Fils communs / Tissus partagés
Fils communs / Tissus partagés
October 2022 to January 2023
Maison de la culture Janine-Sutto
Montreal, Quebec, Canada
Artist: Maria Ezcurra, with the participation of the members of Tricote ton tissu social
Curator: Dominique Fontaine
“At the initiative of Dominique Fontaine, curator in residence 2022, Maria Ezcurra designed a textile work in co-creation with the project Tricoter son tissu social (TSTS) of the Société Écocitoyenne de Montréal (SEM). The artist led a series of workshops inviting participants to respond to the current situation that calls for benevolence and solidarity. This sculptural installation functions as an ecosystem in which each individual piece plays an important role. Our personal identities come together to create a collective representation of our sense of community. A joint initiative allowed three members of the Quilt Movement (POM*, the Maison de la culture Janine-Sutto and TSTS) to meet to share and exchange knowledge and experiences: the participants of POM / TAPAJ (Alternative Work Paid By the Day - overseen by the organization Spectre de rue) discovered knitting and knitters discovered cyanotype photography.
Participants: Corinne, Sabrina, Carmel, Danielle Stibre, Lise Fontana, Christiane, Josée Cardinal, Sarah Cailhier, Élise Deschênes, Kinnara, Éva Sirois-Rivard, Roberte la grand-mère d'Éva, Dominique, Lilianne, Madeleine, Chloé L., Anne-Catherine, Alisha, Keyla, Sedra, Thibaut, Virginie, Raymonde Roberge, Sahar Glillen, Gabrielle Hughes, and Maggie, as well as all the citizens who knitted during the celebration of the 20th anniversary of Voies culturelles des Faubourgs at the Parc des Faubourgs on June 11, 2022. »
Maison de la culture Janine-Sutto
immersion @ Adélard
Artiste en immersion 2022 @ Adélard
Residence: July 26 - September 4, 2022
Frelighsburg, Quebec, Canada.
Maria Ezcurra — ADÉLARD (adelard.org)
This series of work continues the research-creation process that Maria Ezcurra begun in 2018 on migratory birds, more particularly on the so-called neotropical species, which fly each year between Quebec and the south of the American continent. Developed during during her 6-week residency at Adélard, this work is inspired in the birds that the artist saw in Frelighsburg, as well as in the connections she made with the community of the region through birding and other common interests. Her residency project considers the relationship of dependence between nature and human activity, exploring and revealing the sometimes invisible, often problematic links between bird migration and environmental and social issues. Her work examines and reformulates the physical, emotional, environmental and cultural limits of the body and the connection to the place it inhabits.
Passing / Passant / Pasando
2020
Complexe Guy-Favreau, Art Souterrain 2022
Montreal, Quebec, Canada
Maria Ezcurra | Festival Art Souterrain 2022
Passing has been presented in diverse contexts. This installation invites visitors to walk around the space among flying birds. The comforting presence of these silhouettes contrast with the rawness of the deconstructed shoes that produce them. This piece incorporates both the resilience and vulnerability of migrant populations, exploring and revealing the connections – sometimes invisible and often problematic – of the migratory phenomenon with environmental, economic, social, political, and personal processes. Responding to the transboundary dimension of the phenomenon of human and natural migration, this installation revises and reveals the complexity of the geopolitics of memory, displacement and transnational citizenship. For Art Souterrain, Passing was installed at the Guy Favreau Complex, next to Passport Office, during the passport crisis that hit Montreal in the summer of 2022, where people were forced to wait in line for hours, or even days, without obtaining the document, essential to travel.
Crise des passeports: encore une journée de pur chaos | JDM (journaldemontreal.com)(Dé)Masquer / (Un)Masking / (Des)Enmascararse
2022
Cultural Institute of Mexico Montreal/ESPACIO MEXICO (Collaborations in 2 parts with the festival Art Souterrain 2022)
Project carried out with the support of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Conseil des arts et lettres du Québec.
