Outerregion

Last week I participated in Critical Dialogues, a conference organized by Ontario Arts Council in collaboration with Ontario Association of Art Galleries. It found myself in the company of myriad representatives from artist run centres, public galleries, museums, independent curators and artists. As artists and curators from communities of colour and from Aboriginal origins were all there to critique, draw attention to, and explain how we navigate and negotiate the complexity of codes we encounter as Andrea Fatona puts it.

The keynote was given by Dr David Dibosa, (pictured above) an imminent UK based curator who gave voice to the our concerns and spoke about his work as an investigator of spatial practices and politics of representation at the Tate Modern. David states when institutions  eventually invite those whom they once refused into their halls of honour, there is a tendency for the institutions to want to forget the past. He reminds us that “those institutions will forget but we must not forget”

Although I curate as well as create art I spoke about my artistic practice and my new work investigating place, in particular, the absence of Blackness in conceptions of the Canadian landscape.

Leah Snyder from Mixed Bag provides a most excellent summary. Here’s a link to her blog

CRITICAL DIALOGUES: The OAC & OAAG Create a Space for Discourse on Cross-Cultural Perspectives in Curating

Participants in SonicWalk at York University's Summer Institute listening to grass

After two intense years in the Masters program the faculty of Environmental Studies at York University, I have graduated! I’m excited about the shift in direction of  my work. I’m now exploring Sonic Walks, a hybrid art-form that involves listening, walking and participating.

I will be leading a SonicWalk for 71*11d performance art festival. I’m happy to share my enthusiasm for sound with my audience/participants. This Sonic Walk will be similar to the one I facilitated for York University’s Summer Institute  this August. I will be presenting a set of instructions to visitors to the festival who will embark on a journey of discovering and engaging with worlds enfolded in worlds through tuning into sound.

My sonic walk exploration started when I decided to transform Miss Canadiana’s Heritage and Culture Walking tour into an app. With my supervisor’s (Honor Ford-Smith) encouragement, I explored more experiential ways of presenting the work that went beyond the documentary frame. I endeavoured to express what Toni Morrison calls “the truth” rather than “the facts”. I ended up creating and recording HUSH HARBOUR, a Sonic Walk that situates participants in the midst of Toronto’s Black past. Creating the work has been a powerful experience that continues as I take people on the walk and witness their responses.

This work engages participants on a visceral level and opens a space for contemplation and questioning. It is my intent to create more Sonic Walks and to initiate others into the wonderful practice of experiencing the world through sound. If you are interested in experiencing HUSH HARBOUR, you can download the walk, install it on your mp3 player or smartphone and a good pair of headphones go to the North West corner of Wellington and Portland to follow the instructions you’ll hear…or you can contact me and I will walk with you and discuss the project with you.  I have taken many people on the journey and I have presented the work to students of Performance, Women’s studies and Caribbean studies.

Please also come and join me in an exploration of sound at 7a*11d Festival.

when: October 28, 2012 at 2:30 pm.
where: Toronto Free Gallery 1277 Bloor Street West
http://7a-11d.ca/artists/camille-turner

Participants experiencing HUSH HARBOUR at Victoria Memorial Park

Miss Canadiana in Hamilton, her hometown

Join Outerregion at:

Fashionality:
Dress & Identity in Contemporary Canadian Art

opening reception May 13, 2012 11am-5pm

exhibition runs from MAY 5 TO SEPTEMBER 3, 2012

WHERE The McMichael Canadian Art Gallery
10365 Islington Avenue, Kleinburg, Ontario

WHEN Exhibition opens on May 13, 2012 from 11 am – 5pm
and runs from May 5 until September 3, 2012
Join us for tea with Miss Canadiana on Sunday May 13 from 1:30 to 2:30 +  3:30 to 4:30

WHAT The Outerregion crew will be participating in McMichael’s new exhibition Fashionality: Dress and Identity in Contemporary Canadian Art explores the intersection of identity culture and clothing. It was curated by Julia Pine with artists: KC Adams, Ingrid Bachmann, Lori Blondeau, Dana Claxton, Cathy Daley, Nicole Dextras, Aganetha Dyck, Jane Eccles, Gathie Falk, Farheen Haq, Barb Hunt, Michele Karch- Ackerman, Meryl McMaster, Kent Monkman, Janet Morton, Jacques Payette, Camal Pirbhai, Barbara Pratt, Ana Rewakowicz, Natalie Purschwitz, Jana Sterbak, Camille Turner, and Mary Sui Yee Wong.

