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Danica Evering & Helena Krobath

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5 à 7
October 24, 2017
Time: 5:00-7:00pm

Feminist Media Studio
CJ Building, Room 2.130
Concordia University
7141 Sherbrooke W Montreal (Qc)

Feminist Media Studio 5 à 7 presentation series:

Danica Evering (Concordia University, MA Candidate in Media Studies):
“IMPOSTERING: Complicating Power in Social Practice”

The Coordinator is a segment of my ficto-critical thesis project IMPOSTERING: Complicating Power in Social Practice. Informed by my ongoing work in social practice, I ask: How can we complicate the dynamics between insider and outsider in socially engaged art? In IMPOSTERING, I weave together three conversations with artists who are thinking about politics and difficulty—Cristóbal Martinez, Orev Katz, and cheyanne turions—with theory, memory, and anecdote. The Coordinator is one of the more fictional sections of the work, informed by my own memory and experience as the Program Coordinator at an active charitable socially engaged arts organization. Drawn from old work journals, I poetically revisit sticky moments in social practice as a form of temporal reflexivity that allows new considerations to emerge from past thoughts and experiences. Ficto-critical writing has a history within feminist art criticism beginning with Canadian cultural theorist Jeanne Randolph in 1983. After a performative reading of this segment, I will then unpack ficto-critical writing as a way to confront the implication of myself in my work and sit generously with difficulty. Thinking alongside scholar Laurel Richardson’s idea of writing as a method of discovery, I situate ficto-criticism as a method of research-creation.

Helena Krobath (Concordia University, MA Candidate in Media Studies):
“Managing the Dream: Forest World-making in Settler Resource and Land Governance”

My thesis project, tentatively titled Managing the Dream: Forest World-making in Settler Resource and Land Governance, pushes into my memories and understandings of familiar forestry spaces to ask how they have shaped my understanding of land and social relations in the region where I grew up. The thesis fieldwork took place in forestry recreation sites in my hometown of Mission, British Columbia. There, I questioned how the shapes and spaces of the backwoods have presented me with materials for narrativizing life experiences. These settings also shaped my understanding of place, citizenship, and ‘nature’ as they relate to identities and community values. In this presentation, I discuss some of the techniques I used to de-familiarize local structures and spaces, to illuminate naturalized assumptions and values informing or constraining their use. To approach these questions and de-normalize bedrock assumptions about playing in nature, I used mixed methods that included documentary research, critical analysis, sensory observation, and ethnographic art processes. Because these open-ended methods, by definition, lead to unpredictable outcomes, they run the risk of generating an unmanageable set of material. In the case of failure or complication, how to proceed? I will share the role of failure and re-framing in my work, and how I came to understand process and persistence in research-creation.

Danica Evering is a metaphorist and imposter of German descent from Cobourg, Ontario. Her current MA thesis project thinks alongside power structures in socially engaged art through creative writing. In addition to this research, Danica teaches, curates, facilitates, consults, moderates, and makes. Through her art and research she uses feminist understandings and methodologies to investigate complicating narratives, socially engaged art, sound art as dialogue, alternative and mainstream media systems, and publication as public space. Her poetic responses were recently featured in artist Althea Thauberger’s experimental video work L’arbre est dans ses feuilles [The Tree Is in Its Leaves] as part of In Search of Expo 67, co-curated by Lesley Johnstone and Monika Kin Gagnon at the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal, her experimental writing on artist Cheryl Sim’s installation engaging Montreal’s Mirabel airport will appear alongside Dr. Matt Soar’s creative photo works in the upcoming issue of Public: Art/Culture/Ideas #57: Archive/Anarchive/Counter-Archive. She is completing a community development consultancy with Humber Galleries in Toronto that is developing an annotatable toolkit for thinking through education and engagement with the campus, the neighbourhood, and the field of contemporary art.

Helena Krobath is a researcher and multimedia artist currently completing her MA in Media Studies at Concordia, Montreal. Her research explores phenomenology of place and ideologies of nature, focusing on forest recreation sites in west coast resource development zones. She approaches constructions of place-sense through various practices, including documentary research, field immersion, ethnographic art-making, and audio recording. She has led workshops on listening and field recording for the Milieux Institute and the Simone de Beauvoir Summer Institute in Montreal and on audio storycrafting for VIVO Media Arts Centre in Vancouver, among others.