Tag: we imitate sleep to dream of dissent

With the participation of: Jacqui Arntfield, Ellen Bleiwas, Simon Fuh, Chris Mendoza, Dana Prieto, Matt Nish-Lapidus, Mehrnaz Rohbakhsh, St Marie φ Walker
 
ATTEND
EXTEND
REFUSE
REST
WANDER
 
Guided by five themed prompts, each dreamer-participant engaged at their own pace with short readings, various media and creative exercises that steered their performative responses. Intended to function as alternative embodied approaches to traditional research, each participant was encouraged to trust their intuition, lean into play and follow their feelings to experiment with the ephemeral and dream of alternatives to our current position. The project commenced in a collective action of rest in Toronto’s Queen’s Park, a historic site of protest and strikes. 

The findings of each participant will be collected, collated and transformed into an alternative publication in the form of a field guide as a tool for score-based self-practice. Coming in September 2022.

Canada
www.emilydicarlo.com

Emily DiCarlo is an artist and writer whose interdisciplinary work applies methodologies that often produce collaborative, site-specific projects. Evidenced through video, performance and installation, her research connects the infrastructure of time with the intimacy of duration. Since 2007, her work has been shown both locally and abroad with most recent exhibitions at the Art Museum in Toronto and SÍM Gallery in Reykjavik, Iceland as part of their artist-in-residence program. She is the recipient of the 2020–2022 OAC Media Artist Creation Project grant, the 401 Richmond Career Launcher Prize, and recently held the 2019-2020 Canadian Social Sciences and Humanities Research grant (SSHRC). She has been a council member for The International Society for the Study of Time since 2016 and this past year, co-edited an issue of their academic journal KronoScope, which focused on “Anthropocenic Temporalities.” She currently lives and works in Toronto (Tkaronto), Canada.

Resolution:
a firm decision to do or not to do something.
the quality of being determined or resolute.
the action of solving a problem.
the process of reducing or separately something into its components.
the smallest interval measurable by an optical instrument.
the conversion of something abstract into another form.

ARTISTS
Cindy Baker
David Bateman
Kate Barry
lo bil
Kiera Boult
Alexis Bulman
Ulyssess Castellanos
Chipo Chipaziwa
Keith Cole & Jeanne Randolph
W. A. Davison
Emily DiCarlo
Claudia Edwards
Vanessa Dion Fletcher
Serge Olivier Fokoua
Marie-Claude Gendron
Moynan King
Hélène Lefebvre
Tess Martens & Holly Timpener
Roy Mitchell
Laura Paolini
Diana Lopez Soto
Jordyn Stewart
Clayton Windatt

Performance Resolution(s) is FADO’s 2021/2022 at-home residency series. Participating artists were chosen from a Canada-wide open call for submissions inviting artists to propose performance-based research projects that engaged with the theme of ‘resolution.’



It goes without saying that 2020 changed everything. The world is now a very different place than before. (We resolve never to say, “it goes without saying” again.) For artists working in live art and performance, events were cancelled and festivals postponed. What happens to embodied practice when the bodies can’t be together irl? With dizzying speed, we were compelled to bring performance to the tiny back-lit screen as an alternative. Sometimes that worked. Without being able to gather in large groups, sometimes we leaned on old tricks (what performance artist doesn’t know what it’s like to perform in a half-empty theatre?) to shoehorn our work into the current context. More often than not, to keep moving, we stuck with the script—over producing and addicted to presentation.



But thankfully the new year brings with it fresh starts, new directions and an opportunity to reflect. We make promises in the form of new year’s resolutions—a private or public personal commitment to change. Most resolutions dissolve by the end of March, or sooner. If 2020 taught us anything, it taught us that transformation comes slowly. The real breakthroughs are still in the (social) distance, but a seed has been planted.

Our inspirations for Performance Resolution(s) are the hope for a better 2021 for all, and a profound performance exercise designed by Marilyn Arsem that we think about from time to time. Read Marilyn’s exercise below.

Some of the projects in this at-home residency series will have tangible outcomes; many will not. The point was not to find to way to support artists through replicating old ways of doing things by keeping the hamster wheel of production going. Instead, we encourage a slowing down and a deep dive into what it means to have resolve, even if you don’t have the answer. 

Watch this space for updates on various projects and research contributions as they reveal themselves over the 2021–2022 programming year.