Many thanks to Ontario Arts Council

Miss Canadiana appears courtesy of Outerregion http://www.outerregion.ca
contact: info@outerregion.ca

My Cultural Production workshop is coming to an end. The focus of this course was on the relationship between land, bodies and food. I have mostly focused on land and bodies. Today’s post touches on food. Not just food that nourishes the body but food that nurtures the soul.

This week I presented two talks. The first one was in an intimate classroom at OCAD for Johanna Householder’s performance class. The second was at a big lecture hall at University of Toronto for Alissa Trotz’s Women’s Studies students.  Alissa spoke to her students about the importance of cultural producers to use zines, blogs and social media to take up the space of uncovering and telling alternative and hidden histories. I told them about what I know best— my work. Currently I am working on an audio walk of the hidden Black histories of the Grange. I’ve always made art in order to articulate my thoughts and feelings but since returning to school, I have amassed a large collection of words that help me articulate and share what I know.

Last night I went to hear Women’s Studies Professor, Jacqui Alexander speak. I am still reeling as I write this—still recovering from an experience that was so powerful it left me unable to speak or move for several moments afterwards.  Jacqui spoke the language of courage in a voice that is generally erased from academia.  The room was charged with energy and emotion. She dared to name the unnamable and give voice to the unspeakable.

She read us two paragraphs from a book she encountered twenty years ago that changed the course of her life. The book, a history of a plantation in the Caribbean contained just those two paragraphs about a woman named Thisbe. Her husband had committed a crime and since Thisbe worked with herbs and medicinal plants, she was accused of consorting with the devil.  She was tortured until she confessed her husband’s crime then beheaded and burned.

Jacqui was left wondering, why this woman, who in the context of the colonial Caribbean had no power, was such a threat that she had to be killed in such a public and gruesome way. She concluded that Thisbe’s power was both feared and coveted. She decided to find out more about Thisbe but searched in vain in the archives. This was a potent juncture in her research. It was only when she came to the realization that she did not know that she opened up to other ways of knowing.

Jacqui found Thisbe through healing work. Just as poisonous plants are often found in the same place as their antidote, healing said Jacqui, is the antidote to oppression. She gave voice to the bodies that crossed the Atlantic and pointed to the need for all of us, whether descendants of those who made the crossing or those who benefitted from their labour to go into the hold of the slave ship, to face our fear, to confront sorrow and grief and to find healing. Only then, she said, could we be released from its horror. She gave voice to the head on the pole, describing what it saw and experienced. She constantly reminded us to breathe as she led us into another dimension, a world hidden and obscured within the rational space of academia. It made me think about my own project and the impossibility of finding Peggy Pompadour, a slave woman, only through fragments in the archives. Peggy has to be sought in dimensions beyond the rational. I realized what I have always known. Like Thisbe, Peggy doesn’t live in the archives. I have to find Peggy within myself. I wanted to speak with Jacqui, to tell her how powerful this experience has been for me. I shook her hand but I couldn’t get the words out.

Luckily Ras Iville, of One Love Vegetarian restaurant, was there to nourish our bodies and bring us back into this dimension with his delicious corn soup. Cultural production takes risk, trust, courage, guidance and food. I slipped out after the Q & A, walking through the Grange, talking to Peggy.

On January 13, 2012 King George Nigga, a tweeter who when asked by my sister why he (I presume it is a him) uses my image as his avatar stated, This picture is the most complete and comprehensive representation of Black Canada ever produced.

