The fifth in a series of twelve annual events taking place on December 12 from noon to midnight EST (9-9 PST, 11-11 CST, 17-05 GMT, 18-06 CET, 1-13 CST, 2-14 KST).
Each year the event moves through each word of the 12-word phrase you and I are water earth fire air of life and death and activates the word of the year in myriad ways.
The first year it started with ‘YOU’, then in 2021 ‘AND’ came to connect you to anything and everything, and in 2022 that point of connection was ‘I’—the porous one, the sole collective. With ‘ARE’ in 2023, action entered the fray.
This year, with ‘water’, we keep moving, the action is never ending. Time’s involved. Time runs through it.
Hydrophonics, hydrojams. Glistening gestures. Swimsink. Cloud seeding, drought, contamination, advisories. Nautical sea, nausea. Leagues under. Deep diver. Pearl mother. Mariana. We quickly see this could go on forever, for, as Yve Lomax put it in Sounding the Event: “Yes, this noisy restless sea is pure multiplicity: it is mixture, it is contingency and it is turbulent.” Or, put even more succinctly, as Italo Calvino’s Mr. Palomar realizes: “isolating a wave is not easy.”
This year’s event, the 5th edition in the 12-part annual series, will willingly wade the time away, in eddies, in sinks, in drains, in backwaters, through root systems, capillaries, infiltrating, inundating our “humid brains” (Isabelle Stengers).
Out of the blue, blue planet, into the molecular, cellular.
The last 20 minutes of every hour will feature 12 bodies of water as part of the Place (Dis) series. A body of water may be an ocean, a sea, a glacier, a lake, a river, a stream, a steam, a swamp, a well, a swell, a pond, a puddle, a spittle, a sniffle, a rill, a creek, a tear, a molecule.
It may be part of a flood or spill, a drip or drop. It may be dammed, bottled, glassed. It can flow, freeze, steam, or boil. It can help grow or drown. It can wave or stagnate. It can be part of juice, tea, coffee, sauce. It can cause mould or just be moist. It can seep, leak, ooze.
A body of water is a place that displaces.
“The Anishinaabek People refer to the Thames River as Deshkan Ziibi (which means Antler River in Ojibwe / Anishnaabemowin language). The river has also been called Askunessippi (Antlered River) by the Neutrals and La Tranchée (later La Tranche, which means the Trench) by early French explorers, settlers and fur traders. In 1793, Lieutenant Governor John Graves Simcoe named the river the Thames River after the River Thames in England.” (Source: Upper Thames River Conservation Authority).
Western University is located on the traditional lands of the Anishinaabek, Haudenosaunee, Lūnaapéewak, and Neutral (Chonnonton) peoples, on lands connected to several Treaties including Treaty 6 London Township, Treaty 7 Sombra Township, Treaty 21 Longwoods and the Dish with One Spoon Covenant Wampum. This place continues to be home to diverse Indigenous peoples who are recognized as contemporary stewards of the land and vital contributors to society.
LINEUP
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LINKS
– Link to main info page on the 12-year project here.
WATER (DESHKAN ZIIBI) HOUR 1 (9 PST, 12 EST, 17 GMT, 18 CET, 4 AEDT)
artLabPresents Tom Cull with Daniella Butters & Sruthi Ramanarayanan
UpStream/Downstream
UpStream/DownStream is a 2020-2021 project by Tom Cull (with Danielle Butters & Sruthi Ramanarayanan) that brings together art and activism to focus on the question of clean drinking water and healthy river ecology. The work is comprised of two video ‘poems’ that were composed from footage taken at a number of river cleanups held in London, Ontario, and at Oneida Nation of the Thames—two communities that are connected by one river: Deshkan Ziibi/Thames River. Oneida First Nation is currently on a boil-water advisory due, in part, to the ways that the city of London and other upstream communities pollute the river. Volunteers were invited to participate in the cleanups and share their thoughts about what water means to them.
Poet and writer Tom Cull is a community activist based in London, Ontario. In 2012 he and Miriam Love co-founded Antler River Rally, a grassroots environmental group which works to protect and restore the region’s Deshkan Ziibiing (Thames River).
