Time_Place_Space-Nomad :
Silence as Resilience
In 2015, the Canada Council renewed its partnership with Arts House/Performance Space in Australia to have 3 Canadian interdisciplinary artists participate in the 2015 Time_Place_Space: Nomad. This travelling lab-based residency brought together over 25 artists to explore interdisciplinary and experimental practices while camping out together in Regional Victoria of Australia.One of the artists, Anne Riley, agreed to share her observations about the residency, what she experienced and what she took home.
"Silence is often perceived as negative, or passive, or of censorship, yet it is a space that is central to thought. In today’s noise-polluted world, silence can be a powerful tool. Through The Silence of Sovereignty, Dylan Miner proposes that we listen to the silence of certain places as a form of resistance, a quiet strength of aboriginal sovereignty."
Miner’s insight speaks to me, as an emerging queer Indigenous artist of Cree, Dene and German ancestry, based in the unceded territory of the Coast Salish known as Vancouver. It speaks to ways I understand moments / experiences of silence as gestures of resilience, intimacy and language.
Being alone and present with the land became profoundly important to understand the work and challenges I was meant to investigate during the residency.
I recently had a formative experience at the Time_Place_Space: Nomad residency in the unceded territory of the Wurundjeri, (Melbourne Australia). Throughout the residency, participants led workshops in theatre experiments, body awareness, dance, acting and listening. All my previous training had been visually-based, and during the residency I realized a depth of silence rising within me. Something profoundly intimate was trying to find voice, while at the same time I was being asked to face an expansive vulnerability. I had to decide how to engage, and what engagement meant. Not attending workshops became a key to my agency, as what was surfacing in my arriving here was a priority to ground myself, my landing, in this unceded territory of the Wurundjeri. Being alone and present with the land became profoundly important to understand the work and challenges I was meant to investigate during the residency.
One unforgettable moment happened the morning we were departing from our first camp to the next one four hours away. After a week of workshops, it felt necessary to find a moment to thank the land and, in this appreciation, to open up to a spaciousness of horizon. So another artist and I led a workshop offering participants a place and time to watch the sunrise. About 6 people arrived at 5:30 am on the hill above our campsite and we watched the sunrise in silence, together. Some of us were still dreaming, still awaking from sleep. In this morning together, I learned that making time to slow down and thank a place for its teachings allows one to open up. It allows one to gain closure, to communicate in other ways, to reflect on time spent with others, and with oneself, in a place.
In our final week, our bodies were not only being worn down by the elements, but by the constant human interaction. This was when I did much of my critical work facing questions of the residency: What does one need to make ones work? What is artistic resilience? What is your artistic tool kit?
To end the residency I presented a performance entitled: “I couldn’t find the word silence in my Dene dictionary. However, I did find the word WAIT (K’a).”
I asked the participants to sit on a hill above the location of my performance so that they were watching me from a distance. The location, Lake Natimuk, is completely dried out from the intense drought that plagues this area. I began the performance by walking to the centre of the dried lake only with a bucket of water. I grounded myself bodily to find my place in the dried lake. I then knelt to submerge my hair in the bucket’s lukewarm water. As I rose to my feet, I positioned a steadying stance –. one that allowed my hair to dangle in front of my face and torso, creating an abstraction of form and landscape from afar. The performance was 18 minutes — the time it took my hair to dry in the humidity and sun. Lake Natimuk is described as an “Ephemeral Lake,” and it is with this ephemera that I reclaimed an embodied silence and intimacy.
From Noémie Despland-Lichtert’s text for Dylan Miner’s exhibition Silence of Sovereignty at Articule in Montreal in 2015