Please join us at the Centre for the Study of Black Canadian Diaspora for an encounter with artists Fidelia Lam + Marton Robinson. The duo will present their project entitled, 717.
Project Description
A space to facilitate the repetition, reflection, remembrance, and reinterpretation of the diverse locations and postures the human body occupies.
An artistic endeavour born from the invitation extended by Andrea Fatona of Centre for Study of Black Canadian Diaspora, 717 represents a fusion of artistic practices at the point of the artist's initial creative process. This collaboration is deeply rooted in the artists’ background in a variety of embodied practices and includes aspects of sports science, physical training, parkour, and music by crafting a residual and archival space within a process-performative framework.
The choreography and movements employed draw inspiration from a deep connection with the body, physical activity, and the sites we rehearse and inhabit. The resulting sharing within the Centre's space instantiates multi-perspectival and durational recordings of the artists’ process-performance, offering uneven and polyrhythmic representations that destabilize prevailing narratives surrounding bodies and their inherent (en)durance.
"Reflecting on issues of labor and the perception of the homeland, I am interested in the replacement of the body as a speculative artefact and the potentials of the speculative artefacts as an element of memory, and memory as a sociopolitical, and collective tool. I seek to explore the critical role and discourse of objects and the rite as cultural signifiers of national and self-identity as an Afro Latino."
- Marton Robinson, from the African Champion Series.
Biographies
Fidelia Lam is an artist and scholar whose work attends to the confluence of Asian/American diaspora, aesthetics, technology, and urban space through intertextual and recursive assemblages of code, video, animation, projection, sound, bodies, and critical inquiry. Trained as a musician, performer, and composer at the University of British Columbia, they hold an MA in Media Arts from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and a PhD in Cinematic Arts, Media Arts and Practice from the University of Southern California. They’ve presented and exhibited work in Canada, the United States, Europe, and Asia, and are currently Assistant Professor of Critical Computational Media at OCAD University in Toronto, ON.
Marton Robinson is based in Toronto, Ontario. He is a Costa Rican artist and facilitator who has an interdisciplinary background informed by his Integral Health and Visual Art and Communication studies. Robinson teaches in the Industrial Design and Art Department at Ontario College of Arts & Design University. He creates installations and performances investigating modes of communication and translation – of history, culture, and identity – that challenge the conventions of blackness in art history, mainstream culture, and "the official national narratives," particularly in Costa Rica. In addition, the artist is interested in currencies of knowledge and informal economies based on the notion that informality has a way of generating, redistributing, and obtaining generational wealth.