Irvine and Rebecca, that was wonderful. So let’s move on to Pictou Landing First Nation.

Michelle Francis-Denny is the Community Liaison with Boat Harbour Remediation Project but first and foremost she is a Pictou Landing First Nation community member. Pictou Landing First Nation has suffered from decades of pollution and most recently worked with various allies to pressure the Nova Scotia government to pass the Boat Harbour Act, which put an end to the Northern Pulp mill in Pictou County using Boat Harbour as an effluent treatment facility.

With a unique sound crossing Neo Soul and Experimental R&B, singer-songwriter Kwento embodies empowerment through presenting an honest ode to her femininity and Afrocentricity. Kwento receives the energy of her audiences and returns it tenfold – through her soulful vocals, effortless performances and vibrant aura. As her talents take her across the globe, Kwento is collaborating with producers in South Africa, writers in Germany and musicians and producers in Toronto and will release her second EP entitled ‘abbrv.’ (abbreviation) this year. 

Kwento and Michelle’s piece is titled Purple Tides. Purple Tides is a presentation about the community members of Pictou Landing First Nation who have fought tirelessly for more than 5 decades to stop toxic pulp mill effluent from being dumped into their backyard. One of the major visual impacts of the mill operations since it began in 1967, was the presence of foamy effluent washing up on the once pristine beach turning the tides purple. Boat Harbour or A’se’k (the other room) the elders called it, was no longer a place they could rely on for their resources and a void was created in the lives of community members. The Boat Harbour act ordered the effluent treatment facility to close in January 2020 and a new chapter began. Michelle and Kwento have come together to highlight the depth of the impact of this atrocity. Through a speech and a performance of an original song, they will shed light on the healing journey ahead for the community. Welcome Michelle and Kwento.

28:02 MICHELLE FRANCIS-DENNY:

I want to thank you so much for inviting Kwento and I to collaborate on this project for this very worthwhile event. It’s going to be an amazing week. I’m a very proud member of Pictou Landing First Nation and it just so happens that my very personal ancestral connection to the Boat Harbour crisis was highlighted in the film There’s Something In the Water. Our community is very proud to have had this story elevated on such a level that it has resonated with people all over the world and we’re able to help bring awareness to environmental racism. It’s very important for me to acknowledge that every single person in our community and our leaders, those that are here now and those who have passed, each have a story and every single one of those stories matter. Our stories are each a little bit different but connected by the fibres of our being and our strong sense of community. We’re bound by our resilience and our bodies are filled with ranges of valid emotions and trauma. The pulp and paper waste treatment facility has definitely impacted us and those impacts run exceedingly deep. As you can tell in the film, our elders tell many stories and they talk about how the impacts of 1967 were immediate. And how fish immediately died and washed up on the banks and the water turned brown and the stench in the air where, even if you were to venture inside, you couldn’t escape from it. The chemicals in the air and the elders talk about the houses, the paint on the houses, turning black. You think about all those things, but you really need to think about what lies beneath the surface of what you can see. How much anger and sorrow and resentment and sadness our elders must have felt to witness that and how they carry that with them through their lives. The inter-generational impacts that are being carried on. The loss of our Mi’kmaq culture and our pride essentially being washed away with those purple tides. It is quite upsetting how the water authority was very intentful in provincial government. They knew exactly what they were doing. Preying on a vulnerable and marginalized group, using such lies and deceit. Our leaders fought for this case of environmental racism to be recognized, just to be seen, and corrected for many decades. To tell you the truth, the last five years have been a true testament to our strength. Being tossed into this whirlwind and we’re still suffering the effects, but in the pursuit of environmental and social justice it was well worth it. This year, in 2020, we’re finally able to rejoice and celebrate with the closure of the effluent treatment facility that was piped across Indian Cross Point and right into our back yard at Boat Harbour which the elders once called A’se’k. I think about the lengthy battle that’s coming to an end and after the dust settles, a solemn battle within ourselves and within our community needs to be recognized because something new is beginning. Now we’re being tasked with creating a new legacy and a new beginning for future generations. So we look ahead, we talk about our healing journeys a lot, but we’re reminded of the medicine wheel. As Indigenous people we want to strive to achieve balance in our lives and we want to heal from the trauma we’ve endured. So we think about the physical, the spiritual, the mental, and the emotional well-being, but there’s still uncertainty for us that’s in the back of our minds. So we’re not so certain what the way forward is. So many questions alone. I’ve heard from the community: ‘What does healing look like? How am I supposed to feel? Will the fish come back? Who will teach me to hunt?’ We’ve lost that skill, in some sense of passing it down to our generations. ‘Will I be able to dip my toe in the water without fear? Who can I trust?’ Only time will tell.

33:27 KWENTO’S PRESENTATION:
Waves of change keep growing

Crashing on the surface, level still

Rivers of pain keep flowing

From the corners of the Earth and into our veins

These waters, they know us by name

They know why we came, they have all the answers

We’re learning, learning to swim

Teach us to swim, we’re learning to swim

Beyond the purple tide, beneath the ocean floor

After the battle we, after the battle we find, we still find

We still find

Hear them say, we’re finished

No mountains left to climb

Where is our beginning?

Running out of time

These waters, they know us by name

They know why we came, they have all the answers

We’re learning, learning to swim

Teach us to swim, we’re learning to swim

Beyond the purple tide, beneath the ocean floor

After the battle we, after the battle we find, we still find

Beyond the purple tide, beneath the ocean floor

After the battle we, after the battle we find, we still find

37:18 INGRID WALDRON:

Beautiful. This was really a great idea to do this event! Really great. Thank you, Michelle and Kwento. So let’s move on to Sipekne’katik First Nation.

Dorene Bernard is a Grassroots Grandmother, from the Sipekne’katik Band in Mi’kmak’i. She is a Water Protector, a Water Walker, and Survivor of the Shubenacadie Indian Residential School. Her background is in Aboriginal Social Work where she worked for 20 years in Child Welfare and Community Support for Residential School Survivors. She was the Coady International Institute Chair in Social Justice in 2017, sharing her teachings on Environmental Racism, Climate Change, Residential School legacy, Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls, and Water teachings. She has been inspired and was mentored by the late Grandmother Josephine Mandamin, Mother Earth Water Walker.

With an eclectic background that has taken her through many performance styles on four different continents, Liliona Quarmyne is a dancer, actor, singer, community organizer, and activist. She performs across Canada and internationally, creates original works as an independent artist, facilitates community programming, and is the Artistic Director of Kinetic Studio. Liliona sees her body as a link to past and to future generations. Her scope of work is broad but is particularly focused on the relationship between art and social justice, on the body’s ability to carry ancestral memory, and on the role the performing arts can play in creating change. Welcome Dorene and Liliona.

39:55 LILIONA QUARMYNE:

Good evening everyone. Before I introduce our piece, I just want to give deep gratitude to Doreen as she joins us tonight from the front lines at Saulnierville and to acknowledge the incredible heart and care she has put into creating this piece as she has been fighting on the front lines. We’lalin Doreen.

Our piece, part teach-in, part dance, part offering, and part prayer. This performance piece touches on Alton Gas and the establishment of the Mi’kmaq Treaty Rights-Based Fisheries. Drawing on the Peace and Friendship Treaties, this piece will share the ways in which the actions of corporations and large commercial fisheries contradict our collective responsibility to live as treaty people.

42:52 LILIONA QUARMYNE & DORENE BERNARD’S PRESENTATION:
<Speaking/greets in L’nu language> My spirit name is <Introducing self in L’nu language>. My name’s Dorene Bernard, I’m from Sipekne’katik, <Introducing clan in L’nu language> clan and Mi’kmaq. In our teachings, water is life. We were given a gift, to bring life forward, to carry life in the womb, surrounded by water. The water is our first world. We can breathe the water, drink the water, we are the water. When we’re born, we come through the water. The water hears our dreams, hears our thoughts. The water is alive, it’s a spirit, it is our first medicine. With that gift, we’ve been given that sacred responsibility to take care of the water. We’re here to protect the sacred, not only for us, but for our future generations. I would like to see more people have a relationship with the water. Tell the water ‘I love you, I thank you, I respect you.’ Water is life. Our Peace and Friendship Treaties, they are a covenant chain of treaties that took decades to be ratified. And at that time in the 1700s we travelled throughout America, throughout Mi’kmak’i, to tell the people, to consult the people, to tell them that these treaties lived. So it did take years, because we travelled by canoe, we travelled by water, we travelled over land, walking the land. Many people look at our treaties as separate, but they’re all one continuous treaty. <inaudible> our own fishery where moderate livelihood <inaudible> use our lands and resources for the good of our people and to implement those into law. We have treaty rights and we are going to assert those rights. We are all treaty people. What does that mean? That means that we are living here together. This is our land. We share our land with you. And it means that you have a responsibility too. Standing on the shore, <inaudible> leave the wharf. Surrounded by hundreds of non-Native boats. <inaudible> I have such a deep pain in my heart. Our boats that went out there among those hundreds of fisherman, with big big boats compared to ours. And how they chased them and surrounded them and intimidated them. Many turned around and hauled all of our traps out of the water. We knew we had to do something about that. Called DFO, the Department of Fisheries and Oceans, and the RCMP looked on and did nothing. <inaudible> They said it was too dangerous for them to be on the water, that says a lot about how much control they had over non-Native fisherman. Using their boats in a dangerous way, stealing gear, doing all the things that break the laws of the fishery. Not only for DFO regulations about also their own unspoken laws: you never touch another person’s gear. It’s not about conservation, it’s not about fishing in a different season. This was only racism. Them thinking they have ownership of the fishery and these are their waters and these are their fish and we were interfering with that. They just came out from everywhere. We know that racism is alive and well. It’s systemic racism, it’s not just in the fishing industry, and it’s not just the corporations. Alton Gas, but also gold mines and the mining that they want to do coming into our communities, on our lands, on our territory, that want to do business and bypass the consultation <inaudible> informed consent of the Indigenous peoples. But it’s also in the health system, the justice system. Pretty ingrained in Canadian society. We’ve lost decades of history. This isn’t something that I learned in residential schools. This isn’t something my parents or grandparents learned in residential schools. We are living this education. We are living this history. Many fisherman and those families down there, really don’t have the education on our rights as the Mi’kmaq people. Many people were educated during those three weeks, for sure. I know they read the treaties. I know they were looking for what these meant. So it was really something that was long needed, maybe this was a wake up call for them as well. As we were asserting our treaty rights they were trying to figure out what those rights are. And it’s important, really important, that these teachings about our treaties are taught in the schools. Taught in the governments and the organizations. It’s very important that people embrace the meaning of what it means to be a treaty people. We have a lot of catching up to do and a lot of healing of relationships because our treaties have not been implemented and it’s the government that has stopped those things from happening. And now we are implementing, we are serving our treaty rights, we are just doing what needs to be done, for the good of our people the Mi’kmaq and the Wabanaki people who are represented in those treaties. We are unified now to implement those treaties with our laws, with our governance, and not just rely on the Canadian government to define what it means. We need everyone to look at the UN Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous People and the Truth and Reconciliation Calls to Action. The UN Declaration is in thirteen of those ninety-four calls to action. The government has the blueprint, has a foundation, in those documents, to also implement those treaty rights into law and that’s what needs to be done. That’s where we are today. We are at this place in 2020, there is no turning back. We only can go forward and we’d like to go forward together. 2020 is the year of change and it’s going to be for the better.

