Live drawing (acrylic markers, acetate, video)
performance, live drawing, map, score, countermapping, embodied
November 2021
Is it ethical for me to speak about land that is not mine if I speak to a specific embodied experience?

(photos by Natalie Goulet and Colleen MacIsaac)

I had an idea and then I reworked it and then I reworked it again and then I let happenstance guide me. I was wrestling with creating art based on the experience of being on the land – I was a brief visitor, a guest on the land, not someone with a longstanding deep connection to those sites, or a true understanding of the way the people indigenous to the land knew it. 

I started asking questions I did not have answers for. I gradually came to understand that the only way I could ethically speak about the land was to speak to my embodied experience during these specific visits, and what my body encountered, felt, and considered there. I was interested in challenging the authority of Google Maps — and of settler colonial mapmaking — by taking fixed outlines and moving towards a space where a fuller experience of the geography and the lived reality of being within it and relationship to it could be mapped.