Constructions Of-selfhood-nature-and-territory

Errantry

Olivia Klevorn

Our navigation of digital space is dictated by our perceived identities, since user data is collected according to demographics. While we recognize the danger of identarian determinism in our offline worlds, we do not attend to how it limits our freedom in digital ones. In a multimedia performance, Klevorn will show how her selfhood has been constructed online algorithmically—from Netflix preferences to targeted Instagram ads—and consider the destructive effects of this practice beyond her screen-mediated life.

Mediated Natures

Estraven Lupino-Smith

In keeping with their broader critiques of normative nature, Lupino-Smith’s virtual “nature walk” considers how space is socially produced through surveillance and geographic imaginaries, and how reciprocity and relationships can be developed to combat forms of domination. Counter-acting the spectacular forms of nature walks and documentaries, Lupino-Smith interprets the sights and sounds of nature against their dominant forms, where normative gender, sex, and identity are mapped onto animal and plant life.

Maps & Gaps

Polina Teif

Maps have an implicit objectivity and credibility: they are ideological and constructed entities that inform policy, and control the free movement of peoples across territories and borders. In a new video, Teif uses an extensive collection of maps (from the 17th century to present day), archival footage, and interviews to examine how imperialism, statehood, and borders effected the terrain of the lower Jordan Valley. Against the discursive force of cartography, Teif uses poetic storytelling to weave histories of erasure and settlement.

Presenter Biographies

Olivia Klevorn is a queer, mixed-race Black emerging artist living in Toronto. She graduated from Yale University in 2017 with a bachelor's in Cultural Anthropology and received a Master’s of Visual Anthropology from the University of Oxford in 2019, with a dissertation on digital labour relations on Instagram. Olivia has trained as a dancer, writer, and actor, and has been mentored by the poet Claudia Rankine. She conducts research for Hans Ulrich Obrist, director of London’s Serpentine Gallery. She regularly performed as part of author Dean Atta’s Black Flamingo Cabaret, and was frequently a featured performer at London’s Royal Vauxhall Tavern. Recently, she has been published in the Blackwood Gallery’s SDUK 07: TILTING (2), Koffler.digital’s online exhibition A Matter of Taste, and Carnation Zine’s upcoming issue. She was a runner-up for the C Magazine New Critics Award.

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Estraven Lupino-Smith is a queer and trans non-binary artist, born in Dish with One Spoon Territory to an Italian and Scottish family. Their work is informed by their curiosity and critical engagements with human interactions in varied environments: natural, cultural, and constructed. Their interdisciplinary practice involves sound, sculpture, video, and other various forms of installation in partnership with research and writing. They are specifically interested in investigating ecologies, conceptions of the wild, race and whiteness, gender, social and cultural normativities, ancestral stories and skills, and movements for justice and self-determination. Over the course of their training they have refined their understanding of the spatial dynamics of movement building, critical natural histories, and the ideas of imagined geographies. Being an artist and a geographer are two parts of their broader practice engaged with political ecology, queer theory, and creative production, firmly rooted in decolonial methodologies.

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Polina Teif (1989) is a Belarus-born artist and filmmaker based in Toronto. She received her BFA from the University of Toronto with emphasis on Visual Studies and Semiotics and completed an MFA in Documentary Film Production at York University. In 2019 she attended the Doc Institute Breakthrough Program and was awarded the Hot Docs Pitch prize and the 2019 Planet in Focus Green Pitch Award. In 2019, she participated in the Cannes Doc Corner Canadian Showcase, and in 2020 she attended the Berlinale EMF DocSalon Toolbox Program and the 2020 Hot Docs Accelerator Program. Her work has been shown at the Istanbul Design Biennial, Trinity Square Video, Gallery Stratford, Art Metropole, Hart House, Nuit Blanche, and Idea Exchange; and published in DER GRIEF, Aesthetica Magazine, Hart House Review, Magenta, Collective Terrain, LUMA Quarterly, and ICON Magazine.

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Errantry

Mediated Natures

Maps & Gaps

Presenter Biographies

Public Presentations by Research Fellows: Constructions of Selfhood, Nature, and Territory