On Loss: Migrant Relationalities 

3:30 pm - 5:00 pm | Conversation

With speakers Helena Martín Franco and Alexandra Gelis.

Moderated by Claudia Arana.

In this space, artists Helena Martín Franco and Alexandra Gelis will convene with curator Claudia Arana to discuss their artistic inquiries in relation to their experiences of migration. While Martín Franco focuses on the embodiment of diasporic discounters and miscommunications between the newcomer and the local, Gelis wonders about the possibilities of mourning in the distance, and the role of human and non-human relationality in expressing and processing a deterritorialized grief. 

The conversation will touch on pressing aspects of today’s migrant experience, such as the interweaving of globalization, interconnectivity, racialization, and colonialism. 

The conversation will run for 60 minutes.

This event is free and open to the public. Please register in advance.

We invite our audience to join us for Martin Franco’s performance Elephant Woman on Wednesday, Oct. 5th, and visit Gelis’ installation, Migrant Superpositions: Convertirse En, in Onsite Gallery. 

About the speakers

Helena Martin Franco was born in Cartagena. She lives and works in Tio'tia:ke-Mooniyang-Montréal since 1998. She holds an MA in visual and media arts from UQAM. She is a member of several feminist contemporary art collectives, including L’Araignée (collective of diffusion of contemporary art), La Redhada (network of women artists from the Colombian Caribbean), CAVCA (Community of Visual Artists of Cartagena and Bolivar) and Las meninas emputás! (Feminist collective, anti-colonial activist from Cartagena). Her transdisciplinary practice explores the blending of different artistic processes and the hybridization between traditional and new technologies. Her artistic practice invites dialogue about gender-based violence, immigration and artistic censorship. Winner of the POWERHOUSE PRIZE in 2018, her work has been presented in the Dominican Republic, Lithuania, Spain, New Zealand, Colombia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Iran, Argentina, Cuba, and Canada.

Alexandra Gelis is a Colombian-Venezuelan-Canadian media artist, curator and researcher. Her practice is research-based, process-oriented and multi-disciplinary, including film, photography, drawing, and media installation with custom-built interactive electronics and sound. She is known for single-screen film works, and modular immersive non-fiction-based installations. Her projects incorporate personal field research as a tool to investigate the ecologies of various landscapes by examining the traces left by various socio-political interventions. Gelis has worked collaboratively with communities around the globe. She has extensive research on the relationship between plants/people and power in the context of colonization and globalization. From her plant-based research-creation, she explores, documents, and re-creates ecologies that take shape between plants and people, and between plants and their multi-species interrelationships. The idea of plants as political allies in various contexts of struggle (against colonialism, displacement in war, and migratory and racial regimes) is central to her concept of "Migrated Plants". This investigation takes into account the fundamental autonomous behaviour of the "Migrated plants". Her innovative installations, exhibited widely (https://www.alexandragelis.com/) are featured in a recent book, Alexandra Gelis: Seed edited by Mike Hoolboom and Clint Enns. She has exhibited internationally in North and South America, including the Walker Art Center, Europe, and Africa.
 

About the moderator

Claudia Arana is a Latinx Independent Curator and Cultural Connector whose work resides at the convergence of in-between and mixed cultures that emerge along physical, political, and social borders. Nurtured by a Mestizo background, her practice explores themes of memory and trauma, race, diasporas, equity, and representation. She studied Art Theory and Critical Thinking at the School of Visual Arts and Advanced Critique at the International Centre of Photography, both in New York. Recently she worked with the City of Toronto as the ArtworxTO West Hub Curator for the 2021-2022 Year of Public Art in Toronto.

We gratefully acknowledge the financial support of our funders, the Canada Council for the Arts, and the Department of Canadian Heritage.

LAMAS has been generously supported by the Canada Excellence Research Chair in Migration and Integration Program (CERC Migration) and the WhereWeStand Project at Toronto Metropolitan University; the George Brown School of Media and Performing Arts; The Creative School at Toronto Metropolitan University; the Image Centre at Toronto Metropolitan University; Hemispheric Encounters; Sensorium: Centre for Digital Arts and Technology, School of the Arts, Media, Performance, and Design at York University; Performance Studies (Canada); OCAD University; Onsite Gallery; the University of Toronto Centre for Culture and Technology; the Latin American Studies Program at the University of Toronto; the Centre for Research on Latin America and the Caribbean (CERLAC) at York University; and Lokaal.