52:27 INGRID WALDRON

Thank you, Dorene and Liliona for that beautiful piece called Salt Fish. Incredible. Let’s move toShelburne.

Vanessa Hartley is an 8th generation Black Loyalist descendant from Shelburne, Nova Scotia. Currently, she works for Shelburne Association Supporting Inclusion (SASI) as a Community Support Worker. She recently completed her diploma in Social Services and is currently working on community development presentations, programming, and other projects for African Nova Scotians in Shelburne. Vanessa also sits on the board of the South End Environmental Injustice Society (SEED) in Shelburne.

Leelee Oluwastoyosi Eko Davis is of Nigerian, Trinidadian, and French descent. They are a disabled, genderqueer intermedia artist. They are from Treaty One Territory in Winnipeg, Manitoba. Leelee also works as a program designer, facilitator, and consultant in the field of Social Innovation and Adaptive Change. Welcome, Vanessa and Leelee to present their piece.

54:21 LEELEE OLUWASTOYOSI EKO DAVIS:

Thank you, thank you. Thank you, Ingrid for the vision of this work coming together in the way that it has. Yeah, feeling really very blessed. Our piece today we’re sharing with you, Vanessa Hartley and myself, is called . It examines environmental violence that’s afflicting the Black rural communities of Shelburne. The impacts that environmental racism is having as demonstrated here is very real and is very tangible and very urgent. Shelburne’s rich history illustrates the systemic barriers that the community has faced and continues to face today. We, Vanessa and I, have asked ourselves: can these trials be overcome? How can resolution and faith carry us through these continual acts of violence? Where can we go to find solace in these turbulent times? We are sharing this through storytelling, film, sound, and movement, and we’re just going to take some time with these questions. That was our intention with this and not because we think we’ll find answers, but as a means to engage our spirits and our continued liberation in this powerful, powerful way that we are here together. Black, Indigenous, solidarity, liberation, sovereignty, together. Thank you. Hope you enjoy.

56:22 LEELEE OLUWASTOYOSI EKO DAVIS & VANESSA HARTLEY’S PRESENTATION:

Affliction

Affliction

Affliction

Afflictions

Afflictions that cut so deep, it harms the generations ahead

Afflictions that cut so deep, it harms the generations ahead

Speaking up to disrupt the cycle

Speaking up to disrupt the cycle

Speaking up to disrupt the cycle

Speaking up to disrupt the cycle

Speaking up to disrupt the cycle

Speaking up to disrupt the cycle

Speaking up to disrupt the cycle

Speaking up to disrupt the cycle

Speaking up to disrupt the cycle

Of inter-generational trauma

You said get over it

Environmental racism

Environmental racism

Environmental racism

Environmental racism

Environmental racism

We want water that won’t kill us

Your response, is to stop using the race card

We protest, speak, and fight in hopes to gain respect and equality

These afflictions that cut so deep

These afflictions that cut so deep

These afflictions that cut so deep

These afflictions that cut so deep

Our Black community is located in the South End of Shelburne.

Historically many loyalists settled within town limits along the waterfront.

Black loyalists would soon join and live within the outskirts of Shelburne.

Shelburne is where the first race riot within North America would happen.

Riots lasting up to 30 days. Homes, churches and everything else was burnt.

Black loyalists would then settle outside of Shelburne on the outskirts as well within

Birchtown and South End.

From the beginning our community was displaced and marginalized.

Our problems all start from historical presence.

We need to evaluate Shelburne as we still have many systemic barriers that our people are facing.

Shelburne creates these afflictions that run so deep within our history.

How can we establish our land?

When is this toxic inequality depreciating the value of our homes?

Dispense asbestos and chemicals into our wells and takes our elders all too soon.

This land, once a dream, a promise of freedom, is going to kill us.

It becomes quite challenging when town council is reluctant acknowledge environmental racism as a concrete issue.

South End Shelburne residents are perceived by town council as unvalued.

If our council cared of the health and well-being of the South End residents, they would have brought forth the ability and accountability to provide clean drinking water to our residents.

Blessedness I feel, it meets my skin with a warm glow.

The body of a Black woman feels many things.

Blessedness gives me permission to feel joyous.

This new state of self love is what they fear.

And like, some of the elders in the community talk about watching it burn and having to go to school smelling like that, and asking why they smelt so dirty and being sent home because of it. So it’s definitely impacted a lot of generations, I would say. Yeah, like, the toxins were going down into the wells so they’re getting that deep that they’re able to reach the water tables and there’s like super high levels of lead and asbestos in the water here. And there’s a lot of individuals that have passed away from multiple melanoma which is like a super rare type of cancer. And it’s so weird that this one little clump of Shelburne, everyone’s suffering from that one type of disease. But there is something in the water.

And what are the local politicians like?

Well, I think it was 2017 when this was in the midst of happening, um, the town councillor had said that this community, the Black community, needed to stop using the race card. So, they’re not even recognizing that environmental racism is alive and well in Shelburne, let alone being told to stop playing the race card when all we’re fighting for is clean drinking water that every human should have and everyone should have the right to. So it’s been challenging in that sense of just having the story told and people trying to understand and wanting to listen.

It doesn’t make any sense and to dis-acknowledge that we don’t have a Black community as well.

What?

Yeah. Our mayor dis-acknowledges that we have a Black community in Shelburne.

He says there’s no Black community here?

Mmmhmm.

So basically, your family, all of your descendants, all that, you just don’t exist.

Yup.

Yeah, it’s there’s a lot of like white history that’s shown on the waterfront cause of like the loyalists themselves. There’s nothing to do with Black loyalists, yeah.

But what really struck me is that there was nothing, at all about any Indigenous population, like has been completely completely erased from the storytelling, from the time lining.

But we know they were here first, so what happened? And a lot of the times, my, it would have been my grandmother Clara’s side was First Nations. She actually had, was a part of, um, like the reserve, she lived on the reserve and she married, or had children with, my grandfather who was a Black man, so she lost all of her status. Yeah.

Our town council would have also brought forth an effort to establish and foster relationships within this community, as well acknowledge that there is a Black community in Shelburne.

Blessedness I feel.

Blessedness gives me permission to feel joyous.

This new state of self love is what they fear.

Blessedness I feel.

Blessedness I feel.

Blessedness I feel.

1:06:56 INGRID WALDRON:
Wow. Thank you, Vanessa and Leelee, for that haunting piece. Like all the other pieces, we didn’t know what we were getting. Life is like a box of chocolates. That was haunting and that was beautiful. Thank you so much. I would like to thank all of the speakers and performers for these wonderful, innovative, and incredibly creative performances and move to the final segment of our program tonight, which is a moderated discussion. I want to ask the speakers and performers to reflect on several issues, including their experiences collaborating together, what they learned, and how they think solidarities can be built through art and activism in Mi’kma’ki.

So let’s welcome once again Irvine and Rebecca; Michelle and Kwento; Dorene and Liliona; and Vanessa and Leelee. 

I’m going to pose this question to everyone, so you can all certainly answer if you choose. The first question is really just to get a sense of what it was like, you’ve produced some really beautiful pieces tonight, and I’m pretty sure the audience wants to know, what was it like creating your piece and bringing it to fruition?

1:08:29 MICHELLE FRANCIS-DENNY:
I can start by just, I really enjoyed working with Kwento. I think it just flowed, and I think what I appreciate most about her is that she just listened. When we’re in such traumatic, and so much turmoil constantly, you know, I just kind of word vomit to whoever would listen. But she was really kind in listening to the things that were important to me and that really transitioned and I’m so proud of the piece, that she decided to do an original, and I’m very grateful that we were paired together. So thank you, Kwento.

1:09:16 KWENTO:
Thank you, Michelle. I loved working with you. I feel like we’re very compatible as people, you know. I just loved sitting on the phone and just chatting with you and hearing your stories. I was taking notes and making little pointers on the things you were saying. Yeah, the song wouldn’t have turned out if you weren’t so open and willing to be vulnerable with me and share what you really felt. I really appreciate that and I loved working with you too.

1:09:48 REBECCA THOMAS:

I was going to jump in really quickly. I called up Irvine and he just told me a story, and he told me the story of Africville and I took furious notes. With the poetry I do, and when I write, I’m very clear about my intentions that I never want to write stories that aren’t mine, or speak to stories that aren’t mine, and here I was doing a story that’s not mine. But, Irvine was so warm and trusting and he said ‘you know, I’ve been following you since the beginning and I know you’re gonna do a good job.’ So I put an incredible amount of pressure on myself to write something. I was very nervous because I asked him ‘do you want to review it before I do it?’ and he said ‘nope, you’re gonna do a good job and I want to be surprised with everyone else.’ So that’s kind of what my experience was. To have that trust was such an honour, I guess, because I’m not from Nova Scotia, I’m from New Brunswick, so the story of Africville was something that I learned after I moved here. So to have such trust in me was a really wonderful and warm experience.