Within the framework of the theme of the 2022 edition of the Underground Art festival, Voies / Voix Résilientes (Resilient Paths / Voices), the artist María Ezcurra presents a set of masks and costumes that—instead of hiding or altering her identity—reflect individual experiences, as well as social—and therefore political—issues related to the pandemic.<
The pieces presented in this exhibition work as processes and forms of reflection, thus reviewing the connection of our confined bodies with space, the implications of physical limits in social interaction and in our own identity. Created in the artist's home-workshop over the past year, the masks and costumes also explore how this "new normal" has affected the lives of women, working mothers, children and adolescents, as well as immigrant communities—affected always for the distances.
The masks have been made from everyday materials and household items such as tea bags and washing machine fluff, stones and flowers, colored sponges and gold and silver fibers, labels, zippers and buttons, shrunken clothing and slimming corsets that make it difficult to breathe. There are also suits made from bird cages and metal insulating blankets—used as emergency shelters—and cocoons made from nylon stockings.
Functioning as liminal sites that mediate, protect and limit the body, many of these pieces have been activated by a series of participants, friends and family of the artist. The resulting photographs of these interactions reflect diverse experiences and visions, interweaving stories structured by personal memories, as well as by the common circumstances that have affected us in these times of social distancing.
Thus, when interpersonal relationships have become even more distant, this exhibition shows to what extent the pandemic has changed the way we perceive ourselves and the world around us, as well as our way of relating, also allowing us to connect with other forms of coexistence.
Credits
This project was carried out in collaboration with:
- Pedro Orozco
- Matias Orozco Ezcurra
- Eugenia Orozco Ezcurra
- Julia von Hertwig Moratti Rosa
- Lev
- Mekseb
Thanks to the support of Siete|media, Café 92, Remigio Valdés de Hoyos, Serge Murphy and the other participants who preferred not to be named.
Passing / Passant / Pasando
2020
Complexe Guy-Favreau, Art Souterrain 2022
Montreal, Quebec, Canada
Maria Ezcurra | Festival Art Souterrain 2022
Passing has been presented in diverse contexts. This installation invites visitors to walk around the space among flying birds. The comforting presence of these silhouettes contrast with the rawness of the deconstructed shoes that produce them. This piece incorporates both the resilience and vulnerability of migrant populations, exploring and revealing the connections – sometimes invisible and often problematic – of the migratory phenomenon with environmental, economic, social, political, and personal processes. Responding to the transboundary dimension of the phenomenon of human and natural migration, this installation revises and reveals the complexity of the geopolitics of memory, displacement and transnational citizenship. For Art Souterrain, Passing was installed at the Guy Favreau Complex, next to Passport Office, during the passport crisis that hit Montreal in the summer of 2022, where people were forced to wait in line for hours, or even days, without obtaining the document, essential to travel.
Crise des passeports: encore une journée de pur chaos | JDM (journaldemontreal.com)Neotropical immigrants and Others
2021 OBORO, Montreal, Quebec, Canada. Project supported by the Canada Council for the Arts Neotropical Migrants and Others by Maria Ezcurra explores the cartographic dimension of mobility, craftsmanship and ecology from a hemispheric perspective. The exhibition forms part of a research project that highlights the intermediality of art with ornithology and bird watching. The objective of the research was to systematize the Neotropical migratory birds that reproduce north of the Tropic of Cancer, specifically in the province of Quebec, and that winter south of that latitude, where the artist comes from. Through a series of 90 drawings made on recycled packaging materials, Maria Ezcurra presents in the exhibition some of these Neotropical migratory birds. Some of them travel to Mexico, like the double-crested cormorant, or the black tern that flies to Central America and even the swallow that travels from one end of the continent to the other to reach South America. Although there are lists of Quebec birds and Neotropical species, Maria Ezcurra's research consisted in establishing a list that combined both categories. Together with specialists—so-called birders—such as Lance Laviolette of the Nova Scotia Bird Society and Jim Harris and extensive field observation work, she established a new identity for a total of 153 species of Neotropical migratory birds in Quebec. Maria Ezcurra's