Postcommodity

Musagetes and Contemporary Art Forum Kitchener and Area (CAFKA) are pleased to announce that Postcommodity will be speaking as part of the Big Ideas in Art & Culture Lecture Series. The lecture will take place on Friday, November 22, 2013 at 7 pm at Musagetes in Boarding House Arts (6 Dublin Street South, Guelph ON). Please join us for a bite of cheese and olives starting at 6:30 PM. The lecture is accessible by wheelchair and admission is free.

 

Postcommodity uses video, sound, video game design, and installation to talk about how people create and understand a sense of place. The collective was in Guelph in September participating in the Musagetes Guelph Café. Postcommodity are returning to Guelph to present their practice, which began in 2006. During the Café they shared insights on the kinds of communities that can be built with art and how those communities overlap. At the Café they also developed Game Remains: Golden Horseshoe, an artistic multi-player video game designed to be used as a sound and visual instrument. The collective worked closely with a group of eight local collaborators, who contributed to the game protocols through group discussion and testing. The project allows some of the thoughts and concepts within a community of people to take shape through light and sound. 

 

The collective will discuss their forthcoming conceptual installation, Repellent Fence, which will take place on a two-mile stretch of the Tohono O’odham Nation’s homeland, currently divided by the Mexican/American border. Postcommodity will create a fence of large vinyl “scare eye” balloons (often used by farmers to frighten off birds) along the border. A series of community-driven events will coincide with the installation, inviting dialogues between Tohono O’odham, American, and Mexican publics to re-build trans-border knowledge and stories about the movement of people, cultures, ideologies, and capital.

 

Postcommodity is an interdisciplinary arts collective comprised of Raven Chacon, Cristóbal Martínez, Kade L. Twist, and Nathan Young. Postcommodity’s art functions as a shared indigenous lens and voice to engage the assaultive manifestations of the global market and its supporting institutions, public perceptions, beliefs, and individual actions that comprise the ever-expanding, multinational, multiracial and multiethnic colonizing force that is defining the 21st century through ever-increasing velocities and complex forms of violence. Postcommodity works to forge new metaphors capable of rationalizing our shared experiences within this increasingly challenging contemporary environment; promote a constructive discourse that challenges the social, political and economic processes that are destabilizing communities and geographies; and connect Indigenous narratives of cultural self-determination with the broader public sphere. Postcommodity has received grants from the Telluride Institute (2007), American Composers Forum (2008), Arizona Commission on the Arts (2009), Elly Kay Fund (2010), Joan Mitchell Foundation (2010), Creative Capital (2012), and Art Matters (2013). The collective’s installation Do You Remember When? was featured in the 18th Biennale of Sydney (2012). To find out more, visit www.postcommodity.com.

 

There will be a free shuttle departing at 6 PM from the Duke Street entrance at Kitchener City Hall the evening of the lecture. Please contact CAFKA at cafka at cafka.org or 519 744 5123 to reserve a seat.

 

CAFKA gratefully acknowledges the support of the Ontario Trillium Foundation, the City of Kitchener, The Kitchener and Waterloo Community Foundation – Musagetes Fund, the Canada Council for the Arts, and the Ontario Arts Council in helping to make this lecture series possible.

 

Admission: FREE