“We’re always trying to run away from what we’ve done, so amnesia becomes the coping mechanism. Then we continue in our anthropocentric world, thinking we are kings and continuing as slave holders. Ecological slave holders that is. Not knowing history has huge perils. Ecological amnesia is when we forget what was there, complicated by all of this transience.
Transience means that we do not come to know and love a place; we move on, and as such are not accountable to that place. Always looking for greener pastures, a new frontier, I fear we lose depth, and a place loses its humans who would sing to it, gather the precious berries, make clean the paths and protects the waters.”

– Winona LaDuke, To Be a Water Protector: The Rise of the Wiindigoo Slayers, Nova Scotia, Fernwood Publishing, 2020

In fall 2022, I spent three months in research residency in Vancouver, BC, Canada, hosted by Griffin Art Projects, in collaboration with Polygon Gallery, Vancouver, Canada and Cité Internationale des Arts, Paris, France.

My aim was to pursue my ongoing explorations, in the curatorial field, in botanical politics, waterways and earth/soil. I was hoping to find a common thread in my investigations and my intuition was to look through the lenses of inhabiting and mutancy (a derivation from mutation and mutant that points at how to embrace frictions in the current climate and ecological crisis). Getting more acquainted with local ideas around land stewardship, remediation, and ecological restoration was crucial for me. I wanted to discuss these topics interdisciplinarily, so I met people from the fields of visual arts to activism, research, academy, botany, ecology, and science.

Approaching physically my field of study is always central during research residencies. It is just as important as reading and documenting myself. Hence, I spent long hours exploring Vancouver, its waterways, its environment, trying to understand its urban fabric, its colonial history, its zones of frictions, and its sensorial identity. I have hiked a lot to see how forests are structured, how the landscape has been shaped, how rivers are being remediated, how creeks are being depolluted, and how invasive and native plants coexist. In this endeavour, I met guides and storytellers: ecological activists engaged in the restoration of Still Creek, MacKay Creek and the False Creek Watershed; ethnoecologists and botanists; artists (like Holly Schmidt with whom I have been walking Still Creek for instance) or researchers. Focusing on swamps, meadows and waterways, I attended sound walks and events around Beaconsfield Wetland and Maplewood Flats.