We werefour artists, sharing a studio space in ‘The Old Foundry Building’. Our city taxes were raised considerably. We decided to share a smaller space and add more artists in order to stay. Dis-place-ment is a removal of something(s) from its place. Displacement entails both displacing and being displaced; an entanglement that inherits visible and invisible qualities, thus demanding personal, socio-economic, cultural, political and environmental considerations as well as critical observations.

Working alongside each other’s ideas around displacement, we transformed collected material into puppets. Historically, puppets across cultures have deep political implications and are animated through bodily and vocal gestures. Their gestures are frozen and their gazes persist. Jacques Rancière, in ‘Aesthetics Equals Politics’, writes about time and politics: “the laborer stops his arms in order to let his eyes take possession of the land” (p.11).

With thoughts of displacement, futurity and hope, the scrawled Sharpie on the wall was a surprise: ‘UTOPIA IS FULL OF GOOFS’. A group of goofs? Foolish, clowny, pleasurable goofs? Goofs, like mistakes? Does ‘is’ imply present or past? No ‘utopian’ future? Eve Sedgwick writes that hope means trying to organize fragments of experiences to realize a future that may be different from the present. That possibilities of the past, “in turn, could have happened differently from the way it actually did” (p.146).

Having some puppets inactive and others active (through video performance) complicates expectations of how a puppet sounds or moves. Animated vs. non-animated puppets suggest an idea in motion vs. an idea; concept vs. product; dreams vs. reality. The artist knows these dualities well. As artists in Vancouver, we continually face displacement. What different identities do we adopt to survive as artists in Vancouver? How might we show these different identities through the personas of puppets?

References

Gage, M. F. (2019). Aesthetics equals politics: new discourses across art, architecture, and philosophy. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.

Sedgwick, E. K. (2006). Touching feeling: affect, pedagogy, performativity. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.