fissure

In this inter-media digital collaboration, multidisciplinary Indigenous artists Jordan Bennett (Mi’kmaw, Ktaqmkuk), Amy Malbeuf (Métis, Rich Lake, Alberta), Carrie Allison (nêhiýaw/cree, Métis, and mixed European descent), and Jordan Hill (T'Sou-ke Nation), visualize the fissures, gaps, and spaces between devastation and renewal. The artists visually and materially explore the climate change crisis and specifically the destructive force of forest fires. Combining a range of audio-visual footage, beadwork, and tufting, fissure reveals not only the devastation wrought by wildfires, but also the ways in which the land regrows and rebuilds itself. As a response to recent local and national forest fires, extreme weather, and other environmental impacts of global climate change on humans and non-humans alike, this collective response work showcases the connections between devastation and renewal as simultaneous processes. It invites us as implicated witnesses to consider the potential opening for something new to happen after devastation and loss, such as our collective awakening to the global climate crisis as a species and the opportunity for us as humans to individually and collectively imagine and activate new (yet old) ways of doing, being, and living that will support and sustain the earth and our futures.