Cite on Site Residency :
Meet Zoë Heyn-Jones

We’re pleased to introduce you to Zoë Heyn-Jones. Zoë is a PhD candidate in Visual Arts at York University who uses research creation methodology to investigate performances of solidarity and activism in Guatemala. In addition to contributing to publications including Inuit Art Quarterly and PUBLIC Journal, Zoë maintains an active art practice where her research interests are explored through material forms. Most recently, she’s been working on an art project for Thames Gallery in Chatham, ON (upcoming in 2018). Among her multidisciplinary occupations, Zoë is also our spring 2018 resident, and will be hosted by Artexte information centre in Montréal for the next ten days.

The search for balance between academic or scholarly practice on the one hand, routinely shared in specific types of text-based formats, and creative practice on the other, which is more commonly associated with a diversity of materials and modes of expression, has always defined KAPSULA’s output—and we know many of our readers share in this search, too. This is one of the reasons why Zoë’s proposal stood out among the many other timely and provocative projects that we considered for this residency. Zoë implements the idea of networks, but not just the kind that rely on an Internet connection: her notion of the rhizomatic bibliography is equally informed by the feelings and movements of real bodies. This bibliography retains its function as a scholarly reference while taking on a new materiality, one that grounds itself in digital space and simultaneously extends far beyond it to interrogate tangible, physical sites of politics and resistance.

We asked Zoë to answer a few questions to elaborate on her approach to the residency (we knew she’d explain it better) and help us get to know her as a writer, artist, and researcher.

Can you provide a summary of the project you’ll be working on with KAPSULA and Artexte, and describe how you came to this investigation of the rhizomatic bibliography?

My project explores the use of digital mind mapping tools to create a rhizomatic digital bibliography, asking: What if the bibliography was a network, rather than a linear, alphabetically- and chronologically-ordered list? While this structure allows for a certain legibility and ease of use, it also perpetuates a specific logic of temporal chronology and scriptocentrism. Could a bibliography take on a more horizontal and interactive form?

This investigation began by visualizing the horizontal relationships inherent in solidarity work. In my current doctoral research on Canada-Guatemala solidarity networks, I began using digital mind-mapping software to keep track of all the individuals and NGOs who have been active in this movement. This started as a purely pragmatic way to order this information; it quickly evolved into something that was both informationally and visually compelling, with its ever-expanding, cerebellum-like structure.

My doctoral research looks at how we visualize solidarity, something that is so inherently relational, ephemeral, and affect-based. What does solidarity look like? This question is a driving force behind how I’ve been thinking of solidarity as performance, and has lead me to the Artexte collection and this exciting collaboration with KAPSULA. I want to explore how the notion of solidarity has manifested in Canadian aesthetic practice, and experiment with how we can create a bibliography that mirrors the horizontal relationships invoked by the term.

What do you hope the residency will add to your current research practice?

Well, selfishly, I want to find out how other artists have approached the question of visualizing solidarity. I also very much want to map relations of Canadian art history to gain a perspective on this history, but I want to do this in a way that is more nuanced than it is chronological. My background is in anthropology, cinema studies, and experimental documentary, but somehow I ended up in a practice-based Visual Arts doctoral program! I’m still learning how to be an artist, and what it means to do research through creative practice. Having never studied art history per se, I want to see for myself how to bring together disparate artists and artworks through this networked bibliography. The Artexte residency will expand my knowledge of Canadian art, and will allow me an opportunity to experiment with new ways of ordering this information.

What are you most looking forward to during your stay in Montréal? Are you familiar with the city?

I am so looking forward to coming back to Montréal! I did my MA in Film Studies at Concordia between 2007 and 2009, and I have been back to the city a couple of times since, for instance, to attend the Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics’ Encuentro in 2014. However, all the people I knew in Montréal when I lived there almost ten years ago have since left the city. I have also changed and grown immensely since that time; it will be amazing to re-experience the city with fresh eyes, but with some familiarity. When I lived in Montréal it was an intensely melancholic and tumultuous period in my life. It will be wonderful to have a chance to reacquaint myself with the city, but with an exciting project to ground me.

If you could create a new archive that doesn’t already exist, what would you archive and why?

Right now I’m really interested in refusal; for instance, how traditional social sciences and humanities research, which can be seen as extractive in the way it treats community knowledge as a resource for the (often individual) researcher to exploit, can be resisted through refusal. In their article “R-Words: Refusing Research,” Eve Tuck & K. Wayne Yang assert, “Settler colonial knowledge is premised on frontiers; conquest, then, is an exercise of the felt entitlement to transgress these limits. Refusal, and stances of refusal in research, are attempts to place limits on conquest and the colonization of knowledge by marking what is off limits, what is not up for grabs or discussion, what is sacred, and what can’t be known” (225).

I’m also sort of obsessed with performance theorist Diana Taylor’s idea that the archive, thought to be enduring and totalizing, always works in tandem with the repertoire of embodied, performed gestures (dancing, singing, ritual, protest, cooking) to transmit cultural memory.

So I think, inspired by both these discourses, I would want to create an archive of gestures of refusal. But that might just be an empty room…

What is the most thought-provoking piece of art or cinema that you’ve seen in the last year?

I’ve been living in Mexico City for the past year or so, and I recently saw a wonderful, dense, thought provoking show at the Museo Jumex called Memorias del subdesarrollo, or Memories of Underdevelopment. Taking its name from the 1968 film by Cuban filmmaker Tomás Gutiérrez Alea, the exhibition explores the decolonial turn in Latin American art from 1960 to 1980(ish). The show’s opening weekend included a lecture by Puerto Rican sociologist Ramón Grosfoguel on the intricate relationship of modernity and capitalism to the decolonial turn. I also had the great fortune of attending a curatorial walk-through of the exhibition with Julieta González, artistic director of the Museo Jumex, last week.

The breadth of artistic responses to the specific conditions of decolonization in Latin America is completely fascinating! I enjoyed making connections between these different modes of practice – from mail art to tropicália and arte povera – and wider social movements like Paulo Freire’s critical pedagogy and various workers’ movements. I especially loved seeing works that are critical of mining and extractivism, like Juan Downey’s “Anaconda Map of Chile”—a map of Chile encased in a glass structure in which a live anaconda snake is able to slither freely across borders, much like the Anaconda Mining Company was able to do, which contributed to [Augusto] Pinochet’s rise to power. I’m beginning research on how extractivism (and its resistance) are performed and visualized, so it was inspiring to see the ways in which Latin American artists have responded.