A listening portrait of the Primary Colours/Couleurs primaires (PC/Cp) Gathering
WordCloud
I would like to start by thanking France Trépanier and Chris Creighton-Kelly for inviting me to attend the Primary Colours/Couleurs primaires (PC/Cp) Gathering as well as to participate in the formation of the WordCloud. Their generosity and commitment to working with the Canadian Arts community has been a benefit to me as well as all of their friends and colleagues with whom they converse and collaborate with across this country. I am inspired by their critical engagement and their ongoing commitment to centering Indigenous people, Black people and people of colour (IBPoC) in the Canadian Art system.
I also want to thank all of the participants who attended the Gathering and who contributed to the WordCloud. Thank you for entrusting your text messages to me to collect and input into the collective portrait of the event. I am grateful for the opportunity to spend the time at the Gathering, to sit beside you, and to witness the sharing of your stories and to listen and learn. I am committed to the art community and to the ongoing efforts and challenges that my colleagues are engaged. I stand beside you, and with you, with much love and respect.
I am a white settler of British heritage and have been living as an uninvited guest on Lekwungen territory since 2001. I am an artist and curator who volunteers and works in a variety of capacities within the local arts community and the Canadian Art system. My practice is situated in this beautiful part of the country and I am thankful for the opportunities that this land and its people have generously afforded me and my family. It is through my relationships with people working in the arts community that I have come to learn a great deal about the history of this country and the colonial projects that it has inflicted upon Indigenous people and continues to inflict upon IBPoC communities. I offer this statement as a way to share that I know that I am not from this land.
“Dreaming it into real.”
(Comment submitted by a participant at the PC/Cp Gathering, Lekwungen territory, September 2017)
I was invited by Chris Creighton-Kelly and France Trépanier, co-directors of the Primary Colours/Couleurs primaires project to attend the Gathering that they were hosting in Victoria, BC on Lekwungen territory in September 2017. As part of my participation they asked if I would be interested to work on a way to provide a virtual venue for Gathering participants’ comments and feedback. The intent was to give the invited guests an opportunity to express their experience and to give constructive and critical feedback of their time together. Chris, France and I discussed a few different ways that we might be able to facilitate such a tool. The creation of a WordCloud, such as those that are popular on social media websites that visualize the use of popular terms, was an attractive option. Collecting comments and feedback to then arrange into a WordCloud seemed like a good way to both provide opportunity for critical feedback, but to also provide opportunity for a collective portrait of the time everyone would spend together. We developed a process and invited participants to submit text message comments to a cell phone number dedicated to this task. Comments could be anonymous or not, and were encouraged to be honest and engaged.
The associated WordCloud image is the visual graphic representation of all of the text messages that were submitted by Gathering participants during the dates provided during and after the Gathering. Light editing has been done to adjust for autocorrect and enthusiastic thumb-texting. <See image #1>
The invitation for feedback and expressions from participants was done in the spirit of openness and transparency. This virtual forum provided an opportunity for contact and engagement with the process, the coordination, and with the tone and enthusiasm of the group. An intent was for the organizing team to be able to receive constructive feedback as well as participant comments that could be provided in an accessible way, and together contribute to a collective expression of the time spent together.
As you can see from the submissions, some of the comments are direct engagements of affection, salutation and thanks. Other participants speak directly to the process and the time-schedule, offering practical feedback that can be used to better facilitate participant needs at future events. Some participants chose to provide critical perspectives on the representation of attendees in specific sessions, such as asking “Intersectional feminism. Where are the men at?”
“Just a note: no hetero men attended the feminist intersectional session.”
(Comment submitted by a participant at the PC/Cp Gathering, Lekwungen territory, September 2017)
The WordCloud offered an opportunity to make a visual record, express experiences and feelings, and to provide guidance. This was done in the spirit of the coordination and curation of the Gathering itself. There was room provided for questioning the process and for questioning whether certain aspects of the program were working or not.
It was also a public space. The WordCloud functions as a bulletin board, as a communication tool, providing space for notice and suggestion. It was used by some to give a heads-up, to call-out certain behaviour. It provided an outlet for participants’ concerns with the circumstances or other guests. However, it was not setup to function as a direct hotline for emergencies, and in that way helped us see the parameters of such a forum. It was initiated as a part of the “polyvocality” that the gathering was inviting, to provide opportunity for many voices to share their experience, as varied and sometimes contradictory as they may be.
