☊ ⊡ The Myth of Normal (Gabor Maté with Daniel Maté): Compassion in an age of anxiety and disillusionment
Book review. Canadian Dimension. February 2023.

Canadian physician and author Gabor Maté’s new book, The Myth of Normal, is a rich examination of the conditions that lead to individual illness and the cultural normalization of stress, alienation, and disenfranchisement. The book questions and dismantles notions of ‘normalcy,’ interrogating the factors behind the rise of what Maté calls trauma-related illnesses.

∷ Where is the Planetary?
Publishing intervention. continent. at HKW, October 2022.

How can we tell stories about life on the planet that provide information on both where human civilizations come from and how they could develop? What should this narration contain? How could it place civilizations in a position to guide future planetary developments?

☊ ⊡ You can’t play here – Or, forms of infinite play
Essay. MARCH journal, May 2022

“Early play is life “testing” the world, creatures traversing the possible, exploring and confronting the void of the unknown, expectant with discovery. In this sense, play is also a flirtation with fear, creeping along the edges of a supernatural landscape that hovers delicately between safety and traumatic catastrophe. While its inconclusive nature calls for never quite touching upon one or another of these thresholds – always in between and not-yet – play disintegrates in the moment it touches upon catastrophe. It is defeated and undone by brutality, as in Cain’s Book (1960), where Alexander Trocchi, the archetypal tortured artist – which is to say, the conqueror of the useless – wrote: “When the spirit of play dies, there is only murder.””

∷ Creative Resilience: Exploring Arts and Health
Co-curated series of workshops and discussions. ELAN, 2019-2020.

Co-curated with Emily Enhorning, Creative Resilience: Exploring Arts & Health is a short series of events taking place between Nov. 2019 – Jan. 2020, exploring the intersections between arts and health. Featuring: Access & Alternatives (panel discussion); Creative Resources: A Mindfulness-Based Approach to Self-Care (Sonia Osorio); Resilience Theatre Workshop (Lisa Ndejuru and Joliane Allaire); Fascial Topologies (Csenge Kolozsvari).

⊡ Acquiring and Optimizing Sustainable Relationships for Good Solid Cash Flow Streams. Or, Speaking with Plants.
Essay. temporary continent., Anthropocene River Campus, 2019

Considering the connections between language and landscape, as well the disconnections that can occur when the former is used to frame intentions towards the latter, e.g.  #sustainability, in this essay for Temporary continent., Lital Khaikin proposes a radical re-reading of space that privileges the plantlike qualities of longevity and simplicity over consumption and growth.

∷ Extending the Dialogue on the Technosphere
Creative publishing and video production residency. continent. 6.3, 2017

Scenography, video production assistance, and publishing residency at Vorbrenner Freiestheatre (Innsbruck) in collaboration with continent. (Bernhard Garnicnig, Maximilian Thoman, Paul Boshears, Nina Jäger, Jamie Allen) and Gerald Straub.

Based on a series of conversations recorded in April 2016 during the Anthropocene Campus – The Technosphere Issue at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin, the experimental publishing collective continent. opens up the production process as a performative space that poses the question of the (im)possibility of transmission against the backdrop of the Anthropocene/Technosphere issue. They develop a visual staging of the transcription as a walk-in intermedial environment and as a theater of things. Together with the lettrist sound of the transcriber’s jumping, repetitive voice manipulation, levels of perception and understanding also open up beyond discursive conceptualizations.

⊡ It will be the silence, where I am?
Concert review. The Brooklyn Rail, November 2016

“The sad hollows are lit for a moment by a single red “Firefly,” embering in the caverns. Fire returns to the first encounter with mercury, alchemical shift, elemental distortion—the ear is a heretic; stability is a façade. The point of rupture is sensed, awareness returns to the body, though moved far beyond the mind’s control. The labyrinth is navigated without the silken thread, as the pomegranate juice courses beneath skin, an irretrievable and deceptive poison.

Seedling fallen into the waters of Abydos,
sinking into primordial depths,
the darkness from which you came:
you were not supposed to know it again so soon…“

⊡ Of Milk and Honey, Hair and Blood
Creative essay in response to exhibition. Berfrois, September 2016

Notes departing from Deniz Eroglu’s exhibition “Milk & Honey” at OVERGADEN (Copenhagen). “As in the offering of “Honey, Nabidh, Water and Milk”, nourishment to the messenger of the first word, the clean word, the light word. Luxurious, slow liquids, milk and honey are as blood, of the body, the most intimate secretions, drawn out of life and giving life. […] Cyclicality meanders through the verse, acquiring a thickened nature, seducing into the slower rhythms of honey. The sensuality of nature arouses the understanding of the divine – succumbing entirely to the profane, falling through the surrender, to find that desire has reached farther, beyond what the body is alone capable of, as if to forget our own murky waters. Only through your body can I forget mine. The most exquisite cruelty is to find one another when we are already separate.”

