Commemoration (1 of 4 in series II), Brave Womyn Are Everywhere, also came out of The Witnessing Project and other shared, embodied experiences. This series conjures interventions that re/imagine, re/vision and re/member conceptions and embodiments of gender, indigeneity, sexuality, selfhood, community, spirituality and nation. In 2020, I began to experiment further with my interventions in public spaces, this time in locales captured by my photography for The Witnessing Project.
The Witnessing Project was and is meant to challenge conventionalized norms of being, bringing attention to the right to be who we are in public, gendered and colonized spaces. The project also seeks to reveal the irreconcilability of witnessing-experiencing with conventionalized documentation of art, largely used to access various forms of capital as well as the sanctioned and codified consumption of art as “proof” of embodied experience. The Witnessing Project carries the conscious intent of honouring the people and spirits that witness, resisting the often voyeuristic and commodifying gaze of conventionalized documentation. This resisting is also often utilized to highlight diverse creative processes and motivations for making art within a connective archival paradigm.