Given this context and the mandate of Primary Colours/Couleurs primaires to centre Indigenous artists and to invite Black artists and artists of colour to talk about their experience and views on the Canadian Art system, I was sensitive to the perception that my participation in any way would take up unnecessary space. In my discussion with Chris and France on how we might be able to provide a mechanism for participation and for participant feedback, we agreed that the generation of a collective comment cloud could be an effective way for the organizers to learn of what the guests had to say. It could provide a way for open and direct feedback. It was a way to listen.
“Art is an instrument of the community”
(Comment submitted by a participant at the PC/Cp Gathering, Lekwungen territory, September 2017)
Listening is something with which I am building a close relationship. As an artist, curator, instructor and administrator, the ability to take in information to process, synthesize and share is a necessary, if not, invaluable skill. Yet, even though I have experience working with other artists in collectives and developing exhibitions and events, I am aware that listening, for me, is more than just a handy skill to help in my professional development. Through inspiration and mistakes I am learning that the ability to listen is one of the most critical aspects of being able to live in our contemporary context.
At its root the term ‘listening’ implies the mechanism for receiving messages from others in the act of communication. This seems simple enough. It is hard to know what someone else is saying if you are unable to receive that information in some coherent form. I would consider myself an effective communicator given the roles that I play and the jobs that I enact on a regular basis. I even grew up with a healthy education of music performance and would consider my ear to have been trained to recognize certain musical notes and appreciate nuances in tone and rhythm. Listening is what my ears do. Listening is a functioning and active participant in my ability to be in the world. It has helped to get me to this time and place in my life.
I can hear you now. Inside your heads, saying, hold on Doug. That is not all there is to listening. Okay. I know. Or, I should say, I have come to understand. I have come to better understand the role that listening needs to play in my life. I can envision listening as something that is making itself present, out there in the world, intermittent and quiet to my perception at first, then increasing in volume and proximity. The need to listen is slowly being heard. The importance of voices other than my own, is being heard. I am learning the value of listening as a way of being. Not only for me and my participation in the communities in which I live, but for my fellow settler, white and non-Indigenous colleagues, family and friends whom share the history of the echo of one’s own selves. We live in a colonial project that perpetuates patriarchal, white supremacist systems from its core.
“Collapsing capitalism”
(Comment submitted by a participant at the PC/Cp Gathering, Lekwungen territory, September 2017)
The Canadian Art system, even with all of its recent mandates for diversity and inclusion, is still under the umbrella of the federal government and the Canadian colonial project. In the context of Primary Colours/Couleurs primaires, I know I don’t need to say this. Perhaps though, I need to hear myself say it. I need to hear myself say it out loud. This is part of my own experience with listening. I think about what my colleagues talk about when they discuss their experience as artists and curators working in the Canadian Art system. I am able to exercise my own access to resources on a regular basis, and notice a lack of resistance to my participation in systems compared to that of my IBPoC colleagues. The thought of listening to myself, to hear what I am saying so as to better understand the bias and perpetuation of colonial myths that I continue to perform, is my intent. That is how I need to listen.
During the Gathering, Chris and France asked me if I wanted to talk about the WordCloud in front of the broader group. I understood that they needed me to explain the submission process, and to give a face to the other end of the cell phone line. But, I also understand that they wanted me to also be present, that they wanted me to have an opportunity to add my voice to the space. I declined. I did introduce the process and gave out the cell phone number and provided a contact. But, I shied away from further comment. I was uncertain as to how to contribute, what to say. However, now I understand their offer to be a part of the act of listening. They were inviting me to be present. This is also about listening.
“Language fills the room and lifts the spirits, drums into our ears and sings us into being.”
(Comment submitted by a participant at the PC/Cp Gathering, Lekwungen territory, September 2017)
The Gathering was an act of listening. The collective action took the participation of a 130 people invited to come together on Lekwungen territory to talk and share. The comments that make up the WordCloud are part of this process of listening. The perspectives that were texted to the cell phone number provided are messages, notes, suggestions, and greetings that represent all kinds of thoughts shared to communicate unique perspectives within the group. The messages themselves are a record of the active exchange of ideas and views and observations in reply to the events, additions and augmentations of each day’s conversations. It would have been effective if the WordCloud could have been a real-time representation of the Gathering, recording the action as it took place, a mirror of the moment-to-moment scene. That would have been great, to see a reflection of people’s experience visible in a virtual space, great, but not necessary.
