Nanabozho and Anansi tease with stories we cannot fully know
The marquee show at Station on the Green is A Refugium of Infinite Stories by Adrian Kahgee and Debbie Ebanks, members of the Odeimin Runners Collective. They have collaborated on many projects since their 2018 appearance at Creemore Arts Fest. Together they braid Indigenous and Black histories using tricksters from each of their cultures – Nanaboozhoo from Kahgee’s Anishnaabe culture and NansiRoachy from Ebanks’ Jamaican culture – using sculpture, mixed media and film processed and dyed with plant materials. A final chapter turns to Creemore, where photographs and moving-image projections illuminate the continuity of these infinite relations.
Visitors to the show at Creemore Station on the Green will move through different cultures as they walk through the different chapters, and experience different ways of telling stories. At the centre will be a media sculpture of NansiRoachy, a 10-by-10-foot spider.
Ebanks describes the collaboration as a conversation between her and Kahgee.
They discovered that stories are the archive of community in both of their cultures.
A refugium is an area in which a population of organisms can survive through a period of unfavourable conditions.
In the face of colonialism and racial segregation which imposed geographic and social isolation, Anishinaabe and Black Canadians found ways, not only to survive, but flourish through enduring relationships with the land and sometimes with each other.
The artists will be giving talks at 1 p.m. on Oct. 3 and noon on Oct. 4.
Meet the artists
Debbie Ebanks
Debbie Ebanks’ NansiRoachy is media sculpture and archives embodying Anansi, the Akan trickster and shapeshifter, and Auntie Roachy, the Jamaican character brought to life by Miss Lou, a revered Jamaican storyteller. As the keeper of all narratives, Anansi carries stories from western Africa to Jamaica and Canada, collecting new stories and transforming old ones. NansiRoachy shares a mulimedia experience of the Jamaican diaspora on Annishinaabe, Haudonshonee and Huron-Wendat territories, in which Creemore is entangled in the web of stories.
Adrian Kahgee
Adrian Kahgee’s work is a mixed media exploration of storytelling as it relates to her Afro-Anishnaabe being, rooted in the land and histories of her community and traditional territory of Saugeen Ojibway Nation. Drawing on cultural materials used in oral traditions, such as birch bark and beads, Adrian weaves in digitized 16 mm film through beaded pixelations on LED matrixes. This work is an artistic expression of when wiigwaasaatigoog (birch trees) spill the tea.
Films are dyed with plants, which also serve as medicines for the stories/ traumas, incorporate histories and express different emotions.