1:10:57 INGRID WALDRON:
What about you, Irvine?

1:10:59 IRVINE CARVERY:
Trying to unmute here.

1:11:05 INGRID WALDRON:
You’re good.

1:11:08 IRVINE CARVERY:

Am I good? Good now. Oh great. Listen, you know what, we – it’s hard to describe, but we are all Indigenous peoples. Whether that’s an Indigenous person from Africa or an Indigenous person from North America. In our Indigenous-ness we share the spirit. We share in the love of the Earth and Mother Earth. Those are things that we share together. Even though we didn’t grow up together, we lived different lives, I know that that’s why I said to Rebecca, ‘I trust you. Because I know that you’re gonna be able to really really touch on Africville’ and I sent her a note telling her that she really does have the spirit of Africville. In listening to everybody collaborate and the collaborations of everyone here this evening, I’ve got to say that I’m so humbled and honoured to be a part of this group. This is absolutely fantastic and I know that viewing audience is only gonna grow. Because I’ll bet ya, everybody who watched this tonight, is just gonna go spread the word. So I wanna thank all you young people for allowing me into your lives for a day. It’s been wonderful. Thank you so so much. And Rebecca, you’re the best.

1:13:01 REBECCA THOMAS:

Thank you so much.

1:13:04 INGRID WALDRON
What about Vanessa and Leelee, what was it like?

1:13:07 VANESSA HARTLEY
I had such an amazing experience. Typically, I’m not that artistic, so being able to collaborate on this project and really open up with my story and the history of Shelburne was incredible. As well, to be paired up with somebody, ten times as incredible to be allowed to express that. It was incredible and I’m forever grateful for this experience.

1:13:37 INGRID WALDRON:

Leelee –

1:13:38 DORENE BERNARD:

Oh, I’m sorry, did I –

1:13:40 LEELEE OLUWASTOYOSI EKO DAVIS:

No, no, you go ahead Dorene.

1:13:42 DORENE BERNARD:

Oh my goodness, it was beautiful and I want to thank Liliona for putting this all together. With, just some of the things I sent to her, and doing the water song the other day, and just last minute – everything was last minute – and having to come here and not even see the video before we, you know, get a chance to download it because, you know, we’re at the pound here and on the front line. All the things that happened today, this has been so uplifting and really fed my spirit. I’m so thankful that she, I just love that she was at the water and dancing in the water. Yeah. It just really uplifted me and I pray that it does for everybody who watched tonight. All our collaborations, they were just amazing.

1:14:45 INGRID WALDRON:
Thank you. I apologize, let me go back to Leelee and her piece with Vanessa.

1:14:55 LEELEE OLUWASTOYOSI EKO DAVIS:

Oh, it’s all good. To be honest, like, I’m just so moved by Vanessa and who you are as a person and your openness and your willingness, like, it’s really really clear these times require us to move with love, with care, with trust. And you gave and brought all of that, and I’m grateful. I’m so so happy and lucky.

1:15:21 INGRID WALDRON:

Thank you. Liliona? Liliona?

1:15:32 LILIONA QUARMYNE:

Yeah. It was, I think our experience, because what we’re dealing with is so, so alive in this particular moment, well, I mean, I have just so much love and respect for Dorene. But the reality of what we’re doing and the importance of, the importance of the words that everyone shared tonight, just felt so real in the creation process. I think throughout it, I was just so aware of what Dorene was saying and the lived reality of how she is in the world, you know, that she was talking about water as it was like, in everything she was doing, she was embodying water at the same time. It was really, really beautiful and powerful to be able to witness that and to feel it.

1:16:38 INGRID WALDRON:

Great. I’m also wondering if you could talk about what you learned from each other in your pairing. About your respective communities. What did you learn? Anyone can take this one

1:16:57 IRVINE CARVERY:

Well, you know for me, it was special because my grandmother is Mi’kmaq. And I never got to know my grandmother, but through my mother I got to know her. And to hear my brothers and sisters talking, and my sisters talking, it just brought to life the memory of my grandmother and I am so appreciative of that. And I have such faith, it renewed my faith in young people, that they are so powerful. That they have a gift and I’m so glad that they had the opportunity to share it with the world. It’s just simply amazing.

1:17:52 INGRID WALDRON:

Thank you. Anyone else, what did you learn through this collaboration for the piece?

1:18:00 LEELEE OLUWASTOYOSI EKO DAVIS:

Leelee here. I, you know, it’s funny because it’s like there’s all these moments that led to this moment, where all this learning was happening. And I’m not from here, I’m ‘come from away’ as Nova Scotian Africville descendants would call it. And I have to be aware of that. You know, I was very very hesitant about how much my voice was in the piece, how much my image was in the piece, because I wanted to honour Vanessa and honour Vanessa’s story and connection to that place which I don’t have. I have it only through the invitation from Vanessa. So I’m just grateful for the teachings that I have been gifted and passed forward from my Indigenous loves and community, the love of my life, and you know, then to this moment here that prepared me for this. My teaching, my learning is that everything is preparing me for what is coming now where I am.

1:19:10 INGRID WALDRON:

Thank you. I’m thinking about, for all of you, the importance of building solidarity. With Indigenous people, it’s an often discussed topic here, in this province, but across Canada. Did these issues emerge in the production of your piece, and if it did, how so?

1:19:44 REBECCA THOMAS:

I think for me when I was working on the piece, and learning as much as I did about Africville, like recognizing that there’s so many similarities in the stories between the Mi’kmaq people here in Nova Scotia and Mi’kma’ki and along with African Nova Scotians, just seeing how, how often we as people were just discarded. You know, for convenience, for capitalism, for development, for colonization. And to have very similar, like, you know, the Shubenacadie Residential School that my dad went to and the Home for Coloured Children, you just see so many of these kind of like similarities and it just kind of creates this sense of, though we are different in where we come from, and our backgrounds, we still have this really strong sense of solidarity by, you know, not only just surviving, because I don’t necessarily like framing it in that way, but to thrive and to find success beyond simple survival and I think that’s a really unique and incredible piece. It just brings, I don’t know, for me it just makes me feel closer to, you know, understanding or at least having an inkling of an understanding of the Africville Nova Scotian experience and how it relates to the Mi’kmaq experience. It was just a lot of learning and I feel good about this project. Sometimes I finish a poem and I just feel blah, but I didn’t feel this way about this poem. I feel good about this poem.

1:21:13 INGRID WALDRON:

Anyone else? Building bridges, building solidarities, how did that come out, how was it highlighted in the piece?

1:21:22 DORENE BERNARD:

I think that in our piece that we did, in listening to, seeing others, it’s about, it’s a spiritual movement. We build, through our spirituality, our connection with the Great Spirit, with the land, with Mother Earth, the water, and others, you know, all living beings. We talk about our relationships, you know, our relationships with the land, the water, the animals, the , the geese, and all the other living beings. And it’s our human relationships that are suffering. You know, we don’t have a problem with all these other living beings. We don’t have a problem with us. It’s how we treat each other and how that is reflected with how we treat the land, how we treat the water, how everything else is valued in the world. We don’t have value for ourselves and for each other, this is what’s playing out in the world. I think, you know, we talk about the value of our lives, our spirits, you know, so I think that for me, spoke in all of these collaborations, and I think it’s what came through for me and I want to thank everyone for being a part of this with me and Liliona and with you Ingrid, thank you for all you do. You’re the water warrior, you’re the Mother Earth warrior, and I always thought that and I’m so thankful for all the work you do because you bring good medicine. You take medicine from other people to make something good and I want to thank you for that. All of you.

1:23:54 INGRID WALDRON:

I want to pose this question to the artists specifically, to Rebecca, Kwento, Liliona, and Leelee. As you know, you’re artists, so you know there’s a long legacy of art for social justice. So I just want to hear from you, to hear what you think the role is, the role of art is, in raising critical consciousness and enabling people to listen to one another and respond effectively. What’s the role of art for you in that?

1:24:34 KWENTO:

I would say art is everything. Art is like taking nothing, like, space and time and there’s nothing there, and boom – art – and there’s something. I feel like, you know, like it comes from a place beyond ourselves. So if we want to raise our consciousness, art is the way. The way. Creating and making. Something from nothing. All movements have either a chant, or they have a you know ‘we shall overcome,’ there’s always a song. You know, there’s always a song or like, some type of visual, or some type of something. Because art also doesn’t ask permission to enter us, it just does. I think art is like the way, actually, to create social change.

1:25:37 INGRID WALDRON:

Thank you.

1:25:40 LILIONA QUARMYNE:

If I could just add to that, that was one of the most brilliant things I’ve ever heard in my life. I think too that art has the ability to be both incredibly simple and incredibly complex at the same time. So it can enable us to feel all the different emotions, and all the different sides, and all the realities at the same time which I think is essential for the really complex change that we need to deal with in the world right now. Yeah, and I think sometimes, non-artistic processes don’t have that capability.

1:26:30 REBECCA THOMAS:

I think for me, when I think about art, as someone who is both an artist and also, like a, kind of process oriented, nerdy, policy brain. Like, I live in those two worlds, very much, all the time. I can try to have this very rational conversation with somebody, I can pick apart a strategy, or look at a policy piece and try to find its flaws, but often times when you think about these social changes, those are rooted in emotion. So I often talk about the head work and the heart work. I think the head work is the laws, and policies, and all of that stuff that helps things function through process. But the art is the heart work. And in order to get your head to work, you have to have your heart working too. So I think for me, it becomes like a really great additional tool for me to invoke a sense of duty or responsibility to change. So I try to, at least within my art, blend together both that head work and heart work in a way that I can kind of elicit change.