Located in the John Labatt Visual Arts Centre at Western University, the artLAB Gallery is a vital facility within the Department of Visual Arts. Our primary focus is to act as a pedagogical tool, to support student and faculty-led research and production. Exhibitions provide a platform to respond to pertinent social and cultural issues, and/or explore conceptual, formal and material-based interests.
WATER (DESHKAN ZIIBI) HOUR 2 (10 PST, 13 EST, 18 GMT, 19 CET, 5 AEDT)
Archive of Trickster weaves together kaya’s observations of physical and digital archival imagery relating to projects of urbanization at the mouth of the Humber. Working with personal interactions with the land as an archive themselves (land as multifaceted being with agency), the way they exists in the present, the indications of how they once were and how they would like to become (again). This is the second project kaya has created under this title, inspired by Octavia Butler’s unwritten book Parable of the Trickster. Harnessing tools embedded in visionary and speculative fiction, world building and ancestral storytelling practices, this video collage of footage explores archives informed by land as sites of transformation. In this project, kaya a.k.a ‘spyke’, embodies the energy of a trickster, a being who moves outside of linear temporality and binary, to engage with “the archive” as an embodied experience of place. This work was created for National Indigenous Media Arts Coalition’s project in partnership with VUCAVU We Come Together.
Humber Water Dance by Star Nahwegahbo
Star’s practice includes her Mother, Auntie and Grandmother. Star would like to acknowledge the following people who were part of the video:
Jingle Dress Dancer – Robin Rice
Nibi Water Song Singer – Leslie Neshkiwe
Haudenosaunee Water Song Singer – Kaya Joan
The National Indigenous Media Arts Coalition (NIMAC) is an Indigenous led and run organization that serves Indigenous artists working in Media Art through support, mentorship and exhibition.
WATER (DESHKAN ZIIKI) HOUR 3 (11 PST, 14 EST, 19 GMT, 20 CET, 6 AEDT)
melt the stone is a research-creation project by Eli Nolet exploring the embodied potentiality of queer memory and stone butch identity. Using plastic waste from weekly hormone injections and collected stones, plastiglomerates are created – material indexes of a transmutation between human and non-human – objects marked by the currents of water and time. The stone/plastic archive opens outwards to the future, insisting upon a future-oriented existence of the stone butch yet to come. A speculative single channel video traces ephemeral links to imaginative queer potentials and the affective textures of transgender becomings, engaging with the tensions of memory and potentiality through a framework of understanding queer performativities as acts of transgression and simultaneous creation. melt the stone softens the lines between stone as material, and ‘stone’ as an identity, an archive, an imaginative potential.
WalkingLab studies and advances the theory and practice of critical walking methodologies through interdisciplinary arts practices and public walking events. The various projects and events activated at WalkingLab draw on feminist-queer, anti-racist, anti-ableist, and anti-colonial thought and practice to question who gets to walk where, how we walk, under whose terms, and what kind of publics we can make.
WATER (DESHKAN ZIIBI) HOUR 4 (12 PST, 15 EST, 20 GMT, 21 CET, 7 AEDT)
In this video, I am washing my teenage daughter’s hands. A mundane act of care that a mother would routinely undertake with a toddler takes on new meaning and intimacy once the child has become a teenager. The ceremony of washing our hands together is a desire for healing and becomes a gesture that is more powerful than words.
it takes friction to create a lather
holding this body in a slippery space
between us, vanishing
as we listen, washing
what can’t be seen
Time as was told (2024) by Laura Millard (5min 01sec)
Time as was told was shot in Hambergbukta Bay directly opposite Hornsund Fiord on the southern tip of Spitsbergen in the international territory of Svalbard. Between these inlets, Hornbreen-Hambergbreen Glacier is melting at an accelerated pace. When this glacier retreats it will open a passage creating an island at the southern tip of Svalbard for the first time on record. Svalbard is heating up more dramatically than any place on earth ‑ evidence of the devastating effects of the climate crisis. As the U.N. Climate Action Summit struggles to find ways to limit the global temperature to 1.5 degrees Celsius, temperatures on Svalbard have already risen by 4 degrees Celsius. The permafrost and glaciers are melting at a speed that could not be predicted even a few years ago. Circling a small piece of glacial ice in Hambergbukta I was thinking about time, how much we have, and how we measure it. Knowing rapidly melting polar ice has affected the earth’s rotation, and therefore the length of the day, I saw a visual analogy between this glowing, rounded, melting piece of ancient ice and our planet. How do we count the days we have left? The minutes? The seconds? We’re out of time.
