8/22/2020 PERFORMANCE: ARIANNA RICHARDSONTHE CONSUMPTION THERAPY™ DEMONSTRATION CHAMBER September 2019 Durational Performance DESCRIPTION The Consumption Therapy™ Demonstration Chamber was a performance that occurred during the 2019 Hold Fast Contemporary Arts Festival in St. John’s, Newfoundland. This performance was framed as a live demonstration of an absurdist therapy that claims to cure an individual of the drive to consume goods at the rate encouraged by our neoliberal, klepto-capitalist society. The Chamber was a large, inflatable plastic ball, half-filled with plastic recycling that was donated by the art community in St. John’s. Plastic of all varieties was included, creating a visual cacophony of colours, textures, and advertising. During the performance I was inside the ball, in character as “The Hobbyist”, tumbling, rolling, and immersing myself in the plastic detritus, forced to confront and exist within a tiny fraction of the throwaway plastic waste that is generated each day across the world. This performance was an absurd spectacle of a person yielding to plastic waste: a demonstration of the struggle to remove one’s self from the society that is engaging in the destruction of the planet. It reverses a person’s typical relationship with waste: instead of being rendered invisible with waste management infrastructure, it engulfs the consumer, forcing them to surrender to the evidence of their consumption. The Consumption Therapy™ Demonstration Chamber, 2019 Arianna Richardson is a sculptor, performance artist, and mother from Treaty Seven territory (Lethbridge, AB). Richardson most often works under the pseudonym, The Hobbyist, employing hobby-craft techniques to work through an investigation of ubiquitous consumption, gendered labour, waste, excess, and spectacle.
Richardson holds a BFA (2013) in Studio Arts from the University of Lethbridge and an MFA (2018) from NSCAD in Halifax, NS. She was awarded the Roloff Beny Photography Scholarship in 2012 and the Alberta Arts Graduate Scholarship in 2016. Her work has been exhibited across Canada and has been featured in the December 2018 issue of Performance Research, “On Generosity” and Volume 8 of Emergency Index: An Annual Document of Performance Practice. Website: www.ariannarichardson.ca 8/18/2020 POETRY: AYMAN ARIK KAZIIT WON'T END WITH A BANG,
it won’t end with DEFCON 1, but with muddied water guzzled down desperate throats and mothers crying at shallow graves. with winds whispering away whimpering cities, and brothers packing mothers and sisters to safety. it won’t end with the masses. there will be no riots in the streets, instead they will run blue and be made seas gushing into coast. it won’t end with a hero. no, the hero will die of pneumonia, or starve when the livestock have died from dysentery and mildew has taken the plants. we won’t be chased. if we had been, we may have run. instead, death will crawl at a sickly pace and close the space between us. it will end how it all started… with water rushing shores, earth cracking open, and fire razing forests, to make room for new inhabitants. but not with a bang. Ayman Arik Kazi is a Muslim, Bangladeshi-Canadian immigrant, and a student at the University of Western Ontario. That's a lot of identifiers. He founded the Western's first community for spoken word artists and poets, Spoken Word Society. He has written for several small publications like Young Voices and The Reckoner of MGCI. Ayman likes weaving the many aspects of his often conflicting identity into art that offers a scope into his mind.
8/18/2020 POETRY: TYLER ENGSTRÖM'SNONE OF THIS IS A METAPHOR FOR ANYTHING In the car I traced the power lines with my fingers and hopped over the poles like little toads real little jumpers like the ones we collected together before the marsh was condos that must’ve been 25 years ago today it feels longer we were born under the high watermark and knew what that meant how many metaphors do you need to make sense of a dying planet? at least one more? at least one more nothing gets to the point I’m trying to make, there is no such thing as real sacrifice anymore the difference between fake blood and real blood is roughly how much we’ll pay for it Tyler Engström's first book of poetry, Thee Golden Age of the Internet, is forthcoming from Frontenac House in 2021. He was a 2017 finalist for the Writer's Trust RBC Bronwen Wallace Award and his writing has been found in FreeFall Magazine, Freq Magazine, and the poetry anthology Drifting Like a Metaphor: Calgary Poets of Promise. @tylrengstrom
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