Sarah Nesbitt and Katie Earle will be collaborating to develop the debut edition of the FARR Residency project. You can follow what we do on this blog, and in the Reading room itself…
Collaborating is not always easy, but we thank the FARR staff for pairing us together. We have had numerous conversations, which have been hugely inspiring. We complement one another well, and play off each others ideas and motivations. Being both very interested in questioning what ideas are considered important in a space designated as a library for fine arts students, we ask:
What knowledge is valued, revered and available?
What knowledge is absent?
Sarah grew up in Alberta and Northern Saskatchewan, and has had many varied interactions and relationships with First nations communities and individuals. Katie grew up in rural New England in a town with a largely invisible Native population beyond an annual pow-wow. We both have the misfortune to acknowledge our astounding ignorance towards the histories, traditions and contemporary culture of the First Peoples on the land we call our home.
Our project is interested in investigating this gap in our knowledge, and to ask why is there so much we, as white non-Native Canadians, do not know about the land, history, politics and present day lifestyles of a people whose land we walk upon daily.
This will develop in myriad ways. Here are some of our ideas:
- research and self-education
- mapping projects
- small gestures
- looking at, and asking others to look at, official government policy
- expanding the FARR’s collection of books on and by First Nations artists
- visits to reserves and other communities in Quebec to speak with people and with artists. These conversations will then develop into a new wing of the collection at the Reading room where Native art is given the space and acknowledgment it deserves as an historical and contemporary art form. And where students can learn as much from the artistic heritage of this continent as they learn from the European Canon.
- exploring personal histories and narratives, mining personal memories
- Developing a workshop series to take place in the fall of First Nations artists that will be open to the public, particularly collaborating with the youth at the Native Friendship Center here in Montreal…
We welcome all response, as this is an open-ended project and in the weight of the subject matter being taken on by two non-Native white Canadians, we are surely not going to do everything perfectly.
Yet our willingness to make mistakes comes out of a strong belief in the necessity of artists to engage with the world around them, and to use the venue of art to overcome societal obstacles. The future depends upon it. We need one another, and our lives demand that we all do the often imperfect work of decolonization even if it is scary, difficult and challenging. Even when it brings up the monsters of all that we have internalized from what we have been taught and all that has kept us oblivious. For it simultaneously offers us the beauty of all that we have yet to learn, and the connections and wisdom we have to gain from engaging with one another and unlearning the violence we have been handed by history.
As Lilla Watson, a Murri visual artist, educator and activist from Central Queensland, Australia so eloquently stated, 'your liberation is bound up with mine'.**
It is with this in mind that we pursue this project.
** this is taken from a larger quote of hers: “If you have come here to help me, you are wasting your time. But if you have come because your liberation is bound up with mine, then let us work together.”
