Performed at Skylight Gallery on April 10th 2015 in Vancouver, on the unceded Indigenous territory of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm, Skxwú7mesh-ulh Úxwumixw, Stó:lo and Tsleil-Waututh nations.
As a gesture of bearing witness to ongoing colonial violence, I wrote this piece and sampled Stephen Harper’s 2008 “apology” for the Indian Residential School system, his G20 speech only a year later (where he stated in candid denial that Canada has “no history of colonialism”), and time-stretched excerpts from Tanya Tagaq’s “Ancestors” (who is a throat-singer from Ikaluktuutiak and one of approximately 150,000 Indigenous children who attended a residential school).
My idea was to create a piece in ‘time-stretched witnessing’, where sounds from a colonial reality are extended so that we can hear them more deeply and clearly. As a means of retracing memory, the moment of bearing witness is also longer, more moving and more meaningful.
Stefana Fratila, one of the featured artists in this year’s Art Waste Group Show
This year’s Group Show theme is “IN DREAMS”: explore your own alternate reality, reinterpret a subconscious landscape or recreate a nightmare. We are looking for submissions that are drawn from your other waking life – the impossible or the mundane, the hoped or the feared, the meaningful or the inexplicable. Artists may choose to interpret the theme however they wish, although we will give preference to submissions that respond to the theme directly.
Art Waste Submissions Now Open (March 2 - April 17, 2015)
This year’s Group Show theme is “IN DREAMS”: explore your own alternate reality, reinterpret a subconscious landscape or recreate a nightmare. We are looking for submissions that are drawn from your other waking life – the impossible or the mundane, the hoped or the feared, the meaningful or the inexplicable. Artists may choose to interpret the theme however they wish, although we will give preference to submissions that respond to the theme directly.
We are almost ready to accept submissions for the 2015 Art Waste Group Show. Keep an eye out for the submission link on this blog, starting March 2nd and closing on April 17th.
We are open for submissions! We will be accepting submissions until April 30th. To submit, click on the Submit to AW 2014link on the left or go to www.musicwaste.ca. For more info or if you’re having trouble submitting contact us at artwaste2014@gmail.com.
PUBLIC / PRIVATE
The theme for this year’s submission show is just a suggestion; we hope it serves as a catalyst for your submission but we will not reject any quality work because it does not fit with our theme. The theme is what has been on our mind this year and a loose starting point for the work you may want to submit to this year’s show. By submitting you are responding to the theme: you are sharing your private world with the public world.