09 Thematic Residency: Towards Language

This residency will examine the idea of an artist as an intermediary between First Nations, Métis, and Inuit languages and contemporary critical practices. Participants who are fluent and non-fluent in traditional languages will examine and share the strategies they use to create and re-create relationships as principles of visual interdisciplinary practice and organization.

Language is presently in the process of being eliminated within First Nations, Métis, and Inuit families and communities. The interconnectedness between identity and world views that these languages provide is quickly eroding in some areas and springing to life via determined individuals and small organizations in others. Languages reflect world views and the individual’s roles, daily interactions, communal responsibilities and nation to nation protocols. How do First Nations, Métis, and Inuit artists incorporate the natural, the metaphysical, and the aural into their artistic practices, towards a comprehension of what it means to be defined within a language or without a language?

In The Banff Centre’s Towards Language residency, First Nations, Métis, and Inuit artists will further their critical and self-reflective concerns.  Personal and formal issues relating to contemporary Native social ritual can be enhanced by presentations of linguists, writers, and other artists working from different perspectives and media. Discussions and interviews of speakers will inform and create a basis for an exploration of the contemporary conceptual process and the creation of personal meaning and its effects on the collective.

Please note: Applicants for this residency must be status, non-status, Métis, or Inuit.

Photo above: Greg Staats, Witness (Six Nations), 2005.