Concordia’s