1:27:43 IRVINE CARVERY:

I’m not an artist, but art is our humanity. Through art, we find our human selves. And that’s, that is incredible because, you know, when we look at our histories as peoples, any great movement has been led by people coming out of the arts. I think of James Baldwin, I think of Maya Angelou, I think of Tyler Perry today and the work that they do in bringing forward those very, very tough issues but bring it in such a way to bring humanity to it. So art for me is my humanity.

1:28:40 INGRID WALDRON:

What about Liliona? Anything you’d like to say? Not Liliona, I’m sorry, Leelee.

1:28:50 LEELEE OLUWASTOYOSI EKO DAVIS:
Well, it’s pretty much all been said. I just want to say, I guess in addition, that we are all artists, you know. Like, there’s an artists way in everyone if they give themselves space to have it. And that not all artists have the desire or the intent to create through their own humanity. So we’re all making this choice to do this in this way, because I’ve seen many artists who don’t think about intention, who don’t think about output, who don’t think about historical context, who don’t think about any of that. So, you know, I’m just grateful that I wound up in this place, in this time, in this vessel. So 100% yes, bring me back into my body, I started as a professional institution trained dancer and I left it primarily because I was sick of getting patted on the back like ‘hmm, that was nice.’ And I thought, ‘blood, sweat, and tears for that was nice?’ You know I wanted to tell stories and do things in a deeper, bigger way, and I’ve been grateful to be able to find that. To touch presence, to touch people’s humanity, their consciousness, and leave them with something that they can then go with and inform their steps forward. Yeah, y’all said it, but I came and said some more.

1:30:22 INGRID WALDRON:

Thank you. I’d like to pose this question to the speakers. When I say speakers, I mean members of the affected communities: Irvine, Michelle, Dorene, and Vanessa. We’re talking about building solidarity, but as you know there are barriers to building relationships and solidarities between Indigenous people, Black people and Indigenous people, and other communities, there are real barriers in Mi’kma’ki and other parts of Canada in doing so. What do you think those barriers are, and how do you think those barriers can be overcome. 

1:31:02 IRVINE CARVERY:
Hmm. Really serious question here, Ingrid. You know, really, the colonizer did a wonderful job in dividing and conquering. You know, they have done a wonderful job in the way in which they present opportunities for the African descendant community and the First Nations community. They’ve done a wonderful job to divide us, but through our learned experience that all of us have had in dealing with the colonizer, we are breaking down those barriers. You know, we talk about Africville, but we’ve gotta talk about Turtle Cove over in Dartmouth that was destroyed with the Halifax explosion, which was a Mi’kmaq community right across from us. And we shared, we went across that harbour back and forth, from Africville to the Mi’kmaq community, we intermarried. When we arrived here in Nova Scotia, with no supports, it was the Mi’kmaq people that taught us how to go into the woods to find the herbs that we needed, taught us how to fish, taught us how to survive here in this very, very unfriendly place. But over time, they divided us. We need to go back to that commonality that we have with each other and I, you know, the struggles that each of us have been through, the only thing, you know, that worries me, is that the colonizer will use the fact that First Nations people have treaties, so therefore we gotta treat them differently than what we treat people of African descent, because of that, we’ve gotta just say ‘no, sorry, you’ve treated us the same.’ You know, you called me a n*gg*r, and you called them oh that dirty old *nd**n. That’s our history, right. That’s common shared history that we have with each other and we need to recognize that and we need to come together through collaborations like what we’re doing here right now is the way in which we break down that control by the colonizer. We’ve got to get rid of his control over our thoughts and our minds. The spirituality in, when I heard Dorene talk, we talk about the need for us to build, you know, self awareness within our children. That we want them to be strong as young people growing up. That’s exactly what Dorene is talking about, and it’s through that shared history that we can get there. So, you know, we’ve got a lot of work to do, but we are beginning to see the light. We are beginning to walk the same path. And when we get on the same path all together, we are a powerful force. And we can move mountains.

1:34:30 MICHELLE FRANCIS-DENNY:

In my experience, when it comes to barriers, I’ve been working on the, you know, the Boat Harbour mediation project for more than four years now, so I’ve been working directly with the Nova Scotia government and the sector that is responsible for the clean up plans. And I can honestly say that there needs to be a lot of work to be done on the end of, you know, government representation. When you’re working with Indigenous communities because, you know, this word reconciliation gets thrown around so much to the point that it means nothing now. It means absolutely nothing to us, but they have this sense of pride, you know, to say ‘we’re working with this community and we’re reconciling.’ But in reality, you’re not. You’re not. There has to be more space. More space created for conversations. So, you know, we tend to deal with this facade, ‘oh, we’re listening to you.’ You know, you throw in a buzz word here and there to really, to try and capture peoples’ attention that we’re doing well and we’re paying attention. But in reality, on community levels, we feel a different way. And it’s important for government and those representatives that are assigned to acknowledge that. And I’ll tell you, it is a struggle to let anybody acknowledge that they could do better. And that’s the number one barrier for me, is I just want an acknowledgement that you can do better. And it’s impossible right now, so that’s all. So we can move forward. Let’s create space, but first you have to acknowledge that. Don’t hide under this facade that we’re gonna go, and you know, I’m gonna put on my rose coloured glasses and this is all gonna be lovely and we’re all gonna swim in Boat Harbour someday. No. There’s a lot of work here and pay attention and acknowledge. It is what needs to happen and if that has to go up the chain to whatever levels, you know, to ministers and project managers, just a whole slew of people involved, that aren’t paying attention. Something has to be done about that.

1:37:03 VANESSA HARTLEY:
I agree, and going off Michelle’s point, of them trying to throw us off of our path. I think the BIPOC population has an end goal and we have a goal of true equality and equity, and government loves to play the game of chucking a couple words in that makes it look nice and pretty to then distort our perception of what’s actually taking place. So I find, going off this question, I don’t see it as a lack of solidarity between Black and Indigenous because I think it’s always been there and historically we know that it was. I see the solidarity between these two groups uniting and trying to get this end goal and I think in Shelburne, the issue here, is we don’t have the relationship with our municipal, or our town, council. There’s a lack of trust there. I don’t trust that you’re going to tell my story correctly. I don’t trust that you’re intent is accurate. And I know it’s not, because I know that our community still struggles in accessing clean drinking water after being bypassed twice on town water well. So, we know that these things are here in place and we can see them, but they’re not being talked about so we know your intent is not correct and therefore we are continuing to have this conversation, therefore, speaking up for ourselves, trying to fight for what we should have, for what every human being should have, and that’s clean water, and being told ‘no, stop playing the race card, no, there’s no systemic barriers in your way, no, you don’t have health issues’ when we can see clearly that we have many elders in our community passing from cancer and other disease. So I don’t think, in the future, that this trust is going to be built overnight because for many years they’ve been here creating this horrible place of a hell in our Black community.

1:38:55 IRVINE CARVERY:

Very good, Vanessa. You know, I want to point out, how dare Sterling Belliveau – Belliveau, whatever his name is – dare to suggest to the First Nations people that they should stop for a year to negotiate with non-Indigenous fishers. How dare he. How dare the non-Indigenous fishers think that they should be at the table for discussions with the government and the Mi’kmaq people. How dare they. How dare the Premier of Nova Scotia come out and apologize to Black people about the justice system and appoint a committee where we had no input, there was no consultation with us whatsoever, he hand picked who he wanted to be on it. How dare they. How dare they do these, but they continue to do it because of their feelings of white privilege. It’s what it’s about. It’s about white privilege. They say these words, as Michelle said, but those words have no meaning. They have no meaning. And we need, we need, we – our peoples – need to see beyond those words and we need to demand. We are at a, it’s the 21^st Century, no more asking for anything, it’s now time to demand and get out there and make it happen. So, that’s where we need to get to as people with our collaborations. We need to support each community strongly.

1:40:49 LEELEE OLUWASTOYOSI EKO DAVIS:

I don’t think people realize that the fight that we’re fighting is God’s work for everybody’s survival. Because when there’s no water, and there’s no land for us to be on, and there’s no fish or nothing, it doesn’t matter if you’re white, Black, brown, yellow, whatever: you don’t got it. You don’t got nothing, right? So, that’s the thing is that we’re out here doing this work as Black and Indigenous folks, and I really want to highlight as a Black identified person with background great-great-grand Indigenous heritage also, acknowledge all the ways we’ve moved together. And if we do an abolitionist movement, we can see right now the reports, they show that Black people are inequitably incarcerated. But guess what? There’s no number in our Indigenous community. They didn’t even bother to do that report. So as a Black person, I feel I have to stand with my Indigenous community and my counterparts, to move forward because I’m seeing that there’s still shortages that even as a Black person, we’re getting acknowledges, we’re getting all these things, and then I look in these reports that just leave out my Indigenous community. So, I’m a little bit passionate about that.

1:42:10 INGRID WALDRON:

Anyone else?

1:42:13 DORENE BERNARD:

Yes, I’d like to say, I think the biggest barrier that we’re facing right now is the lack of education. The lack of education on what it means to be Indigenous and our rights as Indigenous people. There’s so much out there now, anybody could self educate on the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. That took over 20 years to write, and look how many years it took to have it accepted by all the countries in the world, and then, even to have it implemented in Canada. We are still working to have it implemented, those 94 calls to action. There’s been so much work by Indigenous people over the decades, like the World Commission on Aboriginal Peoples. They took the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, their report, and then the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. We have so many <inaudible> in government offices that haven’t even <inaudible> over these decades, trying to assert our –

1:44:03 INGRID WALDRON:

Did we lose Dorene?

1:44:08 LEELEE OLUWASTOYOSI EKO DAVIS:

She’s speaking truth and the internet came along.

1:44:13 INGRID WALDRON:

Hi, Dorene?

1:44:19 IRVINE CARVERY:

It said that her bandwidth was low, maybe we did lose her.

1:44:27 INGRID WALDRON:

Okay, so why don’t we just move on to the next question and we can come back to Dorene. I’m just kind of thinking about a comment that Leelee made when she mentioned that not every artist uses their work for intention. So this question is actually for the artists, I think most people know that you use your art for social justice, but for those who don’t or have yet to, or want to, how can that be done? How, thinking about what you’ve done throughout your lives, in terms of using art for grassroots mobilizing and social justice movements, you have any kind of words or insights to give artists on how they can begin to do that with intention?