work also points to the contradictions of mobility in contemporary geopolitics and transit as a paradigm of globalization. The installation includes a vast collection of Latin American crafts that the artist has been collecting at flea markets and second-hand stores in the city of Montreal. Ceramics, textiles, glass, onyx, shell, wood, amate paper and feather art are some of the materials where all kinds of bird species are represented. Faced with the global economic crisis and the hardening of migratory controls, the north-south circulation is being reconfigured. But within this logic, there exist alternative channels of memory, subjectivity and affection that store these objects for those who have come and gone between one end of the continent and the other. At the same time, the collection questions the hierarchies between the artisanal and the artistic. Maria Ezcurra presents different types of ornaments and souvenirs (plates, jugs, necklaces, maracas, ashtrays, boxes, dividers, etc.) that demarcate the space of tradition and identity. The immigrant who identifies the cultural codes of these objects shares a bond in which she recognizes and is recognized through them. But some of these objets trouvés also make reference to kitsch as a system of a tourist imaginary and a market for the masses of the North who seek a form of escape and comfort in the South, often in spite of the ecological and labor exploitation it implies. It was in the Technoparc wetlands that Maria Ezcurra found her main observation field. Currently, it is a privileged place for environmentalists and amateurs to observe birds, including some declining species such as the green heron that have returned to the island of Montreal. This “Silicon Valley” of Quebec centered on high technology and innovation, affected for several years by environmentalist struggles to safeguard the habitat of these birds, is located near the Montreal-Trudeau International Airport. From there, you can also watch the planes that come and go, among which are those that arrive from the South loaded with stories of diasporas and tourism. Finally, the exhibition explores the political dimension of the production, distribution and marketing of textiles and clothing. The footwear industry, with its centralized factories in Asia or Latin America that impose precarious working conditions, has conquered the Canadian market. Here, recycled, cut and transformed shoes are assembled to create an immersive and sensory environment with both personal and social implications. The installation is also a nod to the work of temporary agricultural, labour and domestic workers from the South—many of them indigenous—who represent an added value to the Canadian economy, especially in these times of social distancing that have distorted migration patterns. From a bird's eye view, this exhibition marks Maria Ezcurra's need to reconnect with the materiality of her environment and the circularity of the space in which her artistic practice takes place. Nuria Carton de Grammont Montreal, October 2020 Translation: Maria and Paula Ezcurra
En passant, encore
2021 CUISINE TA VILLE : LE GRAND VOYAGE / ATSA, Place des Festivals, Montreal, Quebec, Canada Curador: Nicolas Rivard This installation, presented in the context of Cuisine ta ville: Le grand voyage, welcomes visitors to the Place des Festivals under a group of birds that seem to fly. Made with recovered and deconstructed shoes that move with the wind, this installation generates a dialogue with the other pieces in the space while inviting visitors to reflect on the complex processes of migration, both of birds and people. The beauty of the shapes that flutter like birds contrasts with the rawness of the used shoes unable to escape that form them.
Points de fuite (Escape points)
2021 Maison de la culture de NDG, Montreal, Quebec, Canada This exhibition is the result of the work developed as an Artist-in-Residence for several weeks @ the Maison de la culture de NDG. Created old books donated by the library, recycled paper and repurposed garments, it explores the formal, social and natural implications of natural fibers.
New nests and Lightness
Based on the Mexican tradition of “papel picado” (cur paper, which symbolizes the wind), these pieces represent some of the birds that migrate between Quebec and Mexico and even South America, which we saw during our confinement in the summer of 2020 in Montreal. Connecting personal stories with social, cultural and environmental issues, these two projects explore the challenges as well as the opportunities of the new normal. They invite us to look beyond the restrictions of physical distance, reflecting on the current meaning of migration, identity and social belonging. Incorporating both the resilience and the vulnerability of the migrant populations in the city, this work seeks to make visible and celebrate Montreal's cultural and natural diversity.
