Pen pals / Rélations épistolaires 2023
A wellbeing exchange project co-delivered by CCOV & TMS
Pen pals / Rélations épistolaires is a collaborative project originally instigated by CCOV ( Centre de Création O Vertigo, Montreal, Canada) working in this edition in collaboration with Take Me Somewhere, Glasgow. The project is a transcontinental sharing of questions, ideas and practices between artists living in Montreal and Glasgow whose creative practices intersect with aspects of ‘wellbeing’.
TMS and the CCOV have invited Aniela Piasecka & Laura Gonzalez, artists from Glasgow to exchange and collaborate with Mycelium & Marie Claire Forté, two Montréal artists to exchange remotely in a conversation around the question of "well-being."
The 3 month exchange across cities will use letter writing, digital exchange and video letters to share thoughts, reflections and questions surrounding how performance can address wellbeing whether that be ecological wellbeing, community wellbeing or personal wellbeing. Our hope with this project is that we can shine a light on the research that artists are doing locally and bring it into an international conversation.
The artists will begin their correspondence through video-letters, through which each artist interchange roles of mentor and mentee, knower and not-knower. After the first month, the pen pals will be invited to explore other forms of correspondence as their relationship evolves. In April 2023, CCOV and TMS will host a public discussion, in-person and livestream, with all the participants from both cities to debrief and share reflections of their penpal exchanges.
This project was originally developed by CCOV and is an evolving model for how artists can benefit from online international exchange whilst staying landed in their own communities exploring how a more formalised and spacious correspondence can support a different sort of listening and reflection, while also exploring how we can remain connected across borders in the absence of physical travel.
The correspondence period will be from January 16 - April 20 2023 culminating in a public online event at the end of April 2023.
More information about how to attend to be announced.
Montreal artists:
Marie Claire Forté
The relational, experiential, and experimental potential of dance inspires Marie Claire who dances, choreographs, writes, translates, and teaches. She is the mother of Imogen Keith whose presence is a force coursing through her. Marie Claire creates work, including the recent video installation Mères et mouvements d’enfants presented in 2022 at the Foreman Gallery in partnership with Sursaut and the Centennial Theatre in Sherbooke, with the curator and artist Camila Vásquez. Marie Claire works with artists whom she loves, recently Catherine Lalonde, Louise Bédard, Katie Ward and PME-ART also creating the exhibition project and bilingual publication – I’d rather something ambiguous. Mais précis à la fois. at the Leonard & Bina Ellen Gallery.
Mycelium
Mycelium is an independent researcher & artist who plays with cheap/low/dirt art. It dabbles in living arts & radio, as part of the Audio Smut collective on CKUT. It focuses primarily on magic, ecosexuality & childhood sexual abuse (CSA), notably creating a nature retreat by and for queer & trans survivors of CSA (Lichen Project) in collaboration with ME Louis, a dramatherapist.
GLASGOW Artists
Aniela Piasecka
Aniela's practice spans dance for galleries, film, digital technologies, unconventional performance spaces and theatres; it also includes facilitation and teaching and is nearly always collaborative. Using the notion of psychogeography as a point of departure, works often delve into the relationality between bodies and the space/s they occupy. Aniela's understanding of wellbeing is shaped by being a dance artist with a chronic illness which manifests as pain and fatigue, creating to understand this reality, to process and articulate the experiences of a body in flux. Aniela is invested in work that can assist the body and encourage human connection and have been researching methods for supporting bodies that aim to take into account pain as a facet of existence rather than working against it.
Laura Gonzales
Laura is an artist and writer creating intimate performances that question histories and systems around mental health, through psychoanalysis. She has just finished writing a book about the ;hysteric,' is also a yoga teacher and specialises in breath practices that leads to physical, emotional and spiritual wellbeing. Laura wants to explore presence in an expanded letter form and question whether holding and being held by another in this way can enhance both a sense of being and of wellness. How much of herself can she send to a pen pal? How can she hold someone in distance? How can she make absence be presence? How can a letter and its expanded form heal? Through this exploration, Laura hopes we can challenge current discourses around self-care.
In partnership with
CCOV (Centre de Création O Vertigo, Montreal Canada)
INSTAGRAM: @ccov_mtl
Project made possible with support from the Québec Government Office in London
