❶ SLUG DEVOURING CANADIANA
❷ OASIS AS A DIFFICULT WHOLE
❸ IT TAKES A VILLAGE
OBJECTS:
❹ HEART 2 HEART
❺ THE ROOM
❻ POINT THE KNEES TOGETHER
❼ BREAK
RESEARCH:
❽ ATHENS, AN EFFORT TO LOG
❾ ABOUT JUNK & HANGING OUT
A design for a room to house Christi Belcourts Walking With Our Sisters, done with Dylan Lee Evans,
as part of DFALD’s studio on Site, Matter, Ecology, and Indigenous Storywork.
The vamps were collected by the artist through an open call; each pair is evidence of people who have spent hours puncturing leather, cutting and sewing. We consider their labour an act of commemoration, purification, and love. Labour as ritual and commitment to the act of making sculpt our room.
We first construct a corridor, spanning the length of the vamps placed side by side, the rhythm of which invites contemplation, light being allowed to peek through limited apertures shaped by wood charring.
When Walking with Our Sisters is exhibited in galleries, Christi Belcourt intends for it to transform into a sacred lodge space. We imply the presence of the lodge - a simmering space for physical and spiritual cleansing, a low wood-frame construction, through the use of charred wood. We present charred wood as a marker of both sweltering renewal and safeguarding of memory.
As the corridor turns a corner, the room transforms. The milling of the planks for the corridor produces unusable pieces then used to shape the room housing the vamps.
We imagine the full scale room will be different from the model. The room is mutable, reacting and shaped by available material. The construction of this space could become a communal act, a gathering of hands to collect wood and build a sacred space. This project is defined by acts of assembling and aggregating - all acts positioned in resistance to the longstanding processes of erasure that Christi Belcourt’s work commemorates.
The amount of physical work necessary to make the room is integral to the design - as is the fact that this was conceived as a group project. Neither of us could have made this alone. At the heart of the project is a call to come together, with burning and making acting as catalysts to gathering.