1:45:24 REBECCA THOMAS:

I’ll begin, I guess. I know for me, I always think back to the one moment where I did my poem in city council for Edward Cornwallis, to help get the statue taken down. And that was not the poem that I had prepared for that day, I had a different poem prepared and it was literally within the last 30 seconds or so that I decided to do my piece Not Perfect because for me, when I thought about the responsibility and the access that I had, you know, to a group of decision makers, I said ‘this could be uncomfortable and this could be awkward and I’m just going to be prepared for that and I’m going to do it anyway.’ I think that that first piece is recognizing that if you want to make change with your art, well first of all you don’t have to, but if you want to, for me it helps to just acknowledge that this is going to be uncomfortable, acknowledge that people might not understand. I mean, the tabloid magazine that I will not name took out and did a two page poetic response with like a horrible caricature of me after doing that, and part of it is like steeling yourself for that. If you can acknowledge that that’s going to happen, then it can be less devastating when it does, so that you can continue moving forward.

1:46:59 INGRID WALDRON:

What about the other artists?

1:47:02 LILIONA QUARMYNE:

I think too, there’s this myth or this belief that maybe especially here because more in smaller communities, that there aren’t a lot of people already doing this work. But just because we don’t always know who the people are doing the work, doesn’t mean that there aren’t people doing the work. So, you know, you have to go, you have to work extra hard because the people are there. You just have to find them. I think that this is, I mean, I think this is something that every, not every but a whole bunch of, arts organizations are now starting to wake up to. The day after George Floyd was murdered, it was like, ‘oh, we need to be alive to this’ right? So there’s a lot of people now trying to catch up and catch up and catch up. I think it’s, part of it, is just resilience and persistence. Not saying ‘oh I just can’t find the person’ or ‘I just don’t know how.’ The knowledge is there, there are people doing it, you just have to keep at it and not let yourself off the hook, I think.

1:48:21 LEELEE OLUWASTOYOSI EKO DAVIS:

A hundred percent. A hundred percent the biggest foundational thing in that for me is time. Time. Capitalism cannot continue to function alongside the desires for what we say we need as time. Because capitalism has time is money, this and that, all of that stuff. And that type of thing that you’re suggesting, Liliona, requires taking time. Slowing down. Pausing. Moving at a different pace. You know? I feel like, that so many people say ‘oh well what can I do?’ I really think that, learn yourself. Learn about who you are. Learn about where you come from. Learn about what’s in your heart. Learn about your family’s history. Before you start getting all interested in all of our cultures and then be responsible for that and lead from that because we have our own stories to tell. And so that’s what I always say when I’m working with youth and other folks, is ‘okay well what’s your story?’ Because we can’t keep, it’s 2020, we can’t keep trying to do these old things we’ve done and there’s no excuse for ignorance in 2020.

1:49:39 KWENTO:

Yeah, I agree with that. Just finding your voice. Finding your own voice. And who you are and what you want to say, you know. I guess as advice, outside of your art form, what is it that you want to say? And then also, you know, the truth hurts so be ready for people to act like they don’t care. Because it hurts a little bit when you’re being really truthful but it definitely, that would be my advice.

1:50:16 INGRID WALDRON:

Anyone want to add anything before I begin to start the closing? I want to conclude our discussion by asking each panellist to describe, if it’s possible, in one word what belonging feels and looks like to you in this province?

1:50:44 VANESSA HARTLEY:
I’ll jump in. It’s not going to be one word, but I’ll try to be quick. I think my word is equity. I don’t want equality anymore, I want equity. I want to be put up to the level of other people if that’s what I need to be equal. I want true equity.

1:51:02 MICHELLE FRANCIS-DENNY:

Mine are two words: Mi’kma’ki Strong.

1:51:12 IRVINE CARVERY:

Thank you very much. Mine is Africville.

1:51:20 REBECCA THOMAS:

I’ll jump in, I gotta keep it to two words too, I’m very sorry. Righteous indignation.

1:51:32 KWENTO:

Mine is allowance. Just allow me, you know? Just let me.

1:51:45 LILIONA QUARMYNE:

I think mine is grace. It’s a far away dream but not an impossible one of us one day having enough grace, to be whole enough in ourselves, that we can allow other people to be whole in themselves.

1:52:08 LEELEE OLUWASTOYOSI EKO DAVIS:

That’s an inspiration for me, Liliona. I say that it’s touching grace. Like I can touch grace in myself and I can come over to you and I can touch grace in you.

1:52:24 INGRID WALDRON:

Dorene? Oh, yes, Dorene, are you back?

1:52:31 LEELEE OLUWASTOYOSI EKO DAVIS:

We don’t see her here.

1:52:33 INGRID WALDRON:

Okay, so, thank you for that everyone. So in closing then, we are at a few minutes before 9. This was a fantastic event, I mean, if I may say so myself. It was unique and haunting and thrilling and I’ve really enjoyed being a part of this. So I’d like to thank the speakers, performers and artists who participated in this event tonight. I would also like to thank Lindsay Dobbin, who curated this anchor project for Nocturne, I’Thandi Munro for providing logistical support, Bria Miller for the wonderful graphic art – you’ll notice the graphic art in the promo that we did but also in the Facebook event page, Laurie Graham for providing technical support for the Zoom online platform this evening, Ayoka Junaid for providing ESL interpretation and Lindsay Ann Cory, the Executive Director of Nocturne, for providing support throughout the whole process of bringing this project to fruition.

I would also like to thank our partners who helped fund, sponsor, and promote our event tonight and that includes: Visual Arts News, Halifax Regional Municipality, Arts Nova Scotia, Canada Council for the Arts, the Public Service Alliance of Canada – Nova Scotia branch, Kairos, Environmental Defence, The Leap, Sierra Club, The Black Environmental Initiative, Nova Scotia Environmental Network, Shake Up the Establishment, the Coalition of Black Trade Unionists, and The Ecology Action Center.

Finally, I would like to thank you, the audience, for attending this event and I would like to wish you a great rest of the evening. Thank you very much everyone. I’m not sure if Lindsay Ann Cory would like to take a few final words or not.

1:54:51 LINDSAY ANN CORY:

Yeah, I don’t really want to add to much, I just think tonight has been so amazing. We’re gonna leave the chat open for a bit to let these kind words flow through, but just thank you so much to Ingrid, and to Lindsay, and the speakers, all of you, all of our artists, all of our speakers. Thank you so much.

1:55:15 INGRID WALDRON:

Thank you.

1:55:17 LEELEE OLUWASTOYOSI EKO DAVIS:

Thank you, Karen Staples for your ESL interpretation too.

1:55:23 LINDSAY ANN CORY:

Yeah, thank you Karen, I put that in the chat as well.

1:55:33 INGRID WALDRON:

Great everyone. Thank you so much. Bye bye! Bye audience! Take care!

“Hometactics,” according to Latina philosopher Mariana Ortega, is a notion of everyday praxis as a way to feel comfortable in unwelcoming worlds, all the while remaining aware of the oppressive nature of dominant norms in those worlds. The contradiction of finding comfort in a hostile environment can be observed in Memorial: Work by Venezuelan Diaspora Artists. The group exhibition, shown at the Khyber Centre for the Arts, featured the work of Ana Luisa Bernárdez Notz, denirée isabel, Sebastián Rodríguez y Vasti, Alejandro Rizzo, Cecilia Salcedo, and Camila Salcedo. The exhibition served as a platform for Venezuelan artists to document, archive, and
recreate their experiences of living with unfixed diasporic identities, understanding the resulting artworks as extensions of their displaced selves.

denirée isabel confronts the audience with the private-home in a los extraños que amo profundamente where the artist presents a love letter to people she has never met. Meanwhile, in Realidades Fabricadas, Alejandro Rizzo Nervo makes an interpretation of the public-home as a concern for an uncertain future that incorporates a personal recollection of events. And finally, how Camila Salcedo’s Realidades Alternativas (Santa Paula, El Cafetal, Caurimare, Caracas) encompasses both aspects, private-home/public-home, by piecing together the places from her childhood using Google Street View, a service banned by the Venezuelan government.

The multiplicitous self, which is constantly negotiating their multiple social locations, applies homestactics to their relationship with the public-home and the private-home. The public-home is a way to refer to the public spaces and events in the homeland and can be framed by what the curator refers to as “News/Crisis” in the curatorial statement: there is a scarcity of news coming from Venezuela as a result of censorship laws and power outages, which creates a barrier between the artists and their home country. However, the private-home, as a counterpart, is the collection of family pictures and stories that the artist kept after migrating. This concept of private-home can be found in what the curator categorizes as grandparents/family histories, which focuses on family memories and intergenerational trauma.

a los extraños que amo profundamente by denirée isabel is composed of multiple textile pieces that were placed inside the gallery’s window display. The weavings were hung from the ceiling, juxtaposing delicate panels reminiscent of windows and large-scale portraits of the artist’s grandparents who, unlike the artist, still live in Venezuela. This self-mapping locates the artist embedded in the specific history of Venezuela’s immigration crisis, a history where sometimes leaving the homeland means never returning. The work seems to be a place of offering, a make-believe altar that appeals to the viewer’s sense of grief. Praxis is evident in the private-home when a part of the artist’s personal archive is longing for something familiar.

Alejandro Rizzo Nervo presents us with two photographs from the series Realidades Fabricadas. The scale of the images used in the photo collages lends a cartoonish quality to both pieces while also maintaining a serious political tone. One of the photos shows three people printing money. Bills are stacked on the floor and current Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro can be seen on a nearby screen giving directions. The second image shows four protesters in the foreground (holding banners, throwing tear gas, displaying the Venezuelan flag), while a group of policemen can be seen behind them next to a billboard of Chavez’s eyes covering what appears to be a slum. The use of such cartoonish composition of images can be understood as a tactic to soften the seriousness of hardship, making it manageable for an inexperienced audience. The public-home appears in this work as a criticism to the process of inflation and its consequences.

