This video installation is an ironic narrative exploring complex inter-personal and inter-species relationships in the North through the repeated photographic documentation of a single test tube. Floating in the Arctic Ocean, nestled with a dead duck, held up to the sun by bare toes; the test tube is a yardstick, an optical device, a vessel, and a body.
The video is part of Arctic Labscapes (2013-Currently), a series of new performances, videos and photographs, traveling with lab equipment and specimens from ‘the South’ engaging arctic cultures and landscapes through performance and bioart discourses.
In July 2013 Willet traveled with Dr. Shannon Bell to Pangnirtung Nunavut to join Dr. Peter Kulchyski and his University of Manitoba summer school program living and working with a local Inuit community on Baffin Island. During our time in the North they participated in a variety of educational, community and cultural experiences including: home visits with local elders, Inuktitut classes, a seminar on Artic botany, and hunting, fishing, food preparation, and camping ‘on the land.’ These experiences exposed the artist to a variety of notions of interspecies relations and embodiment complicating discrete and contained notions of the body. Categorical distinctions between: food – garbage – bodies – tools – animals – humans – shelter – shit – me – you - and all of us – were blurred and reconfigured as entangled within the magnificent arctic ecology. Willet conducted a series of performances traveling with a vial of water from the south through the arctic landscape.
In October 2014 she joined The Arctic Circle residency program sailing in a tall ship around the Island of Svalbard, Norway. During the voyage Willet built a miniature green house in her bunk, growing live plant specimens from the south purchased at a local grocery store; chia seeds, peas, red beans, tarragon, and a jade plant cutting from a local scientist, all made the voyage alongside the artist – eventually dying through exposure to the harsh arctic climate.
Whoever left the dead duck on the front porch, your duck is in the fridge.
A video by Jennifer Willet
Editing by Owen Eric Wood
2014
https://vimeo.com/207004414
Collaborators, elders, and contributors:
Evie Anilniliak, Shannon Bell, Warren Bernauer, Tommy Taylor Dialla
Seemeeonie Moe Evic, Jaco Ishulutaq, Pete Kakee, Kelly Karpik
Peter Kulchyski, Isabel Lemus-Lauzon, Paulette Metuq, Inuusiq Nashalik
Joanasie Qappik, Lindsay Terry, Marcus Wilcke
The community of Pangnirtung, Nunavut.
The University of Manitoba, Pangnirtung Summer School Program.
Students enrolled in the Pangnirtung Summer School.
Supported By:
The Canadian Consortium of Performance and Politics in the Americas
Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada
Incubator Art Lab, School of Creative Arts, University of Windsor
Add to playlist