Art Waste is a collaborative art festival taking place June 7-10, 2018. Presented by Music Waste Festival annually in Vancouver BC. Submissions for the Annual Group Show open March 16, 2018 and close April 30, 2018. SUBMIT HERECONTACT US
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.