Lois Klassen with Margaret Dragu

(An artistic project in symbiosis with <i>Mitochondrial Ontologies</i>)

<em>“How do we muster the faith, courage, and will to keep living and fighting? What does it mean to claim for ourselves a sense of wholeness and visibility when the world insists on us being hidden or disguised?” Audre Lorde (The Cancer Journals, 1980)</em>

<em>“Attached to the bed, I raised my sick woman fist, in solidarity.” Johanna Hedva (“Sick Woman Theory,” 2016, 2022)</em>

<em>“[Butoh cultivates] ‘the body that becomes.’” (Sondra Fraleigh quoting Hijikata Tatsumi, 2010)</em>

Since last summer, and fall, I partially attended and attempted to participate in the generative workshops that Gabriela Aceves-Sepulveda hosted in the <i>Mitochondrial Ontologies</i> project. It was “partial” and “attempted” because for most of the workshops I was recovering from a serious illness. My capacity was limited. I attended about an hour of the full-day workshops and then went home exhausted and flooded with fatigue. For the creative work outside of the workshops, I made a limp attempt to feed the projects’ shared files and folders with photos and texts about the lone petri dish of bacteria and fungi that I managed to cultivate with some help from my partner. I was like Johanna Hedva during Black Lives Matter, inside a sick house with a limp fist raised in solidarity, wondering if I was a contributor to anything other than a sick woman’s existence. Eventually I learned that my contributions to the project could be made on my own terms, using the themes and methods as they took on growing relevance and resonance for me.

Since being diagnosed with cancer, all of my artmaking has been collaborative. This strategy has been born out of the necessity to take on substantial projects despite limited energy, and out of joy–now more than ever–in the company of cherished colleagues making creative work desirable and possible. In this parallel project to <i>Mitochondrial Ontologies </i>I am immensely grateful to be working with colleague and elder advisor in sick woman care, Margaret Dragu. Together we expect to produce a new work based on specific domestic ontologies that circulate as wisdom through the bodies of elders, menopaused women, bed-ridden, chair-enabled, house-bound, immunocompromised, fatigue-flooded, virus and cancer stricken, orthopaedically fractured and repaired… We are reflecting on  wisdoms held by bodies-that-become through their situated and ever-changing interdependencies and mobilities.

These are far from new inquiries for us. For Margaret Dragu, the question of preparation for dependency and home-based care informed her performance-based and collective media works, <i>Commodification of Touch,</i> <i>How to be Old</i>, and, the related but earlier work, <i>Intergenerational Teachings. </i>These works display ways of knowing that are rarely presented as creative or experimental. In <i>Commodification of Touch</i> five artists including myself learned how to bathe a senior artist.

The videos were part of the 2016 exhibition, “All membranes are porous” (Kamloops Art Gallery; Charo Neville, curator) where they were playing on handheld devices and screens in domestic spaces (bathroom, kitchen nook and family rumpus room) that Margaret had created.

I contributed to her exhibition’s rooms with textile furnishings by <i>Slofemists</i>, my collective sewing project that I was hosting with Lori Weidenhammer, and sharing with many contributors.

As the COVID pandemic dragged on Dragu created a set of short videos called <i>SOCIAL ARCHITECTURE: landscapes 1 – 7</i> (2021) presenting views from inside a senior’s apartment as architecturally-enabled artworks.

A poem cycle that I wrote this year, “A <i>mighty myth</i> in the evenings and seasons,” also situates interdependencies inside of domestic spaces and even painted onto buildings. I performed it in the 2023 Jane’s Walk Vancouver near the mural, <i>In the Evening </i>(Fintan Magee, 2018) in Mount Pleasant neighbourhood.

A poem cycle that I wrote this year, “A <i>mighty myth</i> in the evenings and seasons,” also situates interdependencies inside of domestic spaces and even painted onto buildings. I performed it in the 2023 Jane’s Walk Vancouver near the mural, <i>In the Evening </i>(Fintan Magee, 2018) in Mount Pleasant neighbourhood.

A poem cycle that I wrote this year, “A <i>mighty myth</i> in the evenings and seasons,” also situates interdependencies inside of domestic spaces and even painted onto buildings. I performed it in the 2023 Jane’s Walk Vancouver near the mural, <i>In the Evening </i>(Fintan Magee, 2018) in Mount Pleasant neighbourhood.

Nearby on the Mount Pleasant Community Screen, a much older work of mine was recently displayed, <i>Flowers for Joyce</i> (2008). It also considers the constricted but pointed gaze of a community gardener.

In our works about the spaces of illness and community, one could say that the sick woman (a term coined by Johanna Hedva that could be used to refer to the conditions of all bodies which do not conform to the mythical not-sick man-body), is active in their gaze from inside the petri dish looking out.

We are eager to continue the generative work of <i>Mitochondrial Ontologies </i>with various methods and anticipated outcomes. Some of these include composing documentation (including storytelling) of food decomposition, rescue, and repurposing that occupies our everyday experiences and spaces. We will also be recomposing into video and text some of the Butoh gestures which themselves re-materialize life and death cycles, and have for <i>Mitochondrial Ontologies</i> been used as foundational work.