J.2.1 Assembling Recipes for Sustainability: Slow-Cooked Curation and Collective Research-Creation

• Amanda White & Zoë Heyn-Jones, Western University

We will discuss our collective mail art project entitled “Assembling Recipes for Sustainability” co-curated at the Centre for Sustainable Curating. Through an international open call, we invited artists, writers, activists, scholars, organizers, visionaries, and revolutionaries to contribute to a collective project through the mail. With no cost to participate, all participants were provided with a self-addressed stamped envelope and a card to submit their recipe. In exchange for contribution, participants will receive a physical copy of the entire collection, and a digital open source compilation will be made widely available.

Participants were invited to contribute a ‘recipe’ for sustainability—with ‘recipe’ to be interpreted as literally or as creatively as desired. These recipes will be submitted on an index card and the collection of cards will be assembled in a recipe box. The intention is to inspire each other with our ideas, DIY solutions, creative or speculative imaginings, practical tips, inherited strategies, poetic responses and plans for sustaining our work. It is also an experiment in working with the recipe as a structuring principle, script and cultural text.

This project is part of a larger visioning exercise at the CSC. It is also our first collaborative project in an emergent network with other artists, researchers, farmers, cooks, food policy makers and scholars, and cultural workers interested in exploring the vast and diverse terrain of food studies through art and research-creation. Through the Assembling Recipes for Sustainability project, we explore the capacity of collaborative research-creation and curatorial work as a methodology with which to approach food justice and sustainability. As artist-scholars interested in the intersection of food and creative research, we ask: how can artistic and curatorial practices engage meaningfully with entangled issues of climate, biodiversity, food security, sovereignty and justice?

J.2.2 We’ve Weave. Deep Curation: Poetic, Collaborative, and Interwoven Curatorial Practice

Klara Du Plessis, Concordia University

We’ve Weave is an experimental poetry reading performance, produced July 2022 during a residency at Studio303, and performed at White Wall Studio and Théâtre aux Écuries in Montreal. Poetically and thematically, the performance hinges on the colonial mapping of borders that erases the interconnection of all land, and the new weaving of belonging through dialogue. The poets and performers are Alexei Perry Cox and Kama La Mackerel. I personally act as curator, expanding my ongoing research creation project, Deep Curation. Deep Curation is a practice of experimental poetry reading organization that I have been developing since 2018 as part of my doctoral research that intersects literary, curatorial, and event-based studies. Deep Curation is also an ethical and responsible mode of literary event creation that posits curation itself as both interpretation and art form. In its most basic formulation, the curator chooses the list of poems performed by guest poets, structuring the event according to thematic and conceptual concerns. In its more robust expansion over time, Deep Curation articulates a new script that consensually excerpts, combines, intertwines, and places the work of two or three poets in deliberate dialogue with one another.

My proposed presentation will resist the formal humanities conference paper format by positioning itself as two main gestures: First, I will reproduce the process of curating a literary event in miniature by distributing short poetic excerpts by Cox and La Mackerel to all in attendance, in order to generate a brief discussion about thematic and conceptual connections that are activated through their adjacency and dialogue with one another. Second, I will play audiovisual documentation of We’ve Weave that applies those same poems in Deep Curation performance. The intention is to activate the process of Deep Curation for those in attendance at the panel without threading together a linear exposition or argument about the curatorial practice—one that not only presents but becomes literature and art.

J.2.3 “Accounting On” as curatorial practice

• Joyce Joumaa, Independent Curator and Video Artist

In this conversation, I would like to lead a discussion on the practice of “accounting on” as a form of curatorial strategy. What I mean by “accounting on” within a curatorial practice is a way through which one is able to “account on” social and political landscapes, rather than curate “from” these landscapes, which then becomes a form of extraction. I would like to reflect on my participation as a resident curator as part of the Canadian Centre for Architecture’s (CCA) Emerging Curator Residency Program.

Taking shape as both a commissioned documentary film and curatorial project, I utilise a method of “accounting on” for my forthcoming exhibition at the CCA, which will examine the precarity of the current socioeconomic landscape in Lebanon. The exhibition will focus on Oscar Niemeyer’s International Fairground in Tripoli, Lebanon, as a way to parallel this reality.

What does it mean to curate within a landscape of a crisis? How do we bridge an institutional framework with a guerilla, on-the-ground research and creation project? From the lens of documentary filmmaking, how do we sit through and understand a participant’s engagement as they become a core part of the discourses leading to the production of an exhibition?