Two artists-in-residence at Struts Gallery are promising to “blend the boundaries” between Sackville and the Guatamalan mining town of El Estor in their upcoming presentation, Voices from Scorched Earth, happening on April 22 at 7pm at Struts.
Styvens Barrios Loch and Romi Fischer-Schmidt are in Sackville as part of a larger project looking at the connections between resource extraction, wealth, and art. Josh Schwebel’s One Hand Washes the Other addresses the complicity of the mining investor and philanthropist whose name graces Mount Allison’s new Pierre Lassonde School of Fine Arts.
Fischer-Schmidt says Voices of Scorched Earth aims to immerse a Sackville audience “in the sounds that are being silenced in order for people to be able to create and learn to be artists here in Sackville.”
CHMA stopped by Struts to hear more about what’s behind Voices from Scorched Earth.
History has not been fair to El Estor, says Barrios Loch. On top of over 60 years of struggle against a mining industry that has been mostly Canadian, “they have suffered since the conquest of the territory by the Spanish,” he says. “It’s been more than 500 years of them trying to recover their land that was stolen… A lot of blood has been shed.”
Nickel that may very well have come from mines in El Estor is all around us, says Fischer-Schmidt. “We invite everyone who is curious and has an open heart to ask difficult questions about where many of our metallic belongings might come from,” says the artist.
“We’re responding to a call to action that we’ve been hearing for many years now” says Fischer-Schmidt, “which is to connect the dots between cultural production, but also all kinds of other kinds of material production.”
“We’ll be sharing some fragments from our work, which is in process,” says Fischer-Schmidt. “So those will be pieces of interviews, other sounds collected from the landscapes and people, some music performance from myself and from Styvens.”
