CMA Journal Issue Eleven: Heterotopias (Worlds Within Worlds)
Issue 11 is being released within the context of a resurgent wave of Covid here in so-called Canada and around the world. As we are asked to continually adjust our expectations for life and movement while performing a bodily calculus of risk and reward, covered by masks, our bodies themselves start to feel like heterotopias, isolated parts of a larger network.
However, the work being created by new artists and scholars creates pathways between our small worlds, and glimpses into the otherwise. These works explore our dissipating lives, our histories, stories, and communal memories in this crisis-ridden current moment, and catch a glimpse of the ephemeral, yet tangible signs of eroded memories that still haunt the spaces we so absentmindedly occupy.
Immerse yourself in the hidden world of resistance through art described in Kitt Peacock and Amir Saarony’s essays. Ashley Snook’s installation VHD VHD explores how human and nonhuman species live within and without natural systems amongst landscapes and spacescapes. Xinyue Liu explores the archetype of the character Kasper from Peter Hanke’s eponymous play as he blooms in the work of W.G Sebald and is carried forward in recent feminist experimental cinema. Kasparian characters speak in ciphers, transforming or concealing messages between non-discrete worlds. Anneliese Hardman’s exhibition critique of Rania Matar’s recent digital exhibit Other Side of the Window: Portraits During Covid-19 through the Rollins Museum of Art, investigates the fracturing of personal and collective identities during the public health crisis. Pooya Kazemi’s photographic series, Recreate the City (2019-2020) uncovers the city as a crossing of diverse, interactive forces; as she writes in her statement, “the [contrariety] of hegemonies and non-hegemonies.” Nathan Clark’s case study of imagineNATIVE’s collective project, 2167, brings together the notions of accessibility and the body, read through Debord’s foundational work in Society of the Spectacle, to ask how simulation can produce new ontological approaches.
*From the Simon Fraser University Website: https://www.sfu.ca/cmajournal/issues/issue-eleven--heterotopias--worlds-within-worlds-.html