Compulsory Figure (2016) by Jordyn Stewart (5min 30sec)
Compulsory Figure is a performance for video that takes place on a series of ponds, flood basins, and marshes that sit along the Niagara escarpment. Dressed in a skating uniform, I assume the role of a figure skater determined to perform upon untouched icy surfaces that exist in the landscape. The title of the work, Compulsory Figure, is defined as the carving of specific patterns or figures onto the ice surface by the skater’s blade. These marks made on the ice were the original purpose of the sport. As a self-taught amateur figure skater my techniques are based on my own rendition of skating routines. While adopting this constructed persona, I critique the hyper-femininity of the sport and challenges its traditional context. I perform outside of the traditional enclosed arena stage and traverses the landscape. Seeing my attire outside of an arena context further emphasizes the absurdity of the garment’s hyper-feminine design. The video documents multiple perspectives of the performance as I prepare to execute my routine.
Reimagining Niagara: Sights and Sounds of Niagara Falls (2024) by Jordyn Stewart (30sec)
Reimagining Niagara: Sights & Sounds of Niagara Falls is a stop-motion video created in response to the exhibition, To play a daredevil’s advocate at the Grimsby Public Art Gallery. The exhibition paid tribute to Annie Edson Taylor, the first person and woman to go over Niagara Falls in a barrel and survive. In the early 1900s, during the height of daredevil activity surrounding Niagara Falls, one woman surprised everyone. Confined in only a whisky barrel padded with a few pillows, Annie Edson Taylor became the first person to successfully plunge over the brink of the Horseshoe Falls and survive. The work documents a miniature replica of the iconic Falls. The waterfall soundscape was created by layering foley sound effects created using found objects. I would like to thank the production crew, Naomi (8), Dylan (10), and Leonardo (6) for their assistance.
Jack Pine, 8′ Camera Crane (2010) by Jon Sasaki (4min 32sec)
Jack Pine, 8′ Camera Crane is a sweeping 360-degree crane shot at the majestic vista where the notable Canadian landscape painter Tom Thomson created his iconic Jack Pine (1916-1917). Far more cumbersome than a paint box, the crane literally clashes with the subject with slapstick intensity. The work is an affectionate critique of the ineradicable Canadian landscape genre, and a humorous look at the ways it can be incompatible with some tools of contemporary artmaking.
Uncharted Waters Kempenfelt Bay (2024) by Lou Sheppard (20min, excerpt)
Uncharted Waters (Kempenfelt Bay) is an act of reorientation, from an anthropocentric position of conventional charting and mapping of Lake Simcoe to acts of listening and responding to the changes that are taking place there. To “sound” a body of water means to send a sonic signal below and wait to hear how long it takes to return. Sounding allows us to chart and map the bottom of a body of water, navigating what is below. To create Uncharted Waters I began by dropping a hydrophone deep into Lake Simcoe passively listening to the sounds that exist below. I brought these sounds to three musicians asking them to respond and amplify what they heard to create a new reflection of the lake- a sonic navigation of this changeable and fragile body of water. Reversing the process of navigational sounding, Uncharted Waters ask us to listen to what is changing in the lake through sound, an echo(dis)location within this shifting environment. How do we navigate beyond our familiar borders? How do we re-orient from fixed point navigation to understanding matter as active, changing and interdependent?
The Doris McCarthy Gallery is a professional public art gallery within the University of Toronto Scarborough that advances artistic innovation, critical thinking, and cultural exchange through engagement with contemporary art.
