[ISEA2020] Workshop: Patricio Davila & Men Immony — Pass Again Through the Heart: Gesture, Memory, and Food

Workshop Statement


This workshop looks at how knowledge is shared through gestures and feelings by family members. It is informed by an ongoing project that collects recipes from Canadian immigrants and refugees, each touching on acknowledgment and formation of transnational identities within North America. This series explores multi-directional approaches to cultural food practices, the bodies that preserve them, and the media that moves this information within the viewing format of a transmedia essay film. Knowledge of practice and feelings are carried across borders. The histories that are shared between parent and child, aunties, sisters, brothers, and chosen family are guided by multi-generational narratives that consist of bodies, things, events, and environments. We wish to highlight commonalities in transnational experiences while expanding on a specific type of intergenerational knowledge sharing— one that, at once, preserves approaches, information, and traditions, creates feeling for processes, smells, taste, as well as transforms, hybridizes and responds to contexts around food as a cultural practice. This workshop applies a series of different data recording processes to represent dialogues weaved by collective experience to create an interface for diasporic identities to talk about migration, community, political conflicts, mourning, healing, and transformation. These technologies include photogrammetry, non-optical motion capturing, videography, and audio recording, all these techniques come together to support the oral testimonies, object-centred narratives, and transmedia storytelling. We are exploring the generative and expressive possibilities of recording rather than capturing and domesticating human movement through a scientific management of labour. We take note of how Eduardo Galeano reminds us that to remember (recordar) is to pass again (re) through the heart (corazón). The English word record shares the same roots. We look to these recipes, formulas, sequences to feel again, not just through words and images but through movements and objects. Inspired by a recent workshop by Donna Haraway we will invite workshop participants to read the « Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction » by Ursula K. Le Guin in order to prompt the interrogation of the stories we select, create, and tell each other. Participants will bring to the online workshops a small collection of notes, images, artifacts, and/or ingredients with which to tell a story of sensing, moving, translating, healing, or transformation. Maximum of participants: 12 Duration: 2 hours.

  • Patricio Dávila is a designer, artist, researcher and educator. He is Associate Professor, Cinema and Media Arts, and core member of Vision: Science to Applications (VISTA) at York University. His research/practice focuses on the politics and aesthetics of participation in info visualization, large-scale interactive public installations, and curation projects such as Multiplex Essay Film Festival and the Diagrams of Power exhibition, research events and book published by Onomatopee Projects (NL). Public Visualization Lab is co-directed by Patricio Dávila (York University) and Immony Mèn (OCAD University), where we work alongside communities to represent and communicate concerns around equity, social justice, the environment, and participation. Our lab employs visualization, curation, mapping, modeling and storytelling through digital media. PVL is interested in fostering cross-institutional partnerships with other universities and organizations to present events, publications, creative projects, and community-based research.
  • Immony Mèn is an artist, educator, and community-based researcher. He is an Assistant Professor in the Faculty of Design at OCAD University. As an artist he has exhibited nationally and internationally and has been awarded municipal, provincial, and federal arts council grants to support his work. Men’s practice takes the form of interactive installations, interdisciplinary performances, social artworks, and community-based research projects. Works include Shadows!, Cite, Chthulucene, Everything. Public Visualization Lab is co-directed by Patricio Dávila (York University) and Immony Mèn (OCAD University), where we work alongside communities to represent and communicate concerns around equity, social justice, the environment, and participation. Our lab employs visualization, curation, mapping, modeling and storytelling through digital media. PVL is interested in fostering cross-institutional partnerships with other universities and organizations to present events, publications, creative projects, and community-based research.