Spill Radio

For the final episode of Spill Radio Tatiana Mellema discusses the development of the program, and thanks all of those who have supported the project. Throughout the recording of Spill Radio conversations on climate change and the ongoing threat to our coastal lands and waters have been reverberating, while real action in the streets has been rising. Reflecting on the terms of the radio conversations Mellema ends by posing a series of questions to our art institutions. 

As part of Spill Response artists Anne Riley and T’uy’t’tanat Cease Wyss spoke with Guadalupe Martinez on October 20, 2019 at the Belkin Art Gallery about their collaborative practice and public artwork A Constellation of Remediation (2018-). This project includes the planting of Indigenous Remediation Gardens on vacant lots on the unceded homelands of the Musqueam, Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh nations. The intent is to clean toxins in the soil found at contaminated spaces and to facilitate the process for communities to heal and repair these constellations points together. This episode includes soundscapes recorded by Yasmine Whaley-Kalaora at the UBC Farm that in 2008 faced uncertainty in its land security due to the ongoing construction of market housing on campus. 

This episode includes an excerpt from Maria Thereza Alves' artist talk presented at SFU Galleries in collaboration with the City of Vancouver Public Art Program during Spill Response. Alves speaks about her project Um Vazio Pleno/A Full Void developed for Frestas Trienal 2017 that is an attempt to question the denial of the Indigenous presence in the history of the making of Sorocaba which states that one man founded the city. Since the 1980s Alves has produced a body of work that investigates the circumstances of specific localities in order to give witness to silenced histories. Her work proceeds through a process of dialogue facilitated by direct involvement in material, environmental and social circumstances, engaging spaces of agency and visibility.

As part of Spill Response the artist Jay White organized a guided walk on October 18, 2019 with poet Rita Wong, streamkeeper John Preissl, and Jim Leyden along the proposed Kinder Morgan Pipeline, noting the streams and rivers affected by proposed and ongoing construction.Their work is part of the grassroots collective Mountain Protectors that includes elders and volunteers who strive to uphold the natural laws of the land by monitoring the construction of the Trans Mountain pipeline expansion project. They are based out of and around, Kwekwecnewtxw, the traditional Coast Salish Watch House on Burnaby Mountain, and they constitute a vigilant presence on the Mountain motivated by a decolonial ethos that recognizes our shared responsibility to the lands and waters we live on and around. (Photo: Rachel Topham)

Nelly César's performative lecture "Lxs artistas del fin del mundx" consists of four performative stories dislocated in the interstices of the wounds of Mexico City. They are designed as an attempt to affectively channel critical standpoints of reactionary social manifestations that redefine territories, social practices, ontological turning points and affective transmutations--as living proposals of expanded realities in the here and now. This performance was originally presented at the Belkin on October 15, 2019 as part of Spill Response, and features a letter written by artist Valentina Jager for Prras! Public letter for women in the arts 2019 and a performative interpretation of the text Cuerpo y Perreo: Gata Fiera written by Ameisin Clicka about the Gata Fiera event in September 2018. (Photo: Rachel Topham)

This interview with artists T’uy’t’tanat Cease Wyss and Anne Riley was recorded by Bopha Chhay Director/Curator of Artspeak for Artspeak Radio Digest, and originally aired on CFRO 100.5FM in 2018. In this conversation Wyss and Riley speak to Chhay about their collaborative project Soundtrack for The Radical Love of Butterflies a cassette edition that they released on August 4th 2018 in Mike MacDonald’s Butterfly Garden at the Walter Phillips Gallery, which consists of interviews and songs with Indigenous womxn and 2spirits who have started social justice groups and whose work remediates the various systems they work in.

Guadalupe Martinez speaks with Or Gallery’s Director/Curator Denise Ryner about her artistic practice and project Spill Response, a research and performance component of the exhibition Spill that brings together artists, activists and educators to consider the relationships between the body, the land and forms of pedagogy that engage with healing, love and sustainability as collaborative methodologies. This episode includes recordings of performance exercises by the artistic collective CUERPO.

On Friday September 27, 2019 over 5,000 people gathered at the University of British Columbia to take part in the Global Climate Strike. This episode includes recordings taken from the UBC rally, including a xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam) welcome by Christie Lee Charles, a speech by Sarah Hunt assistant professor in the Institute for Critical Indigenous Studies and the Department of Geography at UBC, an interview with strike student organizer Michelle Marcus, and musical performances by UBC’s A Capella and the band the Bee Collective.

Zoe Todd and Heather Davis speak with Tatiana Mellema about their article "On the Importance of a Date, or Decolonizing the Anthropocene" (2017), and the intersections between colonialism, environmental change and petrocapitalism. Todd is a Métis scholar and assistant professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Carleton University, and Davis is an assistant professor of Culture and Media at the Eugene Lang College, at The New School in New York.

Carolina Caycedo speaks to Tatiana Mellema about her ongoing project "Be Dammed" (2012-) that investigates the impacts of large dams on the natural and social landscapes of Colombia (where she grew up), Brazil, Guatemala, and Mexico. Caycedo's work uses aerial and satellite imagery, geo-choreographies, and audio-visual essays to intersect social bodies with bodies of water, examine public space in rural contexts, and conjure water as a common good.