Passing
2020, Installation: 80 deconstructed shoes
Centre d'exposition L'Imagier, Gatineau, Québec, Canada
In the context of the exhibition The work itself, curated by Nuria Carton de Grammont
This installation invites visitors to walk around the space among flying birds. The beauty of the shadows that resemble migratory birds contrasts with the rawness of the deconstructed shoes that produce them. This piece incorporates both the resilience and vulnerability of migrant populations, exploring and revealing the connections - sometimes invisible and often problematic - of the migratory phenomenon with environmental and social issues
Tension
2019, Installation: Red pantyhose, rings and rocks
La Centrale Powerhouse Gallery, Montreal, Quebec, Canada
Tension is a textile installation made of red pantyhose and rocks, which physically and conceptually connects the body to the space that it occupies. The piece can be walked and explored by visitors, experiencing the relation of our bodies to place, borders and boundaries. It interweaves textile narratives that hold and are structured by the memories, experiences and places that shape us, embodying the tense—but still multilayered and strong—social formations and cultural relations involved in the construction of identity.
Synapse
2019, Installation: Pantyhose and rocks
Gallery of the Notre-Dame-de-Grâce Cultural Centre, Montreal, Quebec, Canada
Synapse in French and English (or Sinapsis in Spanish and original Greek) means "conjunction." This word is commonly used to refer to the point of contact between two nerve cells in the brain.
The textile in situ installation of the same name highlights stories structured by the memories, experiences and places that shape us. The large-scale work, composed of stretched pantyhose, unfolds in the space like an organic framework, becoming an invitation to reconsider the tension between our bodies, territories and borders.
Synapse explores and reflects on the notion of connections: intellectual, spiritual, emotional, physical, and spatial connections. Personal, social and cultural connections. Historical, geographical, political and environmental connections. Connections of the body with the place it inhabits. Connections with one self and with others. Connections with our community.
See more:
La Presse (2019), by Éric Clément: Maria Ezcurra, Éveiller les consciences
Convergence Initiative (2019), by Andrée Lessard: Synapse, or how we make accidental connections
Objets personnels / Personal belongings / Objetos personales
Objets personnels / Personal belongings / Objetos personales
2018, 55” Touchscreen.
Participatory Project, involving 21 immigrants from Latin America, currently living in Montreal, Quebec, Canada
This interactive piece is the result of a collaboration between Maria Ezcurra and Nuria Carton de Grammont for the Connections Exhibition at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, supported by the Canada Council for the Arts Program New Chapter
Objets personnels exhibits 21 testimonies and objects brought by immigrants from Latin America and some Caribbean countries when they moved to Quebec. With this piece, we intended to re-signify the Art of the Americas Collection of the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts from a participative, diverse, inclusive and postcolonial perspective, creating a collection of personal artifacts, selected in collaboration with the Latin American and Caribbean community in Montreal.
Participants: Abigail Borja Calonga, Rodrigo Buitron Lara, Lidoly Chávez, Eduardo Cruz Alonso, Lydie Dossous, Víctor Espíndola, Daisy Espinoza, Aldyth Irvine Harrison, Sofía Llamas, Adelaida Loreto, Amalia Membreño, Anaïs Montenegro, Flavio Murahara, Tatiana Navallo, Osvaldo Nuñez, Juan Esteban Parra Bermúdez, Martha Remache, Natalie Tavarez, Eduviges Tuctuc, Felipe Varela, Marta Vizcarra.
Photos: Freddy Arciniegas / Video: Germán Andrés Moreno Rojas, Abraham Lifshitz and Diego Rivera Kohn / Interface: siete|media
Reflections
2016, Canada. 5 x 10 x 3 m.
Photo: Maria Ezcurra.
Reflections is a maze made of silver emergency survival blankets. This puzzling network of paths has several entrances and can be walked through different ways. Made of a reflective material, its exterior reproduces the context in which it is located, and the interior mirrors and responds to the people walking through it. This installation intends to transform an everyday space into an engaging and challenging pathway that temporarily changes our relationship with the world and with ourselves. By physically immersing ourselves in this experience, we leave behind a fast moving and fragmented world, looking for something more personal.