WATER (DESHKAN ZIIBI) HOUR 5 (13 PST, 16 EST, 21 GMT, 22 CET, 8 AEDT)
Artists have mythologized water in their art for centuries. Water has been many things—subject, medium, metaphor, and message, and in each case carries with it a fascination and a connection with the natural world. Through a selection of images chosen from the Art Gallery of Hamilton’s permanent collection, including works by Lawren Harris, Mary Wrinch, Edward Burtynsky, amongst others, members of AGH staff (Celia Vernal, Tyler Tekatch, Laurie Kilgor-Walsh) will discuss and highlight the various distinct styles and influences as each artist attempts to capture the essence of this universal element.
The Art Gallery of Hamilton is situated on the Treaty Lands and Territory of the Mississaugas of the Credit First Nation and the Traditional Territory of the Erie, Neutral, Huron-Wendat, and Haudenosaunee. This land is covered by the Between the Lakes Treaty (No. 3), negotiated between the Crown and the Mississaugas of the Credit in 1784, and ratified in 1792.
WATER (DESHKAN ZIIBI) HOUR 6 (14 PST, 17 EST, 22 GMT, 23 CET, 9 AEDT)
“A Confluence of Legacies” is a new hybrid video and live performance created by intermedia artist Michelle Wilson. This work of speculative fiction combines archival images, video, and narration, drawing upon Wilson’s community-engaged research. It explores how personal, familial, historical, and more-than-human legacies converge around an abandoned paint factory site within an Environmentally Significant Area known as The Coves, located in London, Ontario. This piece continues Wilson’s collaboration with the Coves Collective, which is partially funded by the London Arts Council’s Community Arts Investment Program. The Coves Collective is an ad-hoc group of artists, educators, and activists that have come together to attend to our responsibilities and relationships with the Coves: an environmentally significant area in the middle of London, Ontario. The Coves Collective is founded on an ethos of direct action, accessibility, collaboration, and justice.
The School for Advanced Studies in the Arts & Humanities (SASAH) is part of Western University in London, Ontario, Canada. SASAH is an interdisciplinary undergraduate program focusing on the foundations of the humanities. Students gain practical experience in many career fields in a range of sectors—including arts and culture, non-profit, for-profit, education, and information technology—and undertake opportunities in the London community, nationally, and internationally. SASAH is grateful to its community: students and alumni, teaching fellows, valued Advisory Council, community partners and supporters.
Shipwrecks figure in our cultural and ‘aqueous’ imaginaries for myriad reasons. Arguably, the notion of voyages gone awry takes on increased significance in our time when climate disasters and their affects, and the deleterious results of colonialism (which has relied so significantly on shipping) are everyday realities. Yet shipwrecks are also suggestive of other narratives: reminders that, historically, transformation has often arisen alongside tragedy and disaster, whether real or metaphorical. A recent volume, The Ancient Sea: The Utopian and Catastrophic in Classical Narratives and their Reception (2022) , edited by Hamish Williams and Ross Clare, is filled with texts suggesting more complex ways that watery wreckage tales might be construed. Shipwreckiana is a multi-medium project that is comprised of a combination of recorded video and sound, it will include real time interventions deploying sculptural materials, lighting, spoken word, and water itself. Patrick Mahon and collaborators, some of whom have worked with him before on the project, GardenShip and State, will present an allusive event where references to water and shipwrecks forge abstracted spaces marked by trouble, beauty and difference.
The Thames Art Gallery (TAG) is a non-profit gallery dedicated to promoting the understanding, appreciation, conservation, and enjoyment of the visual arts in the community of Chatham-Kent for present and future generations. TAG’s primary curatorial activity is the interpretation of contemporary Canadian art and its history, with a focus on artists from the region of south-western Ontario. We research and produce exhibitions in a range of media, and aspire to be responsive to the challenges of presenting high quality, innovative art in all forms, including installations, electronic and interactive works, websites, film, video and performance, both within the Gallery and off-site. The exhibitions program is designed to provoke, inspire and encourage reflection on the particularities of our locale and population, and extend the definition of art as it relates to broader contemporary culture.
