Since 2019, Indigenous artists from the Arctic and the Amazon have been building a relationship.
The collaboration was the brainchild of the eminent Indigenous curator Gerald McMaster, director of the Wapatah Centre for Indigenous Visual Knowledge at the Ontario College of Art and Design University. McMaster, working with his Brazilian counterpart, Nina Vincent, arranged for a symposium to take place in Toronto, involving 30 Indigenous artists, thinkers, and activists from the various countries in the Arctic and Amazon regions.
Last year, they mounted an exhibition called Arctic Amazon: Networks of Global Indigeneity at the Power Plant Gallery at Toronto’s Harbourfront. The exhibition featured artworks in various media, from painting and printmaking to video to sculpture and craft — all aimed at highlighting the diversity, solidarity, and power of Indigenous culture in these two regions.
As the exhibition was preparing to open, another opportunity emerged. Toronto Metropolitan University (TMU) was in the midst of a re-envisioning of its downtown campus, a process the university calls Indigenous place-making, involving the inclusion of public art by Indigenous artists.
That is how the Inuk artist Niap and the Shipibo artist Olinda Reshinjabe Silvano met and collaborated on a mural called Paisajes de Nosotros (Landscapes of Us). It is installed at Kerr Hall on the TMU Campus, at the corner of Gould Street and Nelson Mandela Walk.
Toronto Metropolitan University commissioned the 12-by-8-metre mural, Paisajes de Nosotros (Landscapes of Us). (Submitted by Gerald McMaster)
IDEAS producer Sean Foley was invited to witness the mural’s production and interview those involved in the process.
Here are some excerpts from their conversation.
Gerald McMaster
Lead curator
What [is] interesting to me [is] an idea that I have been developing now for a number of years, and that is this idea of visual knowledge, which is very different than, say, visual art. Because to me, it’s a way of seeing.
And as Olinda said, there is a Shipibo Conibo way of seeing, and Niap who is from the Arctic with the Inuit also has a way of seeing. And so bringing Shipibo Conibo and the Inuit together, it feels — people would think there’s a conflict, but there isn’t.
So how do you bring a Shipibo Conibo way of looking at the world, which is primarily from the Amazon, and match it up with the far north, with the ice and snow, with a culture so far away? That’s what people want to see. That’s what we want to understand. How does it happen? Where does it come from? Where do you get the energy to be able to work with somebody from far away, and to see their world in your world, and vice versa?
Curator Gerald McMaster (top-middle) is a Tier 1 Canadian Research Chair at OCAD University. He is standing with commissioned artist Olinda Silvano (left) and two other artists, Wilma Maynas and Ronin Koshi, who helped on the mural. (Submitted by Gerald McMaster)
Olinda Reshinjabe Silvano
Shipibo-Conibo artist, Cantagallo, Lima, Peru
Within these designs, the energy is there, the energy of how we are healed with our plants, the piri piri, the ayahuasca vision, […] there are many plants. In this work, it’s not something that you copy. It comes from within you.
Our Shipibo community didn’t have a clock; there is a design called constellation. And it is to guide, to show the way to your house. Or if you were lost you would see the design and that is how you would find home. It would show the way to the farm, to the fish; there are different designs for everything.
We sing when we work. We sing and through that, we get inspired. Sometimes when you’re alone you can focus, you can talk as if someone was there. When there’s noise around, we can’t — you can’t. And then if you want me to do it again I can’t. We have to do another one. It is one time that you do it with that guide.
Artist Olinda Reshinjabe Silvano uses the traditional art of kené in her creative practice. (Submitted by Gerald McMaster)
Niap (Nancy Saunders)
Inuk multidisciplinary artist, Kuujjuaq, Nunavik / Montreal
Her music is so beautiful. The first time I heard her sing, I just got waves of shivers all the way up to my neck, from my feet to my skull. It was just so good.
And when she started singing here to celebrate the beginning, I was just — I just felt like singing as well. And I don’t know a lot of my traditional song, but what I did know, I wanted to sing it.
I get these visions so clear, and they come through discussion, they come when I’m listening to a song, or they come when I’m just on the land. They come in dreams. And I usually see exactly what it’s going to look like and the media they should be in.
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I get this feeling, this vision or this idea, and it’s like energy. I feel energy in my chest. Like bubbles, like excitement. And then I output until the feeling is gone. And then I can never really reproduce this work again. The feeling’s gone.
I realized a lot of things [during this collaboration].
As an Aboriginal woman from Kuujjuaq, our region is struck with a lot of hurt and a lot of consequences coming from our colonial history. And I realize that Olinda, as an Aboriginal woman, she knows the same thing. And that our worries from this common experience [are] also very similar; in terms of identity, sense of identity, fear of losing identity and culture and trying to work hard to keep it alive, and affirming our culture and affirming that we’re present.
I think we were very much the same in that way, you know? And we come from two completely different parts of the world. And that I thought was really special.
Toronto Metropolitan University describes the mural merging the Arctic and Amazon regions ‘through the exploration of Indigenous ways of being, seeing and the shared values that inform each artist’s work.’ (Submitted by Gerald McMaster)
Listen to the full documentary by downloading the CBC IDEAS podcast wherever you get your favourite podcasts. Or find the episode on the CBC Listen App. You can also listen by clicking the player above.
*Excerpts have been edited for clarity and length. This episode was produced by Sean Foley.
LONDON (AP) — With a few daubs of a paintbrush, the Brontë sisters have got their dots back.
More than eight decades after it was installed, a memorial to the three 19th-century sibling novelists in London’s Westminster Abbey was amended Thursday to restore the diaereses – the two dots over the e in their surname.
The dots — which indicate that the name is pronounced “brontay” rather than “bront” — were omitted when the stone tablet commemorating Charlotte, Emily and Anne was erected in the abbey’s Poets’ Corner in October 1939, just after the outbreak of World War II.
They were restored after Brontë historian Sharon Wright, editor of the Brontë Society Gazette, raised the issue with Dean of Westminster David Hoyle. The abbey asked its stonemason to tap in the dots and its conservator to paint them.
“There’s no paper record for anyone complaining about this or mentioning this, so I just wanted to put it right, really,” Wright said. “These three Yorkshire women deserve their place here, but they also deserve to have their name spelled correctly.”
It’s believed the writers’ Irish father Patrick changed the spelling of his surname from Brunty or Prunty when he went to university in England.
Raised on the wild Yorkshire moors, all three sisters died before they were 40, leaving enduring novels including Charlotte’s “Jane Eyre,” Emily’s “Wuthering Heights” and Anne’s “The Tenant of Wildfell Hall.”
Rebecca Yorke, director of the Brontë Society, welcomed the restoration.
“As the Brontës and their work are loved and respected all over the world, it’s entirely appropriate that their name is spelled correctly on their memorial,” she said.