Red Roots/Green Lands
2015, DHC/ART, Montreal, Quebec, Canada
Workshop designed in collaborationwith the DHC/ART’s Education Department for the IMAGINE BRAZIL exhibition, using various found and recycled materials.
The workshop Red Roots/Green Lands invites participants to reflect on the historical and cultural roots of Brazil through the symbol of the pau-brasil (brazilwood) tree. This tree gave the country its name and is inextricably linked to its colonial history. Anabundant resource when Portuguese colonizers arrived in the 16th century, brazilwood was rapidly and intensely exploited by the Portuguese – through the labour of indigenous and African slaves – in order to extract red dye used by the European textile industry.
For the duration for the workshop, the DHC/ART Education room will be transformed into a vast installation with a large tubular structure composed of various found and recycled materials. Lines of wires and thread will extend from its peak, connecting the structure to canvases that cover the walls of the room. These lines evoke branches, but also materialize the various networks and connections omnipresent in our everyday lives, and which are represented and critiqued in the exhibition IMAGINE BRAZIL.
During the workshop, participants are invited to cut fragments of the materials attached to the structure and to select various found objects suspended from the network of lines. They then create a collective landscape-collage using the 2D and 3D elements they have collected. Through this gesture, participants are symbolically confronted by the exploitation of human and natural resources, but are also given the opportunity to propose alternate gestures of reapproprating and recycling objects that would otherwise be disposed of. Inspired by participants’ experience of the exhibition IMAGINE BRAZIL, the landscape-collage allows us to collectively imagine the Brazilian territory from our own perspectives. (https://fondation-phi.org/blog/2015/11/12/workshop-red-rootsgreen-lands/)
Video: https://vimeo.com/155427833
Uncover
Uncover is a participative installation that invites visitors of the Museum of London to create art with clothes. Either by leaving their garments cut and extended on the wall as a textile installation, or by tracing their silhouettes on the walls, participants’ individualities became part of a collective experience.
Pinned Down
2015, Articule, Montreal, Quebec, Canada
Sewing pins, metal, wood and black ribbon
Pinned Down (or how to keep hiding thousands of needles in a haystack) is a participative piece made of 100,000 pins. It represents the number of people who have been killed and disappeared in Mexico over the last decade in the name of the so-called "Drug War," highlighting the recent massacre of the 43 students from the Ayotzinapa Rural Teacher's College. This stack intends to materialize a number so big that endsup dehumanizing death, catalyzing a reflection on the many complex forms of violence unfolding in Mexico while linking personal decisions to social issues.
Read more:
Refusing Silence. Articule Presents Pinned Down by Maria Ezcurra: http://thelinknewspaper.ca/refusing-silence
Taking Action to Commit to Memory: (Another) Day of the Dead, by Megan Mericle : http://www.articule.org
Bare
Fur coats (from different animals), cut and extended on the wall
Made in China
The possibility of everything, ScotiaBank Nuit Blanche, Toronto, Canada
Curator: Dominique Fontaine
The installation is composed ofclothes labeled “Made in China,” donated by the community and set in aChinatown alleyway. This collaborative piece functions as a façade filling anempty space between two buildings, creating in this way not only a commercial, but also a physical and a symbolic connection among cultures and individuals.
Links:
Canadian Art(2014). 6 Picks for Toronto’s Nuit Blanche
TorontoLife (2014). Comment faire unesculpture de trois étages en vêtements, pour Nuit Blanche ?
Retouch
Action
Uncomfortable
Series of Actions
Hair by hair
Action performed with the collaboration of Pedro Orozco
Spotted
Performance. Made with the collaboration of Stefanie Buxton
Displaced
2014, Performed with the collaboration of Daniela Valdovinos, Danielle Maither, Denisse Horcasitas, Jennifer Wicks, Jessie Hart, Lee Lapaix, Leigh Cline, María Natividad Vega, Nati Valdovinos and Petra Hoss. Art Souterrain: Eaton Center (March 16) Place Des Arts (March 8) Place Bonaventure (March 1) Montreal, Quebec, Canada,
Threads, Trends and Threats
This research-creation project explores the way in which our personal and cultural identities are constantly affected by gender stereotypes. Here we are offering a creative way to explore, question and resist these feminine roles socially imposed to us. More than denying tradition we are reinventing it to generate new understandings of what does it mean to be a wife, a mother, and a female individual today.
