Resonance (Dome Installation)
Step into a multisensory installation by Dolleen Tisawii’ashii Manning and Mary Bunch, which unfolds as an immersive universe contained within a single drop of water. The dome projection was created with videos of micro-organisms collected from the St. Lawrence River and is informed by Anishinaabe ontology and references the emergence of the Clan Beings.
Teeming with life, these microbial worlds reflect Anishinaabe understandings of existence as a dynamic, interrelational process comprised of mnidoo (spirit, potency, potential, process, energy). Mnidoo expresses that which is simultaneously happening and about to take shape as an emergent possibility. Water, Niibii is our ancestor, a living multiplicity with whom we humans must renew a commitment of mutual respect and responsibility.
Miigwetch to our partner Native Women in the Arts, and sponsors MITACS, VISTA - Vision: Science to Applications / Canada Research Excellence Fund (CREF), the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC), and the Media Arts Program at York University.
Storytelling Videos
Creation Story
Mariel Belanger
Mariel Belanger retells the Sqílxʷ version of the story of Muskrat and the creation of Turtle Island. She performs on a traditional Sturgeon Nose canoe created by Dr Shawn Brigman, at the confluence of the Columbia and Spokane Rivers. She wears a skirt featuring a design inspired by the captikwl “Arrows to the Sky” story, constructed by Florence Fred.
Drone Videography by Clair Dibble, sound design by Hodari Newtown. Written, directed performed and edited by Belanger.
This work was created as part of Earthdiver: Land-Based Worlding, led by Dolleen Tisawii’ashii Manning, at the Peripheral Visions Co-Lab (York and Queens). Thank you to project partner Native Women in the Arts, and sponsor MITACS.
Water is Alive
Hodari Reuben “Newtown” Clarke, Lydia Johnson, and Elder Mona Stonefish
Jamaican-Canadian Hip-Hop artist Hodari Newtown wrote and performed this song based on the work of Cree Environmental scientist Lydia Johnson and Spirit of the Water, an environmental justice project focused on the waterways of Treaty 3 Territory. The song also features a poem in Anishinaabemowin by Elder Mona Stonefish, in which she addresses Niibii (water) as an ancestor, acknowledges Niibii’s gifts to humans, and expresses the human responsibility to care for and protect the water. 360 Videography and video editing by Dolleen Tisawii’ashii Manning.
Water is Alive was created as part of Earthdiver: Land-Based Worlding, led by Dolleen Tisawii’ashii Manning at the Peripheral Visions Co-Lab (York and Queens). Thank you to project partner Native Women in the Arts, and funder MITACS.
Emerging from the Water
Dolleen Tisawii’ashii Manning and Mary Bunch
As Europeans colonized the Americas, the newly invented microscope led to the discovery of another new world that shifted Western understandings of existence. As Leibnitz noted “There is a prodigious quantity of [living things] in a drop of water tinctured with powder … perhaps the block of marble itself is only a mass of an infinite number of living bodies like a lake full of fish” (1687). Microscopy also contributed to a reductive view of water that is tied to ecological devastation. Emerging from the Water offers an Anishinaabe perspective, asking audiences to re-imagine what water policies, sciences, and human relations with the more-than-human world could look like in a decolonized world. The accompanying interactive microscope features water samples from the St. Lawrence River — a significant trade route for Indigenous peoples, and an artery for colonization in Canada.
Miigwetch to our partner Native Women in the Arts, and sponsors MITACS, VISTA - Vision: Science to Applications / Canada Research Excellence Fund (CREF), the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC), and the Media Arts Program at York University.
Microscope
Peer through the microscope and observe "micro-organism performers" collected from the Bateau Chanel on the St. Lawrence River, near Kingston.
Resonance (VR Oculus)
This immersive universe created by Dolleen Tisawii’ashii Manning and Mary Bunch unfolds within a single drop of water. Fly around and through the microbial planets, each featuring performances by micro-organisms collected from the St. Lawrence River, with original soundscapes. This vr work invites philosophical reflection on the nature of reality and on human relations with niibii (water), informed by Anishinaabe understandings of existence as a dynamic, interrelational process comprised of mnidoo (spirit, potency, potential, process, and energy). Mnidoo is sheer potentiality, the formative dimension of the real. Notably, this is the very definition of ‘the virtual’ in Western philosophy.
