C.5 The Aesthetics and Politics of Walking Research-Creation

Thu Oct 21 / 9:00 – 10:30 PDT

chair /
Stephanie Springgay, McMaster University
Walking has an extensive history as an artistic research practice. Recently artists and scholars have argued that we need practices that break with ableist, racist, extractive, and settler-colonial logics, and instead focus on ones that are situated, relational, and ethical. This has led to question about who gets to walk where, how we walk, where we walk, and what kind of publics we can make. Further, there is a move from individual walking to collective group walking practices that consider the radical relatedness of walking together. Walking research-creation becomes accountable to Indigenous knowledges and sovereignty to Land, considers the geosocial formations of the more-than-human, prioritizes affective subjectivities, and emphasizes movement as a way of knowing. The panel features presentations on anti-racist, anti-colonial, and anti-ableist walking research-creation practices, including the ways walking artist-scholars respond to gathering restrictions during the pandemic.
Stephanie Springgay is the Director of the School of the Arts and an Associate Professor at McMaster University. She is a leading scholar of research-creation with a focus on walking, affect, queer theory, and contemporary art as pedagogy. She directs the SSHRC-funded research-creation project The Pedagogical Impulse, which explores the intersections between contemporary art and pedagogy. With Dr. Sarah Truman, she co-directs WalkingLab — an international network of artists and scholars committed to critical approaches to walking methods. Additionally, she is a stream lead on a SSHRC partnership grant, Bodies in Translation: Activist Art, Technology, and Access to Life. Other curatorial projects include The Artist's Soup Kitchen — a 6-week performance project that explores food sovereignty, queer feminist solidarity, and the communal act of cooking and eating together. She has published widely on contemporary art, curriculum studies, and qualitative research methodologies.

C.5.1 Walking Unsettling Depremacy: Stillness, Silence, and Critical Positionalities

Leah Decter, NSCAD University

This paper engages with the premise that forging the mutually respectful relations necessary for sustainable decolonial futures (Simpson, 2008, p. 14) requires understandings of place that foreground contemporary Indigenous presence and sovereignty in the context of our everyday movements and spaces, particularly as white settler Canadians who inherently benefit from Indigenous dispossession. In it, I foreground walking methodologies that address TRC Call To Action 45: i, which appeals for "the repudiation of concepts used to justify European sovereignty over Indigenous lands…" (TRC, 5). In particular, I highlight walking unsettling depremacy as a flexible, place-responsive, inquiry-driven, positionality-based methodology that foregrounds ongoing unsettlement and the decentring of colonial whiteness in relation to embodied interactions with place. This proposition is built upon the convergence of three intersecting elements: an analysis of the ways the Trans Canada Trail's infrastructural and operational systems reiterate colonial claim and walking as recreation can invoke an assumption of "exclusive [Canadian] authority" (Bird and Corntassel, 2018, 196) over Indigenous lands; a discussion of Dylan' Robinson's premise of "critical listening positionality" (Robinson, 2020, 9–11) as a form of attention in which the normative is accounted for instead of remaining unmarked; and a close reading of my 2020 video, l i s t e n, which, as a refusal of walking, acknowledges land through embodied attention in the form of (my) stillness and silence.

works cited: Leanne Simpson, ed. Lighting the Eighth Fire: The Liberation, Resurgence, and Protection of Indigenous Nations. Winnipeg: Arbeiter Ring, 2008; Truth and Reconciliation Commission Calls To Action; Christine Bird and Jeff Corntassel. Canada: Portrait of a Serial Killer. In Surviving Canada: Indigenous Peoples Celebrate 150 Years of Betrayal, edited by Kiera L. Ladner and Myra J. Tait. Winnipeg: ARP Books, 2017; Dylan Robinson. Hungry Listening: Resonant Theory for Indigenous Sound Studies. University of Minnesota Press, 2020.