I’ve been told by many people that Miss Canadiana holds personal meanings for them but this endorsement was particularly humbling. Thanks King George!

But what does it mean to represent? In my cultural production workshop, I am presenting a self-representation. I’ve decided to tackle the complex image of myself as Mss Canadiana.

When I began this project I wanted to represent my own feelings. I felt alienated from the Canadian nation. I wanted to portray my experience of living in a space of perpetual irony.  A space that tries hard to pretend that it is welcoming and inclusive but where at any moment the underlying tensions spring out and reveal themselves. These little “surprises” remind me why I’m constantly on guard and perpetually resisting the seduction of an uncomplicated belonging.

Here is a recent incident my sister Karen and I experienced. I invite you to share yours.

At a Black history event in a small Ontario town, a White man felt compelled to tell my sister he had a Black nanny as a child. The event was about the history of the Black settlement that predated the current White one. After two women in the room revealed that their ancestors were part of this Black settlement, another White man in the room asked, so when did the Black settlers come and when did they leave? We left shaking our heads. Miss Canadiana still has work to do.

I am certain that my image as Miss C represents different things to different people. Her meaning is open and complex. She has usurped the space a White body is expected to occupy so she represents an uneasy relationship to a comfortable belonging.

I never set out to represent Black Canada. I created an image that is true to my own lived experience. But after putting her out there I realize she’s much larger than I am.

This post represents an important milestone in my academic life. My first article has been published in a journal that just launched today in Trinidad! It’s a new arts journal called Caribbean InTransit. This is issue #2 and it focuses on location.  The guest-editor is Honor Ford-Smith. Many thanks and congratulations to Honor and editor in chief, Marielle Barrow!

You can download it free here.

Two Sisters by Robert Purritt

As part of the exhibition 28 Days: Reimagining Black History Month curated by Pamela Edmonds and Sally Frater, I participated on a panel of artists and curators moderated by Rinaldo Walcott debating the idea of Black history month.

British artist Sonia Boyce spoke about collective memory and cultural amnesia. She told the story of working with a group of young Black women to recall Black British female singers and their silence when they realized that it took them a while to come up with any names. She began then to amass a massive database. Now, several years into the project, people have continued to send her material. Her work responds to the call of archival material that she says begs to be activated.

Robert Pruitt was skyped in from Houston. His work, pictured above is straight out of the Starfleet academy. Karen and I are so excited to encounter a fellow Afrofuturist.  Check out his piece, Glass slippers below.

Glass Slippers by Robert Purritt

Media artist Dana Inkster, who lives in Lethbridge, spoke about “the escapable double bind” of living in a house she didn’t build. She describes her struggle to free herself to be able to make the work she wants to make to which involves uncovering Black histories and making them public. She recounts her personal experience of gatekeepers, institutions that manage the public record and control whose stories are told and who owns the stories. For instance, the NFB, an iconic cultural institution whose mandate is to represent all Canadians, gave her the green light on a story about of Canada’s shifting prairie landscape that would have reshaped the public record. As she worked with them they made it clear that they in fact, owned her story and controlled the terms of engagement. In the end, she made a very different film and the story she wanted to tell was silenced.

UK curator, researcher Paul Goodwin noted that Black in the UK is a contested term that includes the identities of people of Asian as well as well as African and Caribbean descent. Paul spoke about the management of cultural difference through state multiculturalism that focus on visual signs of difference such as skin colour. He introduced us to Wilson Harris, a Guyanese writer who advocates a cross-cultural approach that opens up culture to self-critical analysis and discovering the self through another. He concluded that although Black artists are excluded from how modernity is framed in cultural institutions, they, in fact, played a central role in the formation of modernity.

My talk was about my body as an interface to a Black geography that reveals Black histories concealed within the White geography of Canada. After my talk, someone asked me if being Black limits the work I do. My work is definitely shaped by the experiences I’ve had because I live in a Black body but I do not feel that I choose my work. I feel that It chooses me. I am a vessel through which these stories come into being. The stories I tell in Miss Canadiana’s Heritage and Culture Walking Tours called out to me because I live in an area where Black bodies and histories have disappeared without a trace in the middle of one of the most multicultural sites in the world.