It is fun to think about what real-time response could be like in a forum such as this. But again, it is not necessary. That was not needed as a means of communication. There were lots of messages being sent in real-time between people gathered in the room for each session. There were the warm body interactions of sitting beside people and eating. Of sitting beside people while other people shared experiences or lead discussions on a variety of topics. Already present, were ways of being with people while talking and exploring stories. The WordCloud was a way to listen to the group. It was a way to hear what could be done, or what had happened, or what something was like. It was a feedback for feedback. It was a way of listening.
“Hearing out multiple narratives”
(Comment submitted by a participant at the PC/Cp Gathering, Lekwungen territory, September 2017)
The act of listening was built into the process of organizing the gathering itself. This is what I have learned from Chris and France, from their ability to do as they say, to not just talk about it, but to put theory into action. I appreciate their ability to do this as artists and as organizers and have learned a great deal from their approach to working with others. I have gotten to know each of them over the past few years through our shared association with Open Space Arts Society here in Victoria.
I have been involved with the Open Space organization in some capacity since 2001, and in this time have witnessed many changes in the local arts community and in the people on which it depends. The organization has been my lens on contemporary arts and culture locally, regionally, provincially, nationally and internationally. It intersects with my professional, social and personal worlds. I came to Victoria with an interest and ambition to learn more about artist-run centres and to develop my art practice. The artist-run centre structure provided me opportunities and a version of contemporary art that I wanted to pursue, that I wanted to be. Little did I know the impact that this place, and the people that I would meet, would have on my work and on my understanding of myself as a human being.
France invited me to be a co-curator with her and Michelle Jacques of an exhibition that would be presented in the context of the Primary Colours/Couleurs primaires Gathering as part of its public programming. We arranged a group exhibition to take place at Open Space and curated works by seven artists (Léuli Eshraghi, Jamelie Hassan, Syrus Marcus Ware, Lisa Myers, Nadia Myre, Haruko Okano and Philip Kevin Paul) invited to participate in the Gathering. Tarah Hogue has written a review of the Deconstructing Comfort exhibition as part of the Primary Colours/Couleurs primaires reflection series accessible here: http://rungh.org/deconstructing-comfort/
“We carry our family with us”
(Comment submitted by a participant at the PC/Cp Gathering, Lekwungen territory, September 2017)
That experience was transformative. Working with France and Michelle, along with Breanna Fabbro and the artists in the coming together of the exhibition was important and rewarding. Our curatorial process involved a series of group discussions that took place over a couple of months via skype and telephone. Sometimes were we in the same room with each other, and other times we would be listening from within our cars, or holding our cell phones up to our ears, pacing around a university quad. In each instance we were listening intently to the stories and reflections that the artists would share. The time that we took to be with the artists in this way, to develop a sense of what was possible together, was an amazing and challenging experience.
Our collective conversations stretched the parameters of an easy dialogue. The content that we were exploring was difficult. The stories that each artist shared about their own worlds and experiences with colonial abuse was heartbreaking. Their coming together through a common goal of “interrogating spaces of [dis]comfort to generate transformation and change,” set the tone for the rest of our curatorial process and the exhibition itself. As a group, we created a space for the artists to listen to their histories, to their ancestors and to their shared pasts. This formed the foundation of the relationship between the works, the artists and curators. This set up a context for the larger Gathering that was going to take place.
Indigenous practices have taught me my own responsibility in my work, and about my own relationship to the land. I will always be learning how to centre Indigenous practices but I think this is what a society that has understood that is supposed to feel like.
(Comment submitted by a participant at the PC/Cp Gathering, Lekwungen territory, September 2017)
One of the main things that I have learned from this experience is the understanding that you cannot listen to something if you are not there. In order to be able to listen, you need to be present: present in your knowledge of where you are and what is going on around you; present in your knowledge of yourself and the space you inhabit; present in your responsibility to yourself and your community.
Being present is how we can listen. By being present we are able to hear. I will continue to listen and will continue my commitment to being present. It is uncomfortable and that is okay.
“I don't want to leave! When will I see you all again?”
(Comment submitted by a participant at the PC/Cp Gathering, Lekwungen territory, September 2017)
Doug Jarvis is an artist, curator and instructor living in Victoria, BC. He is a founding member of the art collectives Second Front and Noxious Sector. His individual and collective projects have shown at artist-run centres, galleries, museums and festivals across Canada, the United States, Europe and Asia. He received an MFA from the University of Guelph and sits on artist-run centre and non-profit boards. Doug is the Administrator for the ProArt Alliance.