Leah Decter is an inter-media/performance artist, educator and scholar based in Treaty 1 territory in Winnipeg and currently holds a Canada Research Chair in Creative Technologies at NSCAD University. She received a PhD in Cultural Studies from Queens University and an MFA in New Media from Transart Institute. From 2019-2020 Decter was a SSHRC Postdoctoral Fellow in Theatre and Performance Studies at York University. Working from a critical white settler perspective, her current work addresses social-spatial dynamics of settler-colonial contexts and considers the ethics of being-in-relation in spaces of Indigenous sovereignty. Decter has exhibited, presented and screened her artwork widely in Canada and internationally in the US, UK, Germany, Malta, Netherlands, India, and Australia. Her writing has appeared in the Journal of Critical Race Inquiry, The Land We Are: Artists and Writers Unsettle the Politics of Reconciliation, Canadian Theatre Review, Liminalities: A Journal of Performance Studies, and Fuse Magazine's Decolonial Aesthetics Issue, among other publications.

C.5.2 Marginal Walking and Mapping

Taien Ng-Chan, York University

I propose the concept of marginal walking as a critically creative framework that nourishes and supports the spaces of the margins as a corrective and a prescription to the stresses of everyday racism, which is difficult to see or describe, but underlies every interaction in everyday public spaces. Drawing from my reflections on the increase of anti-Asian hate during the global pandemic of 2020–21, I investigate how news of racist incidents circulates through digital networks that are entangled with quotidian places such as parks, grocery stores, and public transit. Through such concepts as autocartography and strata-mapping, as explored through my own research-creation practices as well as through participatory walks given by my artist collective Hamilton Perambulatory Unit (HPU), I look at how conscious acts of sensing and intervening in marginal everyday space can contribute to the creation of alternative narratives and knowledge that is necessary for change.

Taien Ng-Chan is a writer and media artist whose research explores locative media sound art, "object-oriented storytelling," place-based narratives and futurist imaginings of everyday life through immersive cinema. She is an assistant professor at York University, Chair of the Commission for Art and Cartography at the International Cartographic Association, and one-half of the artist-research collective Hamilton Perambulatory Unit (with Donna Akrey).

C.5.3 Walking Kepe'k

Barbara Lounder, Independent Scholar

In the Mi'kmaq language, the word kepe'k means "at the narrows" and is associated with the Narrows in the Halifax Harbour between the Bedford Basin (Asogômapsgiatjg) and the harbour proper (Kjipuktuk). With the span of a spool of thread, it is the narrowest point between Halifax and Dartmouth (Punamu'kwati'jk). An important location in Mi'kmak'i for millennia, Kepe'k figures in many narratives from the past, present, and future. Beginning in 2013, the Dartmouth shore of Kepe'k became an important place for my walking art, research, discovering and sharing truths, and working towards reconciliation. Situated in the edgelands of Dartmouth, Walking Kepe'k gathers stories of Indigenous ways of life and use of resources, Settler contact, conflict and dispossession, the trauma of the 1917 explosion in Halifax Harbour, militarism, and the threats of climate change and sea-level rise that we face now.

This ongoing work has engaged many Indigenous and non-Indigenous participants. I pay tribute here to my fellow members of NiS+TS (Narratives in Space and Time Society), in particular my partner Robert Bean (who I carry out many collaborations with, including the Being-in-the-Breathable walking art series); Elders, friends and teachers Catherine Martin and Joe Michael; and the many knowledge keepers, researchers, storytellers, artists and other participants who have provided insights and support. In this illustrated presentation, I will map out the process of this work and provide details about the methodologies we developed, such as annotated walks and community collaborations, and how these contributed to the multisensorial, embodied and transformative experiences of Walking Kepe'k.

Barbara Lounder is a visual artist and educator living in Nova Scotia, Canada. She has presented her artwork in exhibitions and venues across Canada and internationally and has participated in artists' residencies in Banff, Alberta; McIvers, Nfld; Pictou Island, NS; and Dilsberg, Germany. Lounder has presented at conferences and symposia in Halifax, NS; Vancouver BC; Newcastle, Sunderland and Plymouth UK; Sokołowsko, Poland; Munich and Dilsberg, Germany; Breda, Netherlands; Gabrovo, Bulgaria; Merida, Mexico; and Portland, Maine. Lounder's performative and critical works engage members of the public in carefully designed walking activities that bring historical and personal knowledge together in embodied experiences. She is a founding member of the collaborative group Narratives in Space and Time Society (NiSTS) and of Hermes Gallery in Halifax. Her recent publications include articles in the Performing Arts Journal and the Journal of Public Pedagogy.