Image: Dana Claxton, Uplifting, 2015, 15min, digital video. Image Courtesy the artist.
Reading: Intertextual: Lindsay Lachance facilitates Monique Mojica
Wednesday, February 3 2016, 6 - 8pm
Audain Gallery, Vancouver
Intertextual: Art in Dialogue is an ongoing reading group held across a range of visual art institutions in Vancouver that takes place between January and October 2016. The group aims to connect a series of readings that provoke dialogue about how art and its ideas are written, circulated, contested and rewritten. Texts are distributed at the event and read aloud; discussion is open to all and no prior preparation is required. For more information on Intertextual, and a full reading group schedule, click here.
Mojica, Monique. "Stories From the Body: Blood Memory and Organic Texts." Native American Performance and Representation. ed. S.E. Wilmer (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2011)
Monique Mojica (Kuna and Rappahannock) is a playwright, director, and actor based out of Toronto. She is a founding member of Native Earth Performing Arts. In this article, she describes "Blood Memory" as a relational process. She explains how knowledge is carried with her through her DNA, so although she may not have personally had certain experiences, she is able to feel, embody and act on them because they are part of her. "Blood Memory" can be considered a physical manifestation of reclaiming and implementing Indigenous ways of being and knowing in relation to self and to others. Mojica explains, "As a contemporary Native Theatre Artist I feel it is crucial that we acknowledge our experience as a valid worldview--something that has been consistently denied to us... This is our reality. And that reality is inclusive of worlds that are both seen and unseen"(99).
Lindsay Lachance is an Anishinaabe P.H.D. candidate at the University of British Columbia and has a Masters in Theatre Theory and Dramaturgy from the University of Ottawa. Her areas of interest include performance aesthetics, the physicalization of spirituality in time and space, and the multiple creation processes of Indigenous dramaturgies.
For more information on the exhibition, click here.
