“Without stories of progress, the world has become a terrifying place […] It’s not easy to know how to make a life, much less avert planetary destruction. Luckily there is still company, human and not human.” (Anna Lowenthaup Tsing, 2015) Howe Are You, Island? is the first piece in an unfinished trilogy of experimental animated shorts created by artists Alisha Piercy and Frances Adair Mckenzie. In the speculative short Howe Are You Island? a melodic voice-over travels through a landscape of interspecies relations, an ecology both real and digital. Shot on Ka-ou-enesegoan (Howe Island) in the lake district of Ontario (Canada), we follow our unseen, possibly nonhuman protagonist through the pangs of trying to connect. In the face of wonder and desire, interspecies relations progress with a glitch. Past the veil of romance, while crossing over shared lands, doubt erupts over the ability to bond in mutual, meaningful ways. What must be given, or given up? A critical fabulation, Howe Are You Island? wonders over the troubles of our living ways, to prefigure: which future connection with the environment and other species is possible?
BY Alisha Piercy, Frances Adair Mckenzie Alisha Piercy, Frances Adair Mckenzie (CA)
Alisha Piercy is a fiction writer and visual artist in Tiotià:ke/Montréal and PhD student in Cultural Studies (Research-Creation) at Queen’s University. Her research areas include hauntology, speculative/sci-fi worlding and Critical Animal Studies. Alisha's interdisciplinary work includes film and drawing installation, and she is the author of poetry, novels, and texts that write-with artists. She holds an MFA (Concordia University), an MA in Art Conservation (Queen’s University), and a BA in Literature (McGill University). Howe Are You Island? a speculative short co-directed with media artist Frances Adair Mckenzie was screened at Somerset House (London, UK), MUTEK, Société des arts technologiques (SAT) (Montréal) and toured on a mobile truck for VIDEO/PLAY (Brussels). Her solo exhibitions have been at Centre Clark, AXENÉO7, Diagonale, and fofa. Her fable Hair Like Flags won the 2010 bp Nichol Chapbook Award for Poetry. Her fiction is published with Book*hug (Toronto).
Frances Adair Mckenzie is a visual artist and animator based in tiohtiá:ke or so-called Montréal. Her work negotiates formal and speculative investigations into concepts of materiality, staging and form. Always in deference to process as hands-on manipulation of real material and objects, through sculpture, installation and the interfaces of digital technology. Through experimental processes the work pays tribute to the urgency of poetic narratives through durational patterns of magical production and historical desire. Frances' video work has been widely exhibited internationally, most notably at the Somerset House London, UK, The MAXXI museum in Rome, IT and MUTEK ES. Frances has exhibited at the Musée d'art contemporain des Laurentides, Parisian Laundry, Centre Clark and the Satosphere (SAT) in Montreal. Two animations and a stop-motion virtual reality piece have been produced by the National Film Board. She is currently an artist in residency at the Darling Foundry.