Rinaldo Walcott, who refers to himself as a critic of Black art and in my view, is an avid advocate of post nationalism, asked me how my work as a performance artist engages or resists the notion of the Canadian nation. I’m not sure what I answered then but here’s what I wanted to say. There is a tweeter who calls himself King George Nigga @BLACK_CANADA who has appropriated an image of Miss Canadiana as his avatar. When my sister Karen asked him why he was using my image he responded, “This picture is the most complete and comprehensive representation of Black Canada ever produced.”

My work stems from my feeling of alienation. Miss Canadiana, for example, was born out of a sense of irony. Canada imagines itself as a modern multicultural nation yet my image as a representation of Canada is still astonishing. If Blackness was not perceived as foreign, this image would not elicit the responses it does. Ten years after I created Miss Canadiana, my body is still not the body expected to represent Canada. My image disrupts the neat binary of Real Canadian and Diverse Other that is reinforced by state sanctioned displays of diversity…like Black history month.

Now, don’t get me wrong, I think Black history month is necessary—otherwise we’d be living perpetually in White history month. There’s all kinds of wonderfulness that surfaces this time of the year. Looking around me at all the beautiful people in the room during the exhibition and the talk, I am grateful that we have opportunities like these to get together with each other.

E Plurus Unum a public monument proposed by Fred Wilson

I’m beginning month two of my cultural production class. We’re reading Jennifer Gonzalez’s book, Subject to Display which examines the work of artists, James Luna, Fred Wilson, Amalia Mesa-Bains, Pepón Osorio, and Renée Green, who use installation as a medium to reframe race.

Stuart Hall, in his lecture, Race, the Floating Signifier talks about the necessity of understanding how racism functions in order to be able to dismantle it. He views race not as a fixed category, but a floating one. While there is no biological basis for race, it is brought into being through the meanings we make out of it. He calls this, race discourse. The artists in the book lay bare ways that visual culture has attempted to fix the meaning of race. Through revealing these mechanisms they subvert racism.

I’m going to give a short introuduction to one of the artists, Fred Wilson. I became acquainted with Wilson’s work several years ago, when I was doing research on installation art. This form of art is basically, the placement of objects in space, generally referencing the body. I happened upon the shocking installation he created below of an antique baby carriage with a klansman hood inside.

From exhibition "Mining the Museum" by Fred Wilson

In another installation from the same show he displayed ornate silver tableware beside slave shackles from the same era.

These works were part of a show called Mining the Museum. The Maryland Historical Society opened its inventory to the artist. Wilson displayed works together that were normally never shown in the same space or were hidden away in their inventory. Through juxtaposing these objects, Wilson’s unsettled their meanings and brought history and memory to the surface.

Wilson’s practice is disruptive to say the least. He destabilizes the notion that mainstream galleries and museums are pristine spaces that present truth in absolute and neutral ways.

He hacks into institutional frameworks of museums to show how race discourse shapes the work and how it functions within the system to contain, produce and reproduce racist hierarchies through visual display and presentation.

His work, My life as a Dog, for example, featured in the opening chapter of Gonzalez’s book was an intervention in a gallery. He invited docents from the gallery to a private tour of an exhibition. He then slipped into a security guard’s uniform and stood quietly in the gallery. None of the docents recognized him. He had disappeared in plain view.  “He had become an anonymous man, an invisible man, a black man.”
(Gonzalez, 2008 p.1)

By turning around the gaze, he placed the looker squarely inside the frame. The docents found themselves at the centre of his performance demonstrating how they were implicated in the way Black bodies are framed within the gallery.