∷ ⊟ The Technosphere, Now!
Publishing intervention, digital issue, and printed Flugblätter (50 editions). continent. 5.2, 2016

Special issue of continent. in collaboration with Jamie Allen, Paul Boshears, Bernhard Garnicnig, Nina Jäger, developed as part of a creative publishing intervention at Haus der Kulturen der Welt’s Technosphere programming.

∷ ⊟ Acoustic Infrastructures
Digital issue. continent. 5.3, 2016

Contributing editor for digital issue of continent. compiled in collaboration with Jamie Allen and Isaac Linder. Issue developed to accompany the Acoustic Infrastructures exhibition at the Eyebeam Art + Technology Centre (NYC).

∷ These may (not) be places
Curator: group exhibition. Studio Sixty Six, Ottawa, June – August 2016.

∷ ⊟ Social Glitch
Digital issue. continent. 4.4, August 2015

Editing for digital issue of continent. compiled by Maximilian Thoman, Bernhard Garnicnig, Gerald Nestler, Sylvia Eckermann. Issue developed for SOCIAL GLITCH exhibition at Kunstraum Niederösterreich (Vienna).

∷ GRAPHIS
Curator: group exhibition. Studio Sixty Six, Ottawa, May – June 2015.

⊡ Fragmentation and Intimate Space in Olivier Ratsi’s “Anarchitecture” Photography
Essay. Afterimage: The Journal of Media Arts and Cultural Criticism, vol. 42 no. 4, January/February 2015

“The surrealistic forms in Ratsi’s photography are in dialogue with many innovative architectural theorists and practitioners who have been exploring the abstraction of form over the past forty years, most specifically borrowing the term “anarchitecture” introduced by New York avant-garde artist Gordon Matta-Clark in the 1970s. Ratsi represents a contemporary inclination toward the phenomenological within architecture, employing an aesthetic that rejects archetypal geometry and returns instead to the materialization of individual experience in urban space.”

∷ ⊟ Intangible Architectures
Digital issue. continent. 4.3, September 2015

Contributing editor for digital issue of continent., in collaboration with Paul Boshears, Jamie Allen and Matt Bernico.

“The idea of intangible architectures as political agents may relate to emergency states, militarised environments, questions of statehood and national borders, and the patterns of self-determining communities. Architectures that are not yet constructed, and the rhetoric used to justify or oppose such development, are also revealing of the philosophy of private developers and communities of resistance. We may then find, after encountering these most immediate forms of intangible architectures, the spatial manipulations of social and intimate behaviour, laws, experiences, and memories. Architectural structures that do exist may yet conceal more complex frameworks, which exude laws that are autonomous to their initial, intended use. These subtle systems are encountered in liminal and transitory zones of city space, in artist-run exhibition spaces, in the homes that we recreate in our memories, in the emotional symbolism we create from structural space.”

⊡ Music & Beyond: Thereminist, Author & Orchestra Captivate a Congregation
Concert review. Ottawa Showbox, July 2015

As music of the theremin is less created through the instrument, and more conjured from the electromagnetic field that surrounds the metal rods, it indicates that sound as always present, and is always multidimensional. The nature of the theremin allows a musician to reveal sound, and perhaps even approach a music that transcends materiality.

∷ ⊟ Pitch Drop
Digital issue. continent. 4.2, April 2015

Editor for digital issue of continent. compiled by Jamie Allen, Paul Boshears, Bernhard Garnicnig, and Marin Abell.

∅ Permission for Violence: Enabling Apartheid through Cultural Curation
Essay. Herd Magazine, April 2015

“That Palestinian performers were not cast in a work that uses an autobiographical approach to explore Israeli identity, though perhaps inadvertently on the part of any performers, perpetuates the erasure of a demographic that makes upwards of 20% of the Israeli population. To even consider the medium of physical theatre as a mode of exploring this identity, it is the presence of the body, its immediate and visceral presence, that defines this expression. Yet, if  the Palestinian voice is absent this implies a brutal silence, where neither the living body of Palestine nor the urgent voice of its persistence, of its struggle, are made present to this artistic form and narrative. In the depiction of Israeli identity, and the dialogue around its effects, the isolation of this representation from the demographic that the state is actively colonizing is an act of political violence.”

∅ Sketches after “Far and Near and Here”
Theatre review. Herd Magazine, February 2015

“The voice, especially that of the written word, allows for a quiet understanding of another, far removed from the noise and mess of the social program. In the absence of all those other seemingly important things, such as a body, it is almost reasonable to attribute an entire world, much less a single identity, to the voice of monologues which we too share. It makes sense to budge the walls of an inner world just enough to include the allusion of a person behind those orderly and attentive words. Anonymous voices, they share thoughts about ordinary things, revealed through letters, through scribbles of fish on the margins of dream journals, through objects – anything but themselves. She rests her idea of him on this intangible glimmer of the person that comes through his letters. They place faith in response, with little expectancy and every hope. He writes.”

∅ Between Rhythm and Silence: “Le Cargo” by Faustin Linyekula
Dance review. Herd Magazine, February 2015

“In Ndombolo dance, movement is accompanied by a rhythmic cry that follows and punctuates the drumming. In this dialogue between sound and body, instrument and the dancer, it is the experience of the group that is emphasized: there is no single dancer, there is no individual, as everyone present to the performance is an expression of the whole. In the narrative and dance performance of Le Cargo by Congolese dancer Faustin Linyekula, the performer is accompanied not only by percussion, but also the recorded sound of laughter, the everyday and unexceptional speech of a village that leaves the performing body inseparable from shared place and community.”

∅ Narratives of Conflict: Johnny Alam and Akram Zaatari at CUAG
Exhibition review. Herd Magazine, February 2015

“The Lebanese Civil War that unites Alam’s Art on a Green Line with Zaatari’s All is Well settles into the humility of the self as a particle of a greater identity. The intimate becomes a conduit of public narrative, the false communicates the undertones of a concealed truth, that which is seen as mundane during times of peace becomes swollen with heroism during war. It is the focus on ‘life as opposed to death’, as Alam states, that returns the narrative into the hands of the audience. The resuscitation of an accurate Lebanese history by Alam and Zaatari seems to ask, what is determined to be valuable in the deliberate erasure of history? And how can the consideration of intimate objects enable a more empathetic understanding and urgent preservation of histories that are being actively erased?”

⊡ Yoshi Sodeoka Video Artist Interview: Psychedelic Apocalypse in the Digital Realm
Artist interview and feature. REDEFINE Magazine, November 2014

“New York City-based video artist Yoshihide Sodeoka is known for his disquieting psychedelic videos, which are characterized by saturated colors, mythological references and a tense expression of time. Working often on an intuitive level, Sodeoka often allows his audio-visual creations to assume their shapes through a combination of spontaneous assemblage and aesthetic choreography. His video art is unique for its translation of noise music into a visual language, and for the close relationship of his moving imagery to principles of stillness. Polarizing aesthetics and themes in particular lend a spiritual tendency to the artist’s work — though not overtly, and perhaps not even consciously — yet the fine line between good and evil is channeled into intense representations of such duality through the artist’s imagery. This symbolically rich language is revealed through Sodeoka’s manipulation of the characteristics of distortion and his play with fragmented forms; a fantastical exploration of imperfection in his imagery works in contrast to the sterility of technology.”

⊡ The Radical Capacity of Glitch Art: Expression through an Aesthetic Rooted in Error
Essay. REDEFINE Magazine, February 2014

“The nature of glitch may also give it a subversive power over commercialization, which in turn can be intentionally harnessed by artists to create statements to this effect. The fear of the uncontrollable and the chaotic, which stand contrary to the monumentalism of corporate structure, can act as stimuli for glitch as a potential mode of radical art. Since glitch artists do not fundamentally rely on a presence of purpose or a stylistic vocabulary, glitch contains no hierarchies, no agendas, no totalitarian truth. From its origins as passive commentary on the encounter of technological error, glitch art has gained a vocabulary capable of more deliberate criticism and, by finding relevance across disciplines, can serve as a catalyst for broader discussion surrounding its artistic and social contexts.”

⊡ Butoh Dancing (舞踏) : Discovering Emptiness, Embodiment and Environment in an Archaeology of the Body
Essay. REDEFINE Magazine, October 2013

“Originally known only as the “dance of darkness” or “dance of death”, Butoh (舞踏) has evolved into an encompassing expression of every element to be found through the human body. It does not transcend the human form or express a superhuman consciousness, but challenges us to comprehend ourselves through a different mentality. Despite the fairly recent origination of this dance form, it has quickly appealed and demonstrated that it speaks to something common within us, however we may allow our cultural and geographic borders to define us.”

⊡ Tuva’s Meridian of Musicality, Spirituality, and Cross-Cultural Place: A Primer On Tuvan Throat Singing
Essay. REDEFINE Magazine, May 2013
* Honoured with “Digital Journalism Award: Khoomei: Cultural Phenomenon of Central Asia Symposium” (Kyzyl, Tuva, 2013).

“The music of any region is the skin of its culture. Its texture, wrinkles, and colors stretch over flesh, bone, and spirit. Within the open palm of Central Asia, Tuva holds a musical tradition that has been quietly capturing the imagination of the world and which is among the most awe-inspiring vocal arts to have persisted to this day. Also known as overtone singing, and colloquially as khoomei, throat singing is a style of vocal performance that allows a singer to deliver two or more notes simultaneously, while the pitch is naturally controlled by the lips and throat. Overtone singing can be heard in many cultures: for instance, in some isolated regions in Canada’s Arctic; within the Xhosa communities of South Africa; among the Chukchi; and in the memory of the Ainu art of Rekuhkara. Tuva’s throat singing, however, is unlike any other in the world.”

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