WATER (DESHKAN ZIIBI) HOUR 8 (16 PST, 19 EST, 00 GMT, 01 CET, 11 AEDT)
Premiere of a new piece featuring twelve vintage electronic metronomes. They are all set to the slowest speed, and are arranged in a wavy line. They will be manipulated and mixed so that they no longer demarcate time but scramble it, stir it, muddle it. Each metronome sounds a bit differently, due to wear and tear, plus the fact that there are various models and brands. Some don’t keep time steadily, others emit a noticeably loud electrical hum. None of them can be depended on for accuracy, in fact, they each exude an idiosyncratic character. It’s clear that each one much prefers to be on its own wavelength.
The above describes the live version that will be presented in the artLAB. Simultaneously, the online version will stream a prerecorded version that will be mixed with the work The Release Into Motion – see description below.
A mouth holding a tomato frozen into a block of ice until both melt and fall off. At the onset the teeth can barely hold, the block is so hard, so cold, hands out of frame help. Slowly but surely the teeth sink in. The pace is so protracted a good part of the face is in pain from the bite of the frost. As the ice melts drops of water fall down into a metal bucket. Each drop makes a ting and marks time. Eventually the ice block falls off and all that’s left is a mouth holding on to a melting and leaking tomato. The jaws are more active now because they can bite down deeper. The tomato eventually splits open and gravity has its way. The abject scene is of a protruding tongue in the process of escaping from the mouth.
2023 remix (audio and video) of 2000 piece. Four different mixes are included on Wet Water (Let’s Dance), a 2xCD published in 2023 by Futura Resistenza. For this event, the 2023 version will be mixed with Temper (Length Wave) – see description above.
Futura Resistenza operates somewhere on the edges of performance, music and the visual arts. Interdisciplinary at its core, for Futura Resistenza a concert is never just a concert and a record reaches far beyond just what meets the ear. The label invites musicians and artists with direct personal connections within its community, as well as people who they simply admire and want to see published or on stage.
WATER (DESHKAN ZIIBI) HOUR 9 (17 PST, 20 EST, 01 GMT, 21 CET, 12 AEDT)
Refraction (2024) is an underwater video piece by Racquel Rowe that explores the sensation of dissolving within water.
As I swim slow, methodical laps, I reflect on the boundaries of my body and the lane, feeling my form gradually dissipate into fluidity. With each movement, I sink deeper into a breathless, weightless state. Moments of resurfacing interrupt this trance, reconnecting me to the surface, before I’m drawn back into the depths, caught in a cycle between dissolution and reformation.
Forest City Gallery (FCG) is an artist-run centre founded on artistic autonomy with a commitment to excellence in programming exhibitions and events that reflect and address recent developments in cultural production. FCG serves to foster and support contemporary art, promoting dialogue among local, regional, and international arts communities. FCG represents artists of all disciplines and career levels with a focus on emerging artists and practices.
WATER (DESHKAN ZIIBI) HOUR 10 (18 PST, 21 EST, 02 GMT, 03 CET, 13 AEDT)
Rimlands are peripheries to centres. The term ‘Rimlands’ was coined by WWI British politician, Halford John Mackinder, to describe that which was not the centre, the heartland. Rimlands by Penelope Cain was filmed in the Cromarty Firth, a watery body off the Black Isle, Northern Scotland. With a 5,500 year old Neolithic settlement on the landward side and a line of oil rigs on the seaward, as they overwinter in the Cromerty Firth awaiting oil price fluctuations, the site speaks of human oceanside activities, harvests and extractions across 8000 years. This video is a brief meditation and performative action, walking the point calculated to be halfway between high tide and low along this coastal intersection of time, site and human infrastructure.
The works featured during this hour consider two peripheral and over-the-horizon watery sites, a remote coastline in far North Scotland (Rimlands), and an even more remote saltpan in the Atacama desert (Before Air There Was Water, see below). Linked by a shared past as the global ocean, before oceanic names and geopolitical boundaries. These two works are also linked by their simultaneous tenuous state of watery periphery while connected through real-world power struggles to geopolitical and earth-bound centres.
The Glenfiddich Artists in Residence program invites breakthrough and award-winning artists from all over the world – Canada, China, Scotland, South Korea, Taiwan and the United States of America – to the historic setting of the Glenfiddich Distillery, deep in the highlands of Scotland, to create original pieces of art. Every summer since 2002, we bring bright new talent to stay with us. Penelope Cain was the artist-in-residence in 2019 representing Australia.