Now if you’re curious about image at the top of this page, here’s the story. Wilson was granted a commission to do a public project in Central Indiana in 2007, In the entire area, a downtrodden slave holding broken shackles was the only public image of an African American. Wilson wanted to turn this sculpture on its ear by transforming it into the victorious symbol above holding a flag with every country of the African Diaspora. Wilson’s vision for E Pluribus Unum was never realized as the project, supported by the Central Indiana Community Foundation was cancelled due to public opposition.

Here is Wilson explaining his vision.

http://www.vimeo.com/14214969
If you want to see and learn more about Fred Wilson, here are a few sources. There are lots more where these came from.

http://www.renabranstengallery.com/WilsonF_Article_SFBG.html

http://pyro-blu.com/bluworld.php?date=02-2009

http://www.york.ac.uk/ipup/events/seminars/ntp-art-heritage-report.html

http://nymag.com/nymetro/arts/features/n_9014/

Speakers for the Dead is an NFB documentary created by Jennifer Holness and David Sutherland. It tells the story of a town in rural Ontario, where a White farmer buried the tombstones of a Black cemetery to make way for a potato patch.
(Holness & Sutherland, 2000)

Greetings gentle readers. It has been some time since I’ve written. As you will recall, I began a master’s degree in September 2010. When I set out on this journey, I had no idea the slippery slopes that lay ahead. I still don’t. I am in the midst of it right now. Every mountain I climb makes me realize there are more ahead. To quote my friend Jennifer’s father, “never say whoah in a hard place.” And so, I keep on, keeping on.

This semester I am taking an image based, Cultural Production Workshop taught by Deb Barndt. Deb is a professor in the Environmental Studies Program and she coordinates the Community Arts Practice Certificate. Deb, in a word, is a powerhouse. Her work integrates global and local food systems, popular education and activism. One of the requirements of this course is a journal so I have decided to attempt here to write in this blog in order to chart the progress I am making in my program. I am working towards a project that will use performance and locative media to create a psychogeographic walking tour of the Grange’s hidden Black histories so my posts will reflect what I am learning. It is my hope, gentle readers, that you will accompany me on this journey.

This is post #1 and I will start by looking at the work of Katherine McKittrick. I’m currently reading her book, Demonic Grounds: Black Women and the Cartographies of Struggle. McKittrick is a professor at Queens University, though; I have heard that she lives here in Toronto. Her area is geography. She probes the intersection of race, feminism and space. For me, this is new territory (ok I intended that pun). I am interested in McKittrick’s work because I am trying to understand why Black history is excluded from Canada’s foundational narratives. There are numerous examples of Black Canadian histories that have been suppressed, overwritten, absent or literally paved over. Marie Angelique, for example, a slave woman who allegedly burnt down Montreal, isn’t even mentioned in most history books. The shattered tombstones of a Black cemetery in Priceville, Grey County (see film above) provides evidence of the lives of early Black settlers who were pushed out of the way make room for the current White settlement. I want to tell these stories, starting with the stories of the Black history of the Grange area of Toronto where I live. I want to breathe live into accounts of people like Peggy Pompadour, a slave of Peter Russell, the administrator of Upper Canada. We know about Peggy because historians like Afua Cooper have rescued fragments of letters and newspaper ads in the archives that mention her.

So why am I looking at geography? Well, geography is about space and space is a way of making meaning. My thinking is that by studying space, it will give me some clues about how/why Canada does that complex dance of imagining itself as a multicultural country yet absenting histories that do not fit the narrative of British and French founders.
As a media artist working with locative media, I’ve been drawing on the concept of space but I’ve never tried to articulate it using words. So I’m attempting here to summarize what I’ve gleaned from McKittrick about the concept of space.

Katherine McKittrick explains that geography isn’t just about the land, the physical space, it is the way we ascribe meanings to it. De Certeau, in his famous text, Walking the City, describes how we write the story of the city through walking. “The networks of these moving, intersecting writings compose a manifold story that has neither author nor spectator, shaped out of fragments of trajectories and alterations of spaces.” (De Certeau, 1984 p.93)

People generally think of space as something external to ourselves. Space just is. This makes it seem neutral, inert, not something we have any control over. We see space as the container we inhabit but we are not aware that we ourselves actively created it.

