A FLOWER AND A THOUSAND PATHS

Céline Bureau

Montréal, Canada

October 13 - 27, 2022

A Flower and a Thousand Paths is an exploration of ethnographies of the “other” and alternative networks of communication. The exhibition brings together practices that navigate different identities, and new ways of constructing narratives, through the work of 3 Colombian artist collectives: House of Tupamaras and Mutante based in Bogota and Elsgüer Studio based in Montréal.

Elsgüer Studio presents 3Lix, which explores layered connections of femme bodies through generational trauma. This project invites viewers to engage with a textile video performance being altered live by the wind being captured through an anemometer. Elsgüer’s other piece, Patterns of Plasticity, is a video installation presenting a series of images of neural activity, along with 3D scans and footage of flowers and pathways captured in Canada and Colombia. This project explores oral history and language as an extension of identity, by reconstructing a journey of recovery based on community support and neuro-plasticity. Mutante’s Queer Forms of Life and Bi0film.net, explore how independent and distributed communication networks are at the core of self-organized communities, such as bacteria, which communicate and collectively act. This project includes blueprints and a video about a parabolic WIFI umbrella antenna that can extend the signal range for a mobile phone. House of Tupamaras’ video installation, Failure is my Style, presents a utopic vision of queerness, while using broken text to question the self within structures of dissidence. This project celebrates empowerment through failure, adaptation, movement, and our connection with others.

A Flower and a Thousand Paths gives space to practices that are centered at the idea of community, collaboration, media experimentation, and postcolonial approaches to art making and presentation. As a video installation exhibition, A Flower and a Thousand Paths transforms Céline Bureau to present narratives of defiance and hope.

This exhibition was curated by Santiago Tavera.

House of Tupamaras Mutante Elsgüer Studio

Vernissage October 14, 2022

Exhibition Catalogue

English

French

Spanish

Photos x Juan David Padilla and Hugo Dufford Bouchard

Elsgüer Studio

Patters of Plasticity

Patterns of Plasticity is an installation that presents a series of 3D animations of flowers constantly blooming from each other, superimposed onto a series of images of neural activity, and walking pathways from Colombia and Canada. This project invites viewers to journey through sequences, paths and different networks of images and sounds that are constantly changing, as a metaphor for the magical process of neuro-plasticity. This collaborative and ongoing creative-research project proposes a deconstructed narrative through collaged memories, videos, texts and sound, and is inspired by the strength and resilience of one of the artist’s family members who is going through a process of rediscovery and plasticity, following brain damage that had an impact on language and communication.

Credits Concept and Direction:

Collaborator and 3D programmer:

Sound Designer:

Consultant:

Voices:

Special Thanks:

Santiago Tavera

Milton Riaño

AM Devito

Crystal Branco- Speech Pathologist

Carmen Rosa Munoz,

Diana Velasquez,

Adriana Velasquez,

Jennifer Tavera,

Abigail Ortiz

Olivia Ortiz.

Norma Velasquez

The Canada Council for the Arts

Mobility Group Colombia

Elsgüer Studio

3LIX

Photos x Juan David Padilla and Hugo Dufford Bouchard

3Lix is a video performance installation that combines choreography, textile work, digital intervention and wind sensor data to create a polymorphic scene. As the end of the world approaches and we have still not defined why we are here in the first place, this work reflects on how we were never meant to be a singular form but rather vessels of transformation in continuous movement. Layered consciousness in one body. Fragmented, multiple, simultaneous and in flux. Beautiful, angry, connected, disconnected. At once re-enacting and healing our generational trauma.

In this installation, 3 bodies in movement are present simultaneously to create one composite image: a dancer wearing a textile piece in a video, the wind at the site which speed is measured through a sensor that is programmed to alter the video image of the dancer in real time, and the viewer who experiences the piece and sees themselves reflected in it through an installation of mirrors. Through this network of moving forms, 3Lix poetically inquires about the patterns within patterns from which emerges our lived experience and sense of identity.

Photos x Juan David Padilla and Hugo Dufford Bouchard

Mutante & House of Tupamaras

Bi0film.net, is an open project made by Jung Hsu and Natalia Rivera that praises bacterial resistance in contrast to the reductionist discourse of war. The collective took one of the Hong Kong social movement’s icons, the yellow umbrella, and adapted it based on an open resource created by Andrew McNeil, to be used as a parabolic WiFi antenna. Self-organizing, collaborating, and communicating in a decentralized and distributed way are some of the wonderful actions of the living to break through, and that is what “resist like bacteria” means. Furthermore, along with this project, a series of blueprints of the Queer Forms of Life: Internet for Bacteria - Phage project present a near-impossible mediating device for the symbiogenesis of a digital-bio hybrid organism between bacteria and the internet. A device to create a queer form of life, a hyperconnected bacteria superorganism.

Failure is my Style ny House of Tupamaras is born from an attempt to rediscover oneself in the place of contradictions, to discover the faggot body and dissidence as spaces not exempt from impossible aspirations such as success. Indeed, if you are to be a dissident, it seems forbidden to err or fail. Is it a failure for dissidence to cry for love? The artwork is a process of collective writing where theft, mending, weaving and unweaving are presented as ways of approaching the word, identity and its implications that asks can we write ourselves away from all absolute truth? Can we fail every day better?