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Please join us in celebration of Nuit Blanche at a special
midnight performance presented by Camille Turner, Sobaz
Benjamin, Karen Turner & Lee Turner
Saturday, September 29th
View a video discussion of The Final Frontier by Camille Turner at www.warc.net
The Final Frontier is a collaborative, durational site-specific performance work where audience and the artists interact. Four performers are involved. The performances take place in different parts of earth. We have to date, done performances in Toronto, the city of Lethbridge, Alberta and on the rolling foothills called the coulees outside of Lethbridge.
This work was created in response to Lethbridge's "alien" landscape, my feeling of "alienation" and my desire to playfully engage, disrupt and subvert. I re-mythologize the city by literally creating an alien nation . Using performance, I provoke responses from the audience, probing the disjuncture between the unspoken histories and fears of otherness underneath the smooth, polite surface of Canadian identity. By adopting the language and symbols of colonization and positioning blackness as otherness in the wild frontier of the Western Canadian landscape, I am creating a new narrative.
Similar to Miss Canadiana's Red, White and Beautiful Tour, this work will add to the dialogue about issues of racialized identity in a playful way that invites various levels of public engagement.
The Final Frontier belongs to the genre of Afro-Futurism, an emergent cultural aesthetic combining elements of science fiction, historical fiction, fantasy and magic realism with non-Occidental cosmologies in order to critique not only the present-day dilemmas of people of colour, but also to revise, interrogate, and re-examine the historical past.
The WARC Gallery installation has been drawn from documentation of the performance work. In the gallery, participants enter an observation deck located on Sirius B from which they will be able to see what we are doing on earth and our interactions with the earth's inhabitants as we complete our mission of healing and peace.
The back story of the work: We have been watching for 10,000 years. Our ancestors lived in the Sahara when it was a fertile crescent, the birthplace of mankind. In the beginning, the Nommos people from the star system Sirius shared with us their great knowledge and technologies. Our land eventually became a dessert and some of us traveled to Sirius B to live amongst the wise and peaceful Nommos. Others went to various parts of the earth to found many great civilizations: the Dogon, the Olmecs, the Xia dynasty; We built the pyramids of Africa, Great Zimbabwe, and Easter Island. We are the basis of many cultural, spiritual and knowledge systems the mysteries of the earth and beyond. All these years we have been witnessing violent acts occurring on the earth. Newcomers have mismanaged the sensitive environment. Their cities are developed to extract all they want from the earth and when they take their fill, they abandon the land. They have displaced the original caretakers. The buffalo, which humans depended on for thousands of years, roamed the plains by the millions. Now they have disappeared in one single generation.
We can no longer watch in silence. We have returned to care for the earth, the land of our ancestors, the land haunted by its tragic memories. We come in peace. We come to heal.
Artist's Collaborators: Sobaz Benjamin, Karen Turner and Lee Turner Production Team: Loralee Edwards, Sherisse Mohammed, Paul Edwards and Gloria Samuels Camera: Brahm Rosensweig, Willie Le Maitre, Todd Doucette and Chris Myhr Many thanks to: Hannah Wigle and the Southern Alberta Art Gallery
It has been my absolute pleasure to work with fellow performers Sobaz Benjamin, Karen Turner and Lee Turner. I would also like to acknowledge some of the many people behind the scene who contributed
to this project.
Jim Ruxton and Boon Chuah of Pharos/Colorwave designed and built the installation
Music Sequenced by: Karen Turner
Camera: Brahm Rosensweig, Willie Le Maitre, Todd Doucette and Chris Myhr
Production Team: Loralee Edwards, Sherisse Mohammed, Paul Edwards and Gloria Samuels
Toronto Performers: Alireza Anvari, Kika Nicolela, Varqa Lynch, Jim Ruxton
Thank you to all the people in Toronto and Lethbridge who interacted with us and participated in interviews
The artist would like to acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts and Ontario Arts Council
Thankyou W.A.R.C. Gallery for giving me the opportunity to create and present this new work
The Final Frontier Media Release
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