Since we humans are the ones making the meanings, then space is about us. It is, in fact, a mirror image of ourselves, and our power relationships. McKittrick says that inequities in our society are produced because of the way we ascribe meaning to space inequitably. We map our power relationships to space and the bodies that inhabit space so we reproduce inequalities through our production of space. (McKittrick, 2006 p.xi)

Ok, enough about space for today. I will keep reading and write more another time. In the meantime, I’d love to hear your responses.
Camille

Works Cited
De Certeau, M. (1984). The practice of everyday life. Berkeley, California, USA: University of California Press.

Holness, J., Sutherland, D., & National Film Board of Canada. (2000). Speakers for the dead. Montreal: NFB.

McKittrick, K. (2006). Demonic Grounds: Black Women and the cartographies of struggle. Minnesota, MN, USA: University of Minnesota Press.

The Outerregion crew couldn’t let the year end without wishing everyone many blessings for a peaceful Christmas & holiday season and a happy, healthy, prosperous New Year.

We will be celebrating with our family in our “Jamaican-centric” style – imbibing much sorrel, Christmas (black) cake, duck-shaped hard-dough bread on Christmas morning served up with ackee, plantain & calaloo as well as many games of dominos and ludy and Christmas movies around a crackling fire.

Christmas is not Christmas in the Turner household without the constant blare of background Christmas music – DJ’d by our father, Lloyd. One of his favourite Christmas albums, played often in our home, year after year, belongs to the late great Jamaican bandleader, Byron Lee and his Dragonaires. Enjoy this Christmas soca medley below from Mr. Lee’s “Christmas Party Time in the Tropics” album. Put on your dancing shoes!

One love,
Karen & Camille

Karen and I attended Honor Ford-Smith’s book launch of 3 Jamaican Plays: A Post Colonial Anthology at the Trane Studio tonight. Honor edited and introduced each play of the volume. This book is important for many reasons. Chief amongst them is the fact, that it chronicles an era, during and after Jamaican independence. The publisher of the book, Paul Issa said, “I think the 1970s and 1980s are the golden age of Jamaican plays. And many of these plays are on the verge of disappearing,” Lucily, he and Honor plucked them out of obscurity and into print to be given a new chance to live. As the unequalled Djanet Sears noted, these plays must be put into conversation with theatre from the Black Liberation movement in the USA and other anti-colonial movements worldwide.

Miss Canadiana was asked to speak. It was an unusual context in which to be asked to participate so I wondered what I could add. How did this event connect to Miss Canadiana? I’ve had the pleasure of spending a lot of time with Honor over the past year and I’ve learned a lot—not only about Jamaican social and political history but how it connects to the larger global picture. It has been an ongoing, eye-opening experience.

Tonight Honor really shone. She described herself as a member of a pivotal generation, born in the 50’s, who experienced the transition from a colonial regime to self-govenrment. The plays in her book reflect that robust and hopeful time as well as its shattering aftermath.

So how did Miss Canadiana connect to this? Well, I told my story, the story of how I became Miss Canadiana. The one I have told, what seems like millions of times. Miss Canadiana grew out of my desire to rupture the mythology of Canada, the multi-culti land where everyone belongs. Miss Canadiana is the result of inserting my image in place of what/who is expected to represent Canada. Miss Canadiana troubles the waters, as does Honor Ford-Smith. Like Miss Canadiana, Honor’s presence, and her work disrupts stereotypes of the Jamaican nation to express the multiplicities of modes of belonging and to uncover the colonial narratives that play out and become our lives.

You can find 3 Jamaican Plays at A Different Booklist at http://www.adifferentbooklist.com

Here are a few reviews
http://mobile.jamaicagleaner.com/gleaner/20110605/arts/arts4.php

http://jamaica-gleaner.com/gleaner/20110414/ent/ent1.html

http://www.jamaicanliterature.com/2011/04/3-jamaican-plays-a-postcolonial-anthology-1977-1987/