Missing
Installation made with 500 gloves found in the streets and public spaces of Montreal for 3 consecutive winters, hanged like a flag outside of the Maison de la culture de Notre-Dame-de-Grâce
Open
This ongoing textile installation was created through a sequence of collaborative actions. Throughout the duration of the show different people from the Concordia community came to the vitrines wearing a garment specifically chosen to be transformed into a sculpture. Together we transformed the configuration and identity of a collective space through a series of shared individualities
Parasites
Six columns made with crinolines
Butterfly Effect
Animation and textile performance, in collaboration with G. Scott MacLeod (Photos) and Tatiana Koroleva. BALANCE-UNBALANCE Conference, Concordia University
Transfigurations
Performance and Installation
Heaven and Hell
Installation made with red and blue clothes cut and sewed together, and extended in the New City Gas Building
In your shoes
Intervention made in a park in Montreal with 500 found shoes
Etiquette
Action in which I cut the Museum visitors´ labels for sewing them into my dress, made with the tags of my own clothing
Waitress
2010-2012, Dress made with the support of Victoria Eugenia.
Espacio México, Montreal, Canada Museo del Chopop, Mexico DF
Detached
Intervention made in the front wall of an old building in Mexico City’s downtown, which was covered with more than 1000 clothes. Project made with the support of Hostería La Bota
Open
2010-2013
Waiting Time
Weaved graphic that shows all the time that I invested waiting, each month, for a year
Divergences
2008-2012
The Procession Goes Inside
Nylon stockings sewed together, filled with women shoes
The Perfect Housewife’s Wardrobe
Photographic documentation of five actions made with garments that integrate the woman to her domestic furniture.
Flowered
2008-2009, Celarg, Caracas, VenezuelaMuseo el Eco, Mexico DF
Market
Action made with the clothes of the passers-by to create installations on the street outside metro stations
Metamorphosis
Action made with the public's clothes to create installations on the walls of the Museo de Bellas Artes of Caracas
15 Springs
15 party dresses with women's names embroidered on their chest. Each name implicates also a female virtue, according to current societal norms.
The Last Scream
This piece takes on fashion as an almost anthropological matter, where the mass of used and discarded garments incorporates little moments of many people’s lives. The ambiguity if this morbid and seductive installation suggests some presences and makes certain absences evident, inviting us to reconstruct and create a personal story from them. Our own altar
Invisible
2005, firstsite Gallery, Colchester, Inglaterra. Curator: Gabriela Salgado.
2008, Kunsthaus Santa Fé, San Miguel de Allende, México.
2008, Galería Hermenegildo Bustos, Guanajuato, México.
2009, Museo de Arqueología, Bienal de Tesalónica, Grecia. Curator: Gabriela Salgado.
Sculptures
2002-2007
New Year
This piece consists of a series of impressions of red underwear bought to celebrate New Year’s Eve for 12 consecutive years. It is a kind of personal metaphor that implicates individual rituals as well as cultural believes, exploring in this way the social taboos constructed around them.
Ni una más (Not one more)
Nylon stockings, women's shoes, metal structure and hangers
PR´02
Interventions made in a factory of plastic packaging in Bayamon, Puerto Rico, using the worker’s uniforms as molds for producing two structures of white foam, produced in the same place.
Body of Work: Swimming Suits
2001-2008
Body of Work: Furs
2000-2003
Body of Work: Stripes
2000-2007
Bringing them back
Interventions made in public spaces in SF using clothes recovered from the street. Each garment was transformed into a sculpture that I brought back to the place where it was found.
67 Gloves in the Tate Gallery
Lost gloves found in London’s public spaces, labeled with their correspondent identification and installed –as tradition suggests- in the fence of the Tate Gallery, becoming in this way liminal objects that can be interpreted both as art and as part of a social action