#CallResponse begins with a series of five local art commissions by Indigenous women and artists whose home territories are located in the Canadian nation state, structured as a connective support system that strategically centres Indigenous women across multiple platforms.
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#CallResponse commence par une série de cinq commandes d’art local réalisées par des femmes et des artistes autochtones dont le territoire d’origine est situé dans l’État-nation canadien, structuré comme un système de soutien connectant les femmes autochtones à travers plusieurs plateformes.
#CallReponse is a structured dialogue between five artists (Ursula Johnson, Maria Hupfield, Christi Belcourt, Tania Willard, and Laakkuluk Williamson-Bathory) and their respondents (Isaac Murdoch, Esther Neff & IV Castellanos, Cheryl L’Hirondelle, Leela Gilday, and Tanya Tagaq). The five artists, together with their invited respondents, catalyze action through performance art, collaboration and dialogue, responding to urgent issues facing Indigenous communities as a result of colonization. The artists of #callresponse propose alternate ways of being through knowledge sharing, expanded kinship networks, land-based practices, interventions into institutional spaces, creative acts of sovereignty, and inhabiting cultural specificity. The project offers opportunities for dialogue and collaboration with the public and locally-based artists as it travels.
Imagining models for creative conciliation following the publication of the Truth and Reconciliation Calls to Action, #callresponse focuses on reconciliation as an action that demands both talk and response. The project is thus structured through the following propositions:
CALL -To support the work of Indigenous North American women and artists through local art commissions that incite dialogue and catalyze action between individuals, communities, territories and institutions. To stand together across sovereign territories as accomplices in awakened solidarity with all our relations both human and non.
RESPONSE -To ground art in responsible action, value lived experience, and demonstrate ongoing commitment to accountability and community building. To respond to re/conciliation as a present day negotiation and the reconstruction of communities in the aftermath of colonial trauma.
#callresponse asserts the presence and work of Indigenous women as central to healing the wounds created by ongoing settler colonialism in Canada (as elsewhere). However, it also recognizes that positioning Indigenous women and/or art as central to healing the wounds of settler colonialism is an impossible burden. Therefore, each #callresponse artist approaches re/conciliation differently, contesting what and who are being asked to do the healing, and situating their work within the identified priorities of a range of different communities.