Miigwetch to our partner Native Women in the Arts, and sponsors MITACS, VISTA - Vision: Science to Applications / Canada Research Excellence Fund (CREF), the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) and the Media Arts Program at York University. Thank you to our technical team: Galit Ariel, Jorge de Oliviera, and Michaela Pnacekova.
About the Artists
Dolleen Tisawii’ashii Manning
Dolleen Tisawii’ashii Manning is an interdisciplinary artist and Queen's National Scholar in Anishinaabe Language, Knowledge, and Culture (ALKC) in the Department of Philosophy and Cultural Studies at Queen's University. Manning has expertise in Anishinaabe ontology, mnidoo interrelationality, phenomenology, and art. A member of Kettle and Stoney Point First Nation, her primary philosophical influence and source of creativity is her early childhood grounding in Anishinaabe onto-epistemology. She is Principal Investigator of Earthdiver: Land-Based Worlding (MITACS), and Co-Investigator on Pluriversal Worlding with Extended Reality. Manning co-directs the cross-institutional Peripheral Visions Co-Lab (York and Queen’s). She is an affiliate of the Revision Centre for Art and Social Justice, a Fellow of The International Institute for Critical Studies in Improvisation (IICSI), and a Member of Connected Minds: Neural and Machine Systems for a Healthy, Just Society.
Mary Bunch
Mary Bunch is a media artist, Canada Research Chair, and Associate Professor of Cinema and Media Arts at York University. Her research develops socio-political concepts through critical theory and media arts creation, informed by queer, disability justice, and decolonizing frameworks. Her four-year SSHRC-funded project Pluriveral Worlding with Extended Reality engages ‘world’ as a frame of reality, as well as being a narrative and aesthetic element of media artworks. She is co-editor of a special issue on Access Aesthetics in the journal Public and has a monograph-in-progress titled Ecstatic Ethics. Bunch co-Directs the Peripheral Visions CoLab, and is a member of Sensorium Centre for Digital Arts and Technology, the Digital Justice Research Cluster, and Connected Minds: Neural and Machine Systems for a Healthy, Just Society.
Mariel Belanger
Mariel Belanger is a Syilx mother, land-based artist and Ph.D. student in Cultural Studies at Queens University. Belanger’s research is a portfolio of Digital Embodied Story Practice as an Indigenizing Research-Creation Methodology that explores digital story-making to subvert coloniality. Her research contributes to the growing body of interdisciplinary artistic scholarship that engages Indigenous community, language, and culture, as a bridge for society telling stories of our time. She is a recipient of a CGS SSHRC Doctoral Scholarship and a Teyonkwayenawá:kon Graduate Scholarship.
Hodari Reuben "Newtown" Clarke
Hodari Reuben “Newtown” Clarke is currently working on an MA in Interdisciplinary Studies at York University creating a hip-hop children’s musical story series that utilizes decolonial theory, Afrofuturism, and abolitionist thought to expand the social imaginary beyond the neoliberal and colonial in the collective consciousness. Clarke has been active in community health and engagement and leadership programs for youth for over a decade.
Elder Mona Stonefish
Elder Mona Stonefish (Anishinaabe, Bear Clan) is a Doctor of Traditional Medicine, with an honorary Doctorate of Law from Guelph University. Stonefish is a former Senator of the Anishinaabemowin Teg - language preservation, a Keeper of Wisdom, and a Grandmother Water Walker. She is a member of the Native American Museum of Washington D.C., a member of the Art Gallery of Windsor Board of Trustees, a traditional dancer, and a recipient of the Queen Elizabeth II Diamond Jubilee Medal (2013). She received the Lieutenant Governor's Ontario Heritage Award for Excellence in Conservation, for the exhibition, Into the Light: Eugenics and Education in Southern Ontario, Guelph Civic Museum, 2020.
Lydia Johnson
Lydia Johnson was born and raised on Robinson-Superior Treaty territory, homelands of the Anishinabek and Fort William First Nation and has mixed settler and Cree ancestry (Lac La Ronge Indian Band). Her research — in partnership with Grand Council Treaty #3, the IISD-Experimental Lakes Area, and Environment and Climate Change Canada — focuses on weaving Indigenous and Western ways of knowing in ecotoxicology and wildlife health to promote collaborative and respectful science between Indigenous Peoples and Western-trained non-Indigenous scientists.
The World Water Day Artistic Activations are presented in partnership with the UNITAR Global Water Academy and York University
