"Desire Lines: Experimental Video as Social and Spatial Interventions"

Curatorial Essay by Alanna Thain and Ylenia Olibet

The archive of Groupe Intervention Vidéo (GIV) is an atlas, tracking movements between the streets and the screen as a space for feminist interventions. An iconic “in-house” production, Les Marcheuses, produced by GIV’s general director Petunia Alves, artistic director Anne Golden and artist and activist Stella Valiani, is a direct record of their participation in the 1995 event the “March of Bread and Roses,” which saw feminist activists and citizens in Quebec set off on a ten day march from three locations, converging on Quebec City to deliver their feminist complaints (Ahmed 2021) around poverty and social exclusion to the political powers-that-be.

This video documents a durational feminist intervention: in making demands on a government that failed to enact a feminist public sphere, the march both acts in the public sphere of political activism and enacts feminist counterpublics of solidarity, imagination, and demand. Footage of the marchers is intercut with talking head interviews, describing the various and often long-term political engagements, experiences, and solidarities that motivate them, as well as moments of pause and respite at the end of the day: from community centre dances and singalongs to swimming, playing and hanging out. In this way, political activism is insistently indistinguishable from the actions of everyday life, and the space of political activism is remade as a 24/7 embodied existence. An intimate and affective record, any pre- distinction of public and private fails to cohere. Political demands are presented as a solidarity cultivated through a soft sociability that leaves room both for shared concerns and a heterogeneity of needs and desires.

Les Marcheuses is not the only film in GIV’s archives that both enacts and takes place in a space of political struggle: one could think of other works by Alves such as 2000 bonnes raisons de marcher (Petunia Alves and Ryofa Chung, 1998) and La meilleure façon de marcher (Petunia Alves, 2001), documenting respectively the International Preparatory Meeting for the World March of Women in the Year 2000 and the march itself in New York City, or Marik Boudreau and Alves’ Montréal Star (2004), composed of sounds and images of queer protest and parties during Divers/Cité in 2004, which–equally political–are left to speak with each other through formal composition rather than explanatory interviews or text.

Les Marcheuses is an icon of the wider work of GIV, as an artist-run centre that produces, curates and distributes work made by women in “its most inclusive definition,” including many non-binary artists whose entry point has often been feminist identification. At the heart of GIV’s practice is redistributing access to the intimate publics of those who must make demands to be heard: not simply to be included in a normative public, but to insistently remap a politics of participation that is all too often predicated on exclusions, violence, indifference and marginalization.

If Les Marcheuses highlighted feminist labour and life as the demand for bread (liveable wages and economic support) and roses (quality of life and everyday joy), the curatorial program assembled here explores thresholds of representation for stories too complex for a straightforward visibility. In looking at these works by twelve artists from GIV’s collection across four decades of work, we consider how artists have used the affordances of experimental video to make felt what it means for a feminist body to be “intervening.”

Intervention—meaning interruption, a coming between—is the lens through which we put the works in this program in relation to each other. Part of the name of this artist-run centre, intervention carries political and ethical connotations partially connected to the utopian discourse around media as catalyst for social change in the 1970s. Yet, far from endorsing a techno-utopian vision, within GIV, intervention has always entailed thinking about process—of making video, of making feminist politics, of creating infrastructures for distribution and exhibition.

“Intervention” also registers a very physical dimension: it draws attention to an embodied relation to video technology and conjures up bodies that make videos by carrying around the heavy Portapack—the portable video recorder first introduced in 1967 and “misnamed” in French “vidéo légère,”—and the bodies that perform feminist protests in the street, that cook food and sustain bodies, that organize conferences, that work in community centres. We also interpret “intervention” within GIV as the continuous reinvention of the uses and affordability of the technology of video itself.

Throughout GIV’s existence, we identify two main approaches to video in its collection: realist political documentaries and video-art works. While this distinction is just one way to “order” the archive according to established feminist film and video histories (de Lauretis 1985; Juhasz 1999), it allows us to articulate our two-fold understanding of intervention both as socio-political work and as formal experimentations. While our focus on experimental video may appear more aligned with the latter, we argue that these two tendencies cohere across these films to underscore that feminist representation is always and also a work of fabulation and creation.

These two facets of intervention extend to the engagement with its own archive that GIV carries on through curatorial assemblages presented in public events. Curation’s propositional relations spark meanings and enlighten the semantic potentialities of those experimental video-art works that are more difficult to interpret as stand-alone pieces. This is what Anne Golden, GIV’s artistic director, calls “le potential alchimique de l’acte commissarial” (the alchemical power of curation work) (2023). Curation is a performative practice that activates the archive by forging relationships and providing exhibition contexts.

In this program, the sphere of intervention is found in actual spaces, such as the streets of Winnipeg, Montreal, or Africville. It is equally found in the space-time of memory as a mediation of the personal or experiential that does not map neatly onto formal or authorized cartographies of state history. It is also the space of media itself, as a collective reservoir of images, identities and authorizations that solicit our attention and that, in these works, becomes sites of intervention. The selected works thus intervene through the making of desire lines across all of these spheres of action.

A desire line is a term from urban planning, describing the paths that feet trace off the formal and established routes of sidewalks that attempt to corral movement into predictable and managed coordinates: a path that cuts across the lawn of a park shows where else we might want to go, an informal testament to other directions at work. In doing so, these videos also make propositions about why the simple actions of crossing a street or existing in public are themselves interventions and interruptions of everyday exclusion, as well as demonstrations of survival tactics for feminist lives. Desire lines are both traces of reorientations and at the same time pave the way for further feminist work. Desire lines in the videos of this program are visual and aural motifs, or themes evoked through storytelling. Desire lines are spawned by feminist complaint (Ahmed 2021), from pointing out injustices, situations of threat, grappling with traumatic individual and collective histories of dispossession and displacement. Yet, desire lines are also crafted by resistance, objection, strategies of survival, as well as by the work of attuning to those stories of complaint.

Part of the tactics of engagement found across these works is an ambivalent relation to the politics of representation, and an expansive and intimate cartography of struggle, pleasure and demand. Against realist documentary evidence, this curated program asks viewers to attend to embodied filmmaking, remixing, and somatic performances as feminist tactics of intervention articulating sensations of precarity and threat, but also of revolt, resistance, and coping mechanisms. How do formal techniques expand the (in)direct testimony of embodied presence to complicate what we know of the world and its operations?

The bodies at work in these videos are not so much in space as (re)making space, intervening in normative coordinates of action and appropriateness through disorientation and re-assembly. In au canada (kimura byol lemoine, 2014), Aberrant Motion (Cathy Sisler, 1993), and My Heart the Tourist (Anne Golden, 2001), the p.o.v. of the video-camera, a 360-degree shot, and abrupt zooms respectively convey sensory experiences of crossing national borders by flight, of spinning in public spaces as a metaphorical act of “deviation” from binary gendered norms and expectations, and of nightmarish feeling and ghostly presences in an abandoned amusement park.

In Win-nip-egg (lamathilde, 2015), the fixed frontal shots—distant and then closer— of a corner store’s entrance traversed by diaphanous bodies coming and going anchors a disembodied, French-European speaking voice, a curious and humble acousmêtre seeking to name the racist and gender-based violence banalized in the everyday and embedded in language. In Deb! (Dayna McLeod, 2021), a lo-fi avatar—an animated potato repurposed from a Zoom plug-in—shelters a story about the pervasive threat of sexual assault in a public park, as both very specific memory and as a collective experience, making humour a survival strategy for real life.

Like the work of curation itself, remixing is another tactic to safely engage the volatility of audiovisual archives—those of national and diasporic broadcast media and those of the settler colonial state—from the perspective of feminist, queer, and racialized bodies. In Static (1995), Nik Forrest challenges homophobic background noise from radio shows through fluid watery tumbles, intimate forms of sociability, and dreamlike movements in urban settings that, combined, refuse to confine sexuality to a private matter. In Agenda (2011), Kim Kölle Valentine explores the unreliable memory of the cinematic spectator that remediates cinematic experience through their own embodiment and wanderings in urban locations.

In Traces Souterraines (Buried Traces) (2011), the visual colonial archive is literally unearthed: Michelle Smith reuses photos and short sequences of film and videos from missionary archives superimposed on waves of water and roots of plants to denounce violent histories of erasure and assimilation of the Métis people. In Two Snakes (2015), Kriss Li’s assemblage of diasporic experiences of deracination and queer embodiment mixes Chinese folklore, its queer remediation and rememory in popular culture, family photo archives and the empty places of suburban Ontario. In Where We Were Not; Feeling Reserved, Alexus’ Story (Jess MacCormack and Alexus Young, 2011), a “twilight tour”—a terrifying extra-juridical kidnapping by cop experienced by a Two -Spirit Indigenous person—shields their voiceover testimony of police brutality through tender and intimate animations that deflect visual evidence of violence into a new emotional, traumatic, and truthful geography of winter landscapes outside Saskatoon.

Finally, at the heart of this program is how the immediacy of embodied presence is both an insistent testimony to the urgency of the here and now, and a medium for threading the local and the global, the past and the future together. Comptines (Diane Poitras, 1986) pays homage to Irish women’s inventive way of protest by making noise with trash lids in support of hunger strikers in the 1980s and connects it with the imaginative potential of children’s songs and games in the street. Welcome to Africville (Dana Inkster, 1999) uses mockumentary interviews with queer people to document the demolition of the African-Canadian neighborhood of Africville in Halifax and, with it, the loss of past community and the necessity of fabulated spaces for future encounters that keep such memories alive.

In conclusion, the artists featured in the program work directly with sensation, formal experimentation, and disorientations to animate feminist demands and an expansion of the everyday. These works model how video can serve as an intervention in our habits of perception and understanding, allowing audiences to suspend what they think they know about the world, and to recognize feelings and sensations that might go unarticulated in everyday life. The videos in this program specifically articulate intervention as tactics of creative expression and protest, bringing forward a shared sense of the challenges of doing feminist work in the public register, and they take up the risk and labour of feminist embodiment. In all of the selected works, desire lines remap space to the rhythm of other wants and needs; they are invitations to step out of official lines and to walk in the company of other absented presences.

- By Alanna Thain and Ylenia Olibet