Realidades Alternativas (Santa Paula, El Cafetal, Caurimare, Caracas) by Camila Salcedo gives the feeling of scouring endlessly for a memory you cannot find. Salcedo pairs found footage, satellite photos, and images from Google 360° to create a video collage that attempts to piece together the neighborhood she grew up in. Looking for the private-home in an inaccessible public-home is a way in which the multiplicitous self-negotiates its diasporic state. In this way, it can find its reflection in location, while longing for places that have changed and maybe don’t exist anymore.

As is stated by the title, the exhibition showcases not just the work of artists but specifically that of Venezuelan diaspora artists. The curator claims that “the work intends to be non-partisan, without siding with any specific political party or political affiliation in the context of current Venezuelan politics.” For a show that presents highly political work, it seems contradictory to claim impartiality. The show falls in the trap of being in a barred room—it wants to create a sense of community by claiming impartiality, although it risks excluding other Venezuelan people that cannot remain impartial. Even when the themes are divided into categories (grandparents, family histories, news/crisis), the most evident one is overlooked: the politics. Hometactics pushes the artist to make this work to negotiate their state of living between worlds; it also unexpectedly reminds us that, sometimes, home has an inextricable link to the political.

In the 1960s, Africville was demolished by the municipality under the pretense of urban renewal. This act of destruction and the displacement of its residents was the ultimate embodiment of generations of systemic and overt racism against Black people in Nova Scotia.

Almost twenty years after the last Africville home was demolished, Mount Saint Vincent University (MSVU) collaborated with the Africville Genealogy Society, the Black Cultural Centre for Nova Scotia, and the National Film Board to develop the exhibition and symposium Africville: A Spirit that Lives On and the NFB documentary, Remember Africville. The exhibition explores the story of Africville and toured across Canada, showing in several prominent institutions

Marking the 30th anniversary of the 1989 exhibition, the collaborators reconvened with the addition of the Africville Museum (established in 2010 following the Africville Apology), to reactivate the gallery space to remember and celebrate the vibrant community that once was

The exhibition is composed of three major components: archival materials from the original exhibition, visual artworks and literary works, and scheduled performances and presentations. The archival materials include symposium transcripts, newspaper articles, publications, and films. The artworks and literary works, some recalled from the original exhibition and others newly added, comprises photographs, paintings, mixed media works, poems, films, and media-based installations.

The performances and presentations took place on and off site, chosen and organized by the Africville Genealogy Society, the Black Cultural Centre for Nova Scotia and the Africville Museum. MSVU deliberately extended freedom to its collaborators for agency and self-determination over the programming that would take place in the space

Through the combination of these three components and exhibition strategies, Africville: A Spirit that Lives On – A Reflection Project creates a potent space for difficult conversations and social justice

Upon entering the gallery, I was greeted with audio recitations of poetry by Martha Mutale. Her three poems set the tone for the rest of my time with the exhibition. Her words were powerful, unapologetic, thoughtful, and heartfelt

The National Film Board documentary Remember Africville was next. The film spoke to the injustice and wounds that were still open twenty years after Africville’s destruction. There was a considerable collection of archival newspaper clippings with headlines and articles, speaking to racism and oppression that could have been published today.

As I moved through the gallery, I couldn’t help but feel the outright sense of loss communicated in the works by Africville’s former residents and descendants. They spoke of stolen identity, estrangement from the past, and imposed indignity. Many of the works, however, also embodied joy

The underlying message across the entire exhibition was grounded in cultural pride and resilience. Irvine Carvey proudly states that when asked where he is from, he always answers “Africville.”

Projected on the far wall of the gallery were three short films by Cyrus Sundar Singh, highlighting the yearly Africville Reunion in connection to the yearly Owen Sound Emancipation Festival. His documentaries highlight many people working to preserve the story and legacy of where they came from

Coinciding with this exhibition in the MSVU Mezzanine Gallery was a solo painting exhibition by award-winning emerging artist Letitia Fraser. Fraser spoke on the panel of How We Build: On Craft and Blackness, one of this exhibition’s official events presented by MSVU Art Gallery, Visual Arts News, and Nocturne: Art at Night. Interdisciplinary artist NAT chantel, who also took part in the panel discussion, performed in the exhibition space in November

How We Build: On Craft and Blackness panel discussion. Left to right: Sobaz Benjamin, Letitia Fraser, Juanita Peters, NAT Chantel, moderated by Francesca Ekwuyasi

As a visitor, I found myself very moved by this exhibition. My own experiences with racism as a mixed-race African Nova Scotian were brought to the forefront of my mind. I encountered my biological surname on the list of Africville families, and I was left to wonder if there might have been a community for me there if Africville still existed.

From 2006 to 2009, Eyelevel Gallery hosted a studio tour called Go North! which aimed to bring arts consumers to Halifax’s North End at a time when it was largely stigmatized as a low-income neighbourhood. Artist studios, local businesses, and galleries welcomed neighbours and visitors to celebrate the North End’s alternative art-production spaces. Tour groups moved through ad-hoc backyard cinemas, sculpture gardens, and basement darkrooms, as well as projects by Uniacke Square Tenants Association, Black Business Initiative, and the Mi’kmaq Native Friendship Centre. Go North! attempted to work across lines of class and race difference, in order to reckon with the North End’s shifting identity.

In a 2006 article about Go North!, Michelle Strum, owner of Alter Egos Café, discusses the vacancies on Gottingen Street saying, “People talk every year about the businesses that leave, but it’s not uncommon everywhere. It’s just more obvious here because so much is empty.” ¹ The emptiness Strum describes is no longer present on Gottingen Street, where most vacant buildings are slated for demolition and dotted with scaffolding. When Eyelevel Gallery no longer had the administrative and economic capacity to continue Go North! in 2009, it foreshadowed major shifts in the North End as the pace of gentrification accelerated. Between 2011 and 2012, commercial property values increased by 17% in the North End, the highest growth rate on the peninsula. ² When the North End Business Association was founded in 2011, they claimed the domain www.gonorthhalifax.ca, making the name synonymous with economic growth and development, rather than DIY artistic action.

My guess is that if Go North! was restaged today, there would be significantly fewer artist studios on the map. Or perhaps the artist studios would simply be displaced to kitchen tables or bedrooms. Maybe these spaces never died, and only transfigured. Fuller Farm, a DIY urban farm with a bike workshop, silkscreen studio, and darkroom, has moved between different homes on Fuller Terrace; its current tenants are interdisciplinary artists who still make use of the equipment. Many ceramicists from across the North End now collectively work at Wonder’neath Art Society, using kilns that have been moved from various former studios. On the topic of artist-run culture, Jon Tupper says, “I’m interested in the sort of space that for its brief life burns brightly.”³ Temporariness is not necessarily a weakness for arts spaces, and artists find ways of embracing precarity as an inevitable aspect of their practices.

When I conducted a survey of 46 Halifax-based artists in October 2019, the number one reason they gave for leaving their North End studios was eviction/demolition. This staggering statistic comes as no surprise to artists who have been relocated in various waves of “renoviction” in the last decade. In the time since Go North!, the artist studios above Enterprise Car Rental (now Seven Bays Bouldering) and Propeller brewery were closed to make way for expanding businesses. Artist migrations tend to be patterned—after being evicted from their studios in the Bloomfield School in 2005, many artists moved to the Manual Training school before they were again forced to relocate. ⁴ The artist studios at 6050 Almon Street were demolished in 2017, and the mixed-use housing, retail, and commercial development that proposes to take its place covers almost a full city block, and will measure 27 storeys at its highest. ⁵ After losing her studio space at Bloomfield School in 2005, and again at 6050 Almon Street in 2017, sculptor Sarah Maloney says, “I finally realized that the only way I could have a secure studio space was to have it off the peninsula in a building I own.” While rising rent and financial constraints are among the top reasons why artists are vacating their studio spaces, eviction remains the dominant factor behind the relocation of artists in the North End.

In October 2019, as the Co-Chair of Eyelevel’s board of directors, I helped our Artistic Director Sally Wolchyn-Raab move boxes of receipts and archival materials into our new space above Radstorm at 2177 Gottingen Street. Eyelevel is moving less than one block away from where it was listed on the 2006 Go North! map, because its most recent home on Cornwallis Street was condemned due to damage from Hurricane Dorian. In the midst of this relocation, Eyelevel is launching Sitelines, a publication about its spaceless and site-responsive model. It developed this organizational framework under the direction of Katie Belcher in 2013, when it moved out of its space on Gottingen due to a 30% rent increase. ⁶ As it relocates for the 11th time in its 45 year history, Eyelevel continues to embrace this model, whether by choice or by force.

Eyelevel’s recent move coincides with massive changes to Halifax’s land-use policy. The Halifax Regional Municipality has been developing Centre Plan—a comprehensive policy which dictates density and height requirements for buildings in peninsular Halifax and Dartmouth—since 2015. Centre Plan’s first phase was unanimously approved on September 18, 2019, opening up several areas of the North End to high-rise developments. ⁷ The areas highlighted in red on Centre Plan’s interactive map are designated as “higher intensity zones” where mixed-use developments are authorized to be built up to 27 storeys high, the tallest currently allowed in the city. ⁸ These zones cover the current sites of Eyelevel, Radstorm, Centre for Art Tapes, Midnight Oil, Bus Stop Theatre, Halifax Pop Explosion’s office, the sites where artists were evicted from their studios at the Bloomfield School, and 6050 Almon Street. Arts spaces which fall outside of this high-intensity zone include Wonder’neath Art Society, Veith House, and Hermes Gallery, but the second phase of Centre Plan is awaiting approval.

It is widely accepted that artists contribute to the rate of gentrification in cities, and the acceleration of development in the North End is no exception. ⁹ I’ve lived in the North End on-and-off for five years, and my purchasing power as a white-settler arts worker makes me complicit in the whitewashing of my neighbourhood. When I lived on Willow Street last summer, my landlord decided to not renew our lease in order to turn our three-bedroom apartment into an Airbnb. That same summer, I cringed while booking Airbnb’s for visiting artists-in-residence, in buildings where friends and fellow artists had their leases unceremoniously not renewed. As karma’s pendulum swings, arts workers who are beneficiaries of gentrification also become its victims—sometimes simultaneously.

It is conventionally understood that arts spaces attract real estate developers to low-income areas; granted, recent research claims that “it is gentrification that draws the arts, not another way around.” ¹⁰ Peter Moskowitz, writer of How to Kill a City: Gentrification, Inequality, and the Fight for the Neighborhood, argues that “there’s nearly always a stage 0, when a city opens itself up to gentrification” through tax breaks and incentive programs for developers. ¹¹ While artists are certainly involved and implicated in the process of gentrification, the policy changes at a municipal level undeniably propel drastic changes in the built environment.

As the victims of countless renovictions (in a cycle of gentrification which they, in turn, contribute to), what impact do artists have on North End property values? Are they only scuffing floors, clogging sinks, and causing buildings to deteriorate? Or are they also monitoring spaces that don’t otherwise have a security presence, creating inventive solutions to poor infrastructure, and financing the business downstairs? In my conversation with Eryn Foster, the creator of Go North!, she said, “I just think it would do so much to really acknowledge the importance of artists and the place that they occupy in our city.” As long as the points on the map continue to shift, precarity will inevitably continue to be a part of artistic practice in the North End.

1. Lis van Berkel, “Taking it to the street,” The Coast, September 7, 2006.
2. Jiajing Chen, “Streetscape Analysis of Halifax North End,” North End Business Association.
3. Jon Tupper, “Invisible Spaces,” Decentre: Concerning Artist-Run Culture = Decentre: À Propos de Centres d’artistes (Toronto: YYZBOOKS, 2008), 246.
4. Sean Flinn, “Spaced Out,” The Coast, December 29, 2005.
5. “Public Meeting Table Discussion, Case 20871,” Halifax, January 22, 2019.
6. Hilary Beaumont, “eyelevel Gallery is moving once again,” The Coast, December 5, 2013.
7. Zane Woodford, “Halifax passes first half of Centre Plan despite developers’ concerns with affordable housing ‘tax,’” The Star, September 18, 2019.
8. See the interactive map on www.centreplan.ca. See also the North End Business Association’s Development Map which tracks all new construction, and active applications for zoning variance in the North End, viewable at www.gonorthhalifax.ca/development-map.
9. Jillian Billard, “Art & Gentrification: What is ‘Artwashing’ and What Are Galleries Doing to Resist It?” Artspace, November 30, 2017.
10. Richard Florida, “Do Arts Scenes Really Lead to Gentrification?,” City Lab, March 22, 2018.
11. Peter Mokowitz, “What Role Do Artists Play in Gentrification?” Artsy, September 11, 2017.

Ten years ago, Atlantic Canada looked a lot different than it does today. Not the nature, which has remained relatively consistent, but the typical cityscape.

In Halifax, for example, heritage mainstays like the City Hall building (opened in 1830) and the Old Town Clock (opened in 1803) now coexist with modern buildings like the Halifax Central Library, which was designed by local firm Fowler Bauld & Mitchell and introduced bold lines and sleek glass walls into the city’s skyline when it opened in 2014.

Also, St. John’s, Newfoundland is well known for being a city with a long past (after all, they have close to 30 federally designated historic sites), but even they have been looking toward the future with the construction of The Rooms in 2005. The modern building was built on a historic site, but with plenty of consultation from historians and archaeologists to quell fears of lost heritage.

These places, and other cities across the Atlantic provinces, are evidence that residents have started to let go of long-held ideas that old is always better. This has resulted in new skylines that mix traditional heritage architecture with modern, innovative buildings.

This shift has been largely driven by young, creative architects who see their practice as a form of art, rather than something strictly technical and functional. They work at small firms where they have creative autonomy, bringing in inspiration from art movements, the feelings of certain places, and the stories that can be told about their work

Narrative Architecture

One of the biggest new trends in Atlantic Canada is narrative architecture, or architecture that’s developed around a story. The emphasis is placed on the meaning of the building rather than just the design.

For Monica Adair, founder and partner at Acre Architects in Saint John, New Brunswick, the narrative behind the pieces is one of the most important elements. In fact, the firm’s tagline is “storied architecture.”
“I think this idea of inspiring people to live great stories was really about going beyond the bricks and mortar,” Adair said. “It was about how we see the world, how we see ourselves in the world, and how can we transform that?”

Adair is originally from Saint John but spent a lot of her time in New York before returning home to set up her practice with Stephen Kopp, her husband and business partner.

While in New York, they set up the precursor to Acre Architects – the Acre Collective, comprised of artists, writers, landscape architects, and other people that inspired the two. There wasn’t much strictness to it – it was more about working on exciting projects with people who inspired them.

One of their first “stories,” as they call their architectural projects, was a public art piece titled “In Transit.” Situated just in front of the new Saint John Transit headquarters, the project is both a public art piece and a bus stop.

“That project for us showed that architecture could cross both realms of art and architecture, and it actually crossed the idea of functional space,” Adair said. “So, that was a really good project for us to keep our practice open and for us to work with ideas and to change the public realm.”

Another firm that’s using narrative to guide their design process is Fathom Studio in Dartmouth, Nova Scotia. Chris Crawford, director of architecture and vice president, says that “it’s all about storytelling.”

“I think that plays a major role in our design, and I think every project has a story, and having a team that regularly uses that as a medium, it really helps inform that greater design process.”

Fathom Studio has done a lot of work for Parks Canada, and where it would be easy to stick up a sign without any context, they focus heavily on the history of the space, telling stories that are instrumental to understanding the area and its people. There’s a reason that an area is designated a national park, and it’s not just the beauty.

For example, in Fathom’s work at Prince Edward Island National Park, they used the stories of Indigenous heritage—as well as French, Acadian and British colonization—to inform the design of their work at Robinsons Island.

The island, which is actually more of a peninsula, was most recently used for camping, but has been used by the Mi’kmaq people to harvest shellfish and by the English and Acadian settlers to forage cranberries. When Parks Canada got in touch about creating signage for their new trail system, Fathom did some research to uncover those stories and then let those stories inform their design.

The site has signs that expand and retract, minimizing the impact on the natural landscape, and transparent signs that overlay the vista with illustrations of former activities that took place on the site. At one stop, they’ve demonstrated the size of the annual cranberry harvest through a red metal frame.

“It’s just illustrating the importance of the other layers that are other times ignored in the history of what has happened on the site or the current culture and society.

Heritage reimagined

Architecture is vast and explores many complex ideas, but individual architects vary widely in their approach. The people I spoke to approach projects very differently, but one thing that they can all agree on is that there has been a major shift concerning heritage buildings, or the idea that old is good and new is bad.

“I’ve been working for 13 to 14 years now, and in that time, I’ve seen a massive shift,” said Crawford. “From being a young graduate and not having much optimism that our province or our culture would be open to new ideas to seeing a real design culture emerge.”

Crawford says that in Halifax specifically there was a perception that architectural innovation meant a throwing away of history in favour of something cold and heartless. That’s no longer the case.

Rayleen Hill, the principal architect and founder of RHAD Architects, is also based in Halifax. She’s noticed the same kind of pattern over the years and thinks the shift in perception might have been the construction of the new Halifax Central Library, a large modern glass building with a second story that juts out over the rest of the building, all bold lines and sharp edges.

“I think it was the first time that everybody got to see modern architecture in a great new light, and all that it can provide,” she said, “and I think it might have changed a lot of minds. It’s been a very important building for the city.”

Hill has worked on a number of projects that bring modern twists to heritage buildings. For example, one residential project in 2014 added a garage and new siding to an existing Halifax home, turning it from a regular old house into something modern and energy efficient that still paid tribute to the original structure.

The same goes for Adair. One of Acre’s first projects in Saint John was the creation of a tiny patio for a wine bar housed in a heritage building. The project was relatively simple, but Adair says that, as the first contemporary intervention on a historic structure in the city, the meaning was much deeper than you’d think.

It showed many St. John residents that you could make a modern change to a historical building in a city that prides itself on heritage without compromising the past.

“That’s something not to take for granted for us,” she said. “These moves, even small, kind of start to set the stage. So, I think that was a great opportunity for us to start our dialogue for mutual accommodation between old and new.”

Acre has since worked on many of the commercial buildings in the historical core of the city, bringing their signature look to much of Canterbury Street and Grannan Lane. Here, the cobblestone streets and brick buildings mix with modern industrial touches and old rustic lighting to evoke an image that’s hip and modern, not unlike what you’d see in the cooler areas of Brooklyn.

Architecture is Art

Another common thread linking this new wave of Atlantic architects is how they view their field. Whereas in big architectural firms the focus is on technique and functionality, everybody I spoke to believes that the most important element of architecture is the design, and how it makes people feel.

“I think outright that architecture is art,” said Hill, when I posed this question to her. “It doesn’t have a relationship with art, it just is art.”
Of course, she adds, this depends on the specific architect and how they approach a project. For Hill, whose background is firmly rooted in design, any architectural piece that her firm works on takes into consideration the same things that an artist would: colour, form, emotion.

That’s why it’s so rewarding for her to work on things like the Halifax Explosion Commemorative Markers. With that project, she was focused on how people would react to the space, what they would see, and how they would feel. As a result, what could have been just a signpost is a piece of public art with a message.

“What we were really trying to do was to develop a sense of scale, and really to have this moment where people could walk up to the markers and read them, and while they’re reading them, also be able to see their own reflection in the markers.”

For Crawford, the relationship between art and architecture is a little less obvious, but he heavily emphasizes the importance of place-making, something that requires the ideas of art and architecture as well as those of urban planning and community feedback.

One of Fathom Studio’s projects, a revitalization plan for the seaside community of Borden–Carleton on Prince Edward Island, is a perfect example of what they hope to achieve.

The plan looks at the fabrication yards right outside of the small town as an asset rather than a liability, envisioning a large park with boardwalks passing through marshes, markers explaining the location’s history, and rotating artist studios built from the concrete pillars of the yard.
He uses the Highline in New York City as an example of the kind of project that he sees this becoming.

“Someone walks through and sees the old highline, this derelict raised subway line and you know, your initial thought is this is horrible, we need to get rid of it,” he said, “and then you see what happens as a result of some community advocacy from that passionate community, and now every major city is trying to recreate it.”

The Borden–Carleton project has not yet gone through development, but Crawford is hopeful that either someone will pick it up or a community-led initiative will give it the support it needs to go forward. If that happens, he sees it as a hub for PEI’s artistic community.

For Adair, the relationship between art and architecture is more characterized as a way of thinking or a way of viewing the world. It has been heavily inspired by the artists she worked with in New York, including Lawrence Weiner, Walter De Maria, and James Turrell.

“I’m very interested in transformational projects, and things that change the way we think, the way we see the world,” she said. “And so I think these land artists, or these Dia Foundation artists, are just part of these big thinkers, and I think they’ve always really inspired me.”

When it comes to transformation, Acre is really pushing toward the future. By the year 2030, they hope to have completed 100 transformational projects—whether the scope be big or small—and they are well on their way to achieving that.

“We’re not just going to sit there and go, ‘okay, that’s a great project and brings in money, and we’re happy to just do it’, [the point is] to really just spend some time thinking about how do we ambitiously try to go after making change.”

Commissioned by the Bonavista Biennale, Will Gill’s Green Chair was a solid steel, powder-coated, 130-pound replica of a mass-produced wooden chair that can still be found in many Newfoundland kitchens. With the help of local fisherman Ivan Russell and assistant Flo Nitzinger, it was lowered over the cliff where Gill and the team could reach it by boat and anchor it into place. Green Chair withstood months of hurricane-force winds, and winter blizzards that struck Bonavista, a small town on the Bonavista peninsula (three and a half hours northwest of St. John’s). 

The Green Chair was covered in frozen ocean spray before the sea ice tore it away in spring, but it remains the iconic image of 2017’s Bonavista Biennale.

Since then I’ve been trying to determine why my experience of the first Bonavista Biennale has stuck with me for so long. I remember telling a friend the following week that it actually worked. 

The Biennale could have looked as if the projects had been dropped in from a distant planet called Contemporary Art, but it didn’t. It could have felt as if a group of outsiders took it upon themselves to tell the story of the place to its own inhabitants, but it didn’t. The event could have pandered to its viewers by explaining the basics of performance or installation art, but it didn’t do that either. 

Instead, the Bonavista Biennale seemed, at least from my perspective as an Alberta-born, Ontario-raised, UK-educated arts writer (who has been living in St. John’s for six years), to strike a complicated balance. 

I never once overheard anyone ask why a person would want to build a steel chair in the North Atlantic or dismiss Green Chair in any way. Instead, its poetic logic seemed clear and necessary to everyone who talked about it in pubs and shops around the peninsula over that weekend, or in subsequent social media posts and newspaper coverage. The rarity of that sort of reaction to public art only dawned on me after the initial adventure of the event.

Meaningful engagement was not limited to Green Chair, but seemed to extend to the festival as a whole. A remarkable feat considering the 2017 event comprised 24 sites spanning a 100 km loop around the tip of the peninsula, ranging from provincial historic sites and public buildings to dark root cellars and open fields. Many locations were staffed by people from the communities nearby. In some cases, the attendants were able to speak to the artists about their work as they installed it, and this, in turn, led to revealing multi-layered conversations with viewers making their way around the Biennale route. 

For instance, in Keels, population 51, at the end of the road off the far side of the loop, a young man talked about parties and scout meetings he attended in a refurbished community hall where the portrait of a young Queen Elizabeth still hangs over the communal kitchen. Pages from Pam Hall’s ongoing Towards An Encyclopaedia of Local Knowledge lined the walls of the main room, and the attendant made sure to point out tables set with maps, pens and sticky notes for people to contribute their knowledge to the next volume of the project, noting some valuable points about nearby fishing spots.

Thankfully, the 2019 edition of the Biennale will include many of the same sites and a number of new locations. Again, attendants will be from local communities, and given the success of the discourses created in 2017, co-curator Catherine Beaudette wants to improve what the Biennale provides in order to create a more equitable exchange between the organization and those acting as ambassadors for it, and their own communities. Offering guided tours with more opportunities for communication between the attendants and the exhibiting artists, “making sure that we give to them as much as they give to us.”

In terms of artists, the 2019 list is an intriguing mix of Inuit, Indigenous, Newfoundland and Labrador-based, national and international, established, mid-career and emerging artists, indicating more potential for discourse. Artists like Jordan Bennett, Meagan Musseau, Camille Turner, D’Arcy Wilson, Thaddeus Holowina, Wanda Koop, Mark Igloliorte, Meghan Price, Kym Greeley, Barb Hunt and Jane Walker, and many others will expand the conversation during 2019’s Bonavista Biennale, running between August 17 – September 15, 2019.

Mark Igloliorte, an Inuk artist from the Nunatsiavut area of Labrador, will present a multi-disciplinary body of work that travels directly from the Ramp Gallery in Hamilton, New Zealand, to Bonavista. Traverse is a collection of past and present pieces that trace Igloliorte’s ongoing exploration of his culture and language through the lens of contemporary travel, recreation, geography, and the process of decolonization. In the video of a performance called Eskimo Roll, Igloliorte is in a kayak surrounded by oil tankers and container ships in English Bay, near Vancouver, attempting to complete the troublingly-titled manoeuvre. A painting called Kayak is Inuktituk for Seal Hunting Boat reveals the linguistic origins of his vessel, often perceived as mere recreational equipment. Seal Skin Neck Pillow, on the other hand, directly challenges international restrictions on sealskin products and the associated ignorance of Inuit economic realities and cultural practices through Igloliorte’s own variation on the ubiquitous piece of travel gear.  

In an intriguing pairing, Barb Hunt, an established fibre artist living in British Columbia and professor at Memorial University’s Corner Brook campus, is collaborating with Jane Walker, her former student and an emerging artist and administrator who helped organize the 2017 Biennale, and is a driving force behind the Bonavista Peninsula’s brand-new art space, Union House Arts. Hunt describes Walker as “one of the best students of my entire (23 year) career teaching visual art.” Hunt was familiar with Walker’s research on art in rural contexts in Newfoundland and the Shetland Islands and wanted to work with her on a project about loss in this province. 

“There is a way we react to gradual loss in our small communities, in towns where there are more deaths than births – more funerals than christenings,” says Walker to a local junior high art class. 

Text will be spelled out in Morse code using artificial flowers collected from outside cemeteries in the province. Housed in St. Mary’s Anglican Church in Elliston, near the Sealers’ Memorial and the Home From the Sea Interpretation Centre, there are also connections to sudden, large-scale losses like a1914 sealing disaster that took the lives of 251 people from communities nearby and prompted significant changes to regulation of the industry.

St. John’s artist Kym Greeley will present a new series of paintings based on the visual elements of driving along the Bonavista Peninsula. Eschewing the usual tropes of Newfoundland landscapes like boats, icebergs, and ocean, Greeley investigates the ways most visitors and residents actually see the places around them – through the windshield of a car. Using this fixed perspective as a frame, and images taken with the professional camera she mounts to her dashboard, paintings will play with colour, atmosphere, and subtle changes in landscape from painting to painting, recalling the slow-moving imagery of a long roadtrip. 

Toronto-based artist Meghan Price will install two projects and lead a boulder kite workshop and geo walk in conjunction with Suzanne Nacha. The two met on Fogo Island, NL when Nacha was Geologist-in-Residence with the Shorefast Foundation and Price was Artist-in-Residence at the Museum of the Flat Earth. 

In Price’s Body Rock, paper is covered with graphite rubbings that record subtle geological textures, then stitched into floating “boulders” to remind us that rock, viewed in its own timescale, is not the sedentary material we imagine, but something always in motion. 

New Balance, on the other hand, implicates consumer culture and waste in geologic time by recreating upper layers of the earth’s crust in high-tech textiles, and the foams and rubbers of athletic shoes. Price and Nacha will also participate in a GEOart symposium on August 22 and 23, organized by Discovery Aspiring Geopark Inc. – a group dedicated to securing UNESCO Global Geopark designation for the upper half of the Bonavista Peninsula.

Additional programming was recently announced and the schedule includes panel discussions, a curators’ tour, workshops in photography and natural dyes, an outdoor kiln firing, a pop-up food truck, and film screening.

The Bonavista Peninsula is a locus of regeneration with new businesses opening and young people moving to the area, despite its relatively recent decimation by the cod moratorium in 1992. Buzzwords tend to fly around coverage of new initiatives in the province – cultural tourism, sustainability, diversification – terms that often seem disconnected from the people who live the theory. 

When considering the context of the Biennale, Beaudette wonders “How do you create these new economies without destroying what’s there? How do you do it by building on what’s there and be sensitive to the area without imposing some kind of Disneyland impression? You can build on what’s there – the culture, the history, the geology – and use art as an economic stimulator and a force for social change. It’s a whole other function of art that I’m really excited about, and it’s resonating in other, similar communities.” 

Beaudette laughs when asked about the lasting effects of the 2017 Biennale, as there had once been serious discussion about whether people on the peninsula would even attempt to pronounce the word biennale. Now, she says, “it just rolls off the tongue” among her neighbours. 

Someone in the local paint shop mentioned recently that he’d visited all 25 of the 2017 sites. “That makes it meaningful. So many of these things were so fun and engaging that it inadvertently made fans of cutting-edge contemporary art. That feels productive,” says Beaudette. The fact that many local viewers had personal connections to the sites where the art was displayed meant “there was ownership there.” 

My experience as a visitor to the Bonavista Peninsula during the last Biennale felt like the best kind of road trip. I discovered places I might never have encountered and had discussions that would never have occurred otherwise. I saw and learned something new at every turn.