WATER (DESHKAN ZIIBI) HOUR 11 (19 PST, 22 EST, 02 GMT, 03 CET, 14 AEDT)
Fluid Resilience amplifies our subtle and dynamic interrelatedness to water in Nature. Researched and created with Shannon Cooney’s dance practice Dynamic Expansion which embodies fluid dynamics and seeks to honestly move the physical body from fluid impulses. The work took inspiration from conversations with Dr. Quinlan, and sought to create a choreography with elements of the of Resilience’s Socio-Ecological Complex Adaptive Systems theory and practice. Another source of inspiration was attendance at a water circle in 2017 hosted by Anishinabek Elder and Water Walker Josephine Mandamin, who in her lifetime walked 30,000+km around water and waterways to listen and bring attention to water.
Video excerpts of a live performance of Fluid Resilience on October 17, 2020, at Tanzfabrik Uferstudios, Berlin. Choreography by Shannon Cooney, co-creative performers Jared Gradinger and Sigal Zouk, Dramaturg Igor Dobricic, Sound Marla Hlady, Costume Nina Gundlach, Lights Emese Csornai, videographer and editor Ben Mergelsberg, Resilience expert Sr. Research fellow Dr. Allyson Quinlan.
The McIntosh Gallery is a public art gallery based at Western University. Since 1942, the McIntosh collaborates with artists, curators and academics to develop innovative strategies to interpret and disseminate visual culture.
WATER (DESHKAN ZIIBI) HOUR 12 (20 PST, 23 EST, 03 GMT, 04 CEt, 15 AEDT)
Wetland Project is a multipart, multidisciplinary study of an environmental soundscape. Its inspiration lies in a tiny bit of Earth and the sounds that emanate from it: the ṮEḴTEḴSEN marsh in W̱SÁNEĆ territory (Saturna Island, British Columbia). For ten years, this beautiful, reverberant soundscape featuring birds, frogs and airplanes has been investigated by artists Brady Marks and Mark Timmings, and musicologist Stephen Morris, and shared with audiences around the world in the form of slow radio broadcasts, new-media installations, musical performances and an artists’ book. Each iteration of Wetland Project delineates a distinct path to knowledge, a means by which the sonorous source is investigated in all of its dynamic, life-affirming power. The project’s conceptual base is rooted in an original algorithm that transforms the sound frequencies from a 24-hour field recording of the marsh into pure colour fields in flux. This metamorphosis, achieved using a colour scale that maps the pitch range in the recording onto the visible light spectrum, produces a spontaneous visual expression of the entire circadian rhythm. The synesthetic experience it provides sparks forces of apperception that re-enchant our awareness of the wetland and, by extension, of the environments we inhabit.
For the final hour of You And I Are Water Earth Fire Air Of Life And Death, Marks and Timmings present a new audiovisual interpretation of the Wetland Project field recording. Corresponding with the start time at 20 PST (23 EST), the first 23 hours and 40 minutes of the soundscape are compressed into a decelerating 40-minute piece. Then the remaining 20 minutes are played in real time. Time compression has a distilling effect that reveals patterns in the soundscape. After hearing this distortion, listening at normal speed becomes a refreshed experience.
The artists wish to thank recording engineer Eric Lamontagne and programmer Gabrielle Odowichuk for their enormous contributions to Wetland Project.
New Adventures in Sound Art (NAISA) is a non-profit media arts organization that operates the NAISA North Media Arts Centre and Café in South River, Ontario, Canada. Arts presentation with a focus on sound and listening are the basis of its year-round exhibitions, online broadcasts and performances. NAISA is located on the traditional territory of the Anishinabewaki peoples covered by the Williams Treaty (1923) and Robinson-Huron Treaty (1850). NAISA recognizes the significant ongoing contributions of First Nations, Inuit, and Métis peoples to aural culture in Canada.
Based in BC’s Lower Mainland, Other Sights is a collective whose many art projects consider the aesthetic, economic and regulatory conditions of public spaces and public life. The concerns of regional waterways, of the foreshore, and newly piloted studios on wheels can be found at currentsandwaves.ca.
