Artist In Residence | Constelaciones | January 19-31, 2017
the greenhouse artlab hosted CONSTELACIONES art collective for a residency from January 13 to January 31. During this time CONSTELACIONES shared their works-in-process and reflective remains from their trans-hemispheric performances: “Lake Winnipeg,” “Wrapping Atacama,” “Return Atacama,” and “Echoes: North…North.”
CONSTELACIONES artist collective embodies collective healing through kinship and vulnerability—rejecting isolation, silence, and disconnection in the face of trauma. Drawing from interdisciplinary practices that include sculpture, performance, installation, sound, and video, artists Roewan Crowe (Winnipeg, MB), Doris Difarnecio (Chile, Argentina, Brazil), Christina Hajjar (Winnipeg, MB), Monica Martinez (Edmonton, AB), and Helene Vosters (Winnipeg, MB) engage in a process-based trans-hemispheric collaboration. The digital book, Return Atacama: Engaging Histories of Political Violence Through Performance and Durational Witnessing was recently published with HemiPress in their award winning Gesture Series. It assembles the many movements, reflections, and practices surrounding hemispheric artist collective CONSTELACIONES’s 2016 performance Return Atacama. A ritual of remembrance and witnessing, the performance involved returning Chilean-Canadian artist Monica Mercedes Martinez’s sculptural installation, everyone is fallen except for us fallen –created to honour the lives lost following the 1973 coup– to Chile’s Atacama Desert. Featuring contributions from Dot Tuer, Smaro Kamboureli, Diana Taylor, Shannon Bell, Jarvis Brownlie, and Cassie Scott, this richly visual collection from the Gesture series incorporates photography, video, drone footage, poetry, and prose, to produce a polyphonic experience of this politically urgent performance. Blurring the distinction between artistic and scholarly work, both the performance and this publication, which bears its name, probe the possibilities and limits of transnational creative collaboration, while “challenging the containment of trauma associated with political violence within isolated historical events and disciplinary or geographic locations.”