Meet Nocturne's 2025 Curator, Marite Kuus!
Nocturne is excited to announce Marite Kuus as our 2025 Festival Curator!
Marite Kuus is an artist and curator based between Kjipuktuk, Mi’kma’ki and Tallinn, Estonia. In 2023 Marite participated in Nocturne as an Anchor artist, and in September 2024 she curated the 15th annual Antigonight Festival in Nalikitquniejk/Antigonish. She is currently a Master's student at the Estonian Academy of Arts in Tallinn at the Craft Studies department where she is focusing on individual and communal relationships to matter and material, explored through collaborative interventions.
Marite has selected the 2025 festival theme, Ground, which will inform our Anchor projects and unite the festival as a whole. Keep reading for more in Marite's curatorial text below:
Let’s start with the basics, the ground under our feet, the surface of the Earth. How do we touch the ground? How do we keep an intentional relationship with it? Richard Long used his feet to make art in collaboration with the ground. 1 Marlene Creates chronicles her encounters with her environment. 2 Barbara Lounder creates tools for walking 3 and documents her walks, 4 many of her projects are closely associated with the WalkingLab 5 research group, developing anti-ableist and anti-colonial walking practices. Jane’s Walks happen in Halifax and worldwide every year on May 4th, 6 on the birthday of Jane Jacobs fought to keep cities walkable and safe.
To walk and to touch are our most immediate connections to the environment around us. The Town of Halifax was built onto Mi’kma’q land in 1749 and the “design of the settlement was laid out in the typical British military manner of the time, with a regular grid system protected by military fortifications,” 7 as described in a HRM urban planning report from 2021. Point Pleasant Park is rented from the Crown for an annual fee of around 10 cents, equivalent to 1 shilling. The lease is valid until the year 2865. 8 Colonial frameworks impact our day-to-day lives. How do we engage with ground that was stolen and maintains colonial structures?
To ground as a verb means to keep something in one place, to anchor, to hold on. To keep grounded signifies a feeling of stability, yet often seemingly unshakeable structures are shattered. Even now, the city feels increasingly more temporary and fluid. It doesn’t go unnoticed that there are currently 73 active construction sites in the HRM. 9
Demolition is a long-standing tradition in Kjipuktuk, perhaps most notably in Africville. A community that was so solidly planted for over 120 years 10 was brutally removed. A city worker who was involved in the resettlement process of Africville recounts: “I remember this woman because she was between me and the driver and she cried all the way into the city because she didn’t want to leave, didn’t know why they were making her leave. What really bothered me – she didn’t even know where she was going. They could have taken her anywhere.” 11
A similar story happened in Newfoundland in the 1960s, due to the transition of salt-cod fisheries to the fresh-frozen industry.12 Documentation of this process is recorded by Memorial University’s Maritime History Archive, 13 as well as in an artistic research project by Craig Leonard. 14 Images of houses floating on water feel unnerving and paradoxical, a symbol of constancy in a changeable state. How to feel grounded in a world where it’s hard to trust the structures we expect to be stable?
Demolition and uncertainty however can also give space for fluidity and liminality. Community gardens in Kjipuktuk tend to crop up in spaces that are in limbo, such as the corner of Windsor and Quinpool. What was once St Patrick’s High School has been an empty lot since 2015—now home to a community garden and multiple desire paths—it still manages to be a pollinator meadow. The property was sold in 2014 to BANC Investments for $37.61 million, 15 making it another public space that is likely to disappear. Emma Marris discusses the opportunity for novel ecosystems in urban areas in her 2016 TED talk. 16 Marris urges us to consider a new definition of nature: “one that includes not only pristine wilderness but also the untended patches of plants growing in urban spaces”. 17
It might feel overwhelming to consider what is happening above ground, so we can take respite in what’s happening beneath us. To quote mycologist Merlin Sheldrake, the intelligence of mycelial networks “is a way of life that challenges our animal imaginations”. 18 An example of this is the use of slime molds to map out the most efficient route for the Tokyo subway system. 19 Fungi offers a different perspective due to its “nonbinary, cryptic and subversive biological nature,” 20 as described by mycologist Patricia Kaishian and feminist scholar Hasmik Djoulakian. “Mycology disrupts our mostly binary conception of plants versus animals, two-sex mating systems,” and the human hierarchies that we have learned to expect by “calling upon non-normative, multimodal methodologies for knowledge acquisition.” 21
Poet and professor, Camille Dungy, reclaimed the land she lived on in a predominantly white community, by planting a garden of native plants. Her book Soil 22, documents her journey of diversifying the land with herbs, vegetables, and flowers, using this as a metaphor for the homogenization that threatens our society. The last sentence of Soil perfectly sums up my motivation for choosing Ground as this year’s Nocturne theme:
“What I want most from this life is to keep learning where and how to look.”
- Curatorial Text by Marite Kuus
References:
1. Long, Richard. A Line Made by Walking. 1967. http://www.richardlong.org/Scu.... ↩
2. Creates, Marlene, Susan Gibson Harvey, and Andrea Kunard. Marlene Creates: Places, Paths, and Pauses. 2018. Halifax. Dalhousie Art Gallery. https://artgallery.dal.ca/marl...↩
3. Springgay, Stephanie, and Sarah E. Truman. “Queering the Trail.” In Walking, edited by Tom Jeffreys, 194. MIT Press, 2024. ↩
4. Lounder, Barbara. “Barbara Lounder – WalkingLab.” Walkinglab.org, 2022. ↩
5. Springgay, Stephanie, and Sarah E. Truman. Walking Methodologies in a More-Than-Human World : WalkingLab. Milton: Taylor and Francis, 2017. https://walkinglab.org/wp-cont.... ↩
6. Bauman, Martin. “This Weekend in Halifax, There’s a Jane’s Walk for Everyone. Yes, You Too.” The Coast Halifax, April 30, 2024. https://www.thecoast.ca/news-o.... ↩
7. Halifax Regional Municipality. “Regional Centre Secondary Municipal Planning Strategy.” Halifax.ca. Halifax Regional Municipality, 2021. https://cdn.halifax.ca/sites/d.... ↩
8.Parsons, Katy. “How Halifax Sealed Deal to Rent Point Pleasant Park for Shilling a Year.” CBC, May 28, 2017. https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada...↩
9.Projects we’re following (2024) Halifax Developments Blog. Available at: https://halifaxdevelopments.ca... (Accessed: 26 July 2024). ↩
10. McRae, Matthew. “The Story of Africville.” Canadian Museum for Human Rights, April 6, 2023. https://humanrights.ca/story/s...↩
11. Ibid ↩
12. Martin, Melanie. “The Resettlement Program.” www.heritage.nf.ca, 2006. https://www.heritage.nf.ca/art....↩
13. Mha.mun.ca. “Moving House,” 2024. https://mha.mun.ca/mha/resettl...↩
14. Aspacegallery.org. “Mobile Homes,” 2021. https://aspacegallery.org/prog…↩
14. Quon, A. (2020) St. Patrick’s High School Lands sold by Halifax Regional Council for $37.6 million - halifax, Global News. Available at: https://globalnews.ca/news/659... (Accessed: 26 July 2024). ↩
16. Marris, E. (2016) 00:01 / 15:42 Nature is everywhere -- we just need to learn to see it, TED. Available at: https://www.ted.com/talks/emma... (Accessed: 26 July 2024). ↩
17. Ibid. ↩
18. Sheldrake, Merlin. Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds and Shape Our Futures. S.L.: The Bodley Head Ltd, 2020. ↩
19. Fountain, Henry. “Slime Mold Proves to Be a Brainy Blob.” The New York Times, January 25, 2010, sec. Science. https://www.nytimes.com/2010/0...↩
20. Kaishian, Patricia, and Hasmik Djoulakian. “The Science Underground.” Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience 6, no. 2 (November 7, 2020). https://doi.org/10.28968/cftt....↩
21. Ibid. ↩
22. Dungy, Camille T. Soil: A Black Mother’s Garden. Simon and Schuster, 2023.↩
Nocturne 2025 will take place from October 16th-19th!
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About Marite Kuus
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Bio
I am an artist and curator based between Kjipuktuk, Mi’kma’ki and Tallinn, Estonia. I first found myself in Kjipuktuk/Halifax as an exchange student at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design. I wanted to go as far from my home place as possible and Canada was the furthest I could get on the list of schools involved in the exchange program. What was supposed to be a temporary stay got sidetracked by falling in love, accidentally and unexpectedly as love always is, and now, 5 years later, Kjipuktuk is my second home.
As an artist, I often work collaboratively on publicly engaged projects based on sensory participation and spatial interaction. In collaboration with artist and choreographer Lauren Runions, we presented our project MEANDER at Nocturne in 2023, which was installed at Grand Parade. MEANDER has also been presented at Eastern Front Theatre, Dartmouth in 2023 and Radiant Rural Halls on Prince Edward Island in 2024. Being involved with a number of outdoor arts festivals as an artist, I prioritize tactility and interaction in my work, to make the experience rewarding for both the artists and the visitors.
In 2022, I co-founded Galerie Cecile, an off-site gallery space in Kjipuktuk. Galerie Cecile emerged due to a need for immediate arts spaces in the city and thus exhibitions grew out of an apartment and an empty lot. In 2024, I co-directed the Halifax Art Book Fair, the first art book fair in the Maritimes. In 2024 I curated the Antigonight Festival in Nalikitquniejk/Antigonish. For the 14th installment of the festival I developed the theme Sense: Fire, Water, Earth, Air.
Currently, I am undertaking Master’s studies at the Estonian Academy of Arts in Tallinn at the Craft Studies department. My research focuses on individual and communal relationships to matter and material, which I explore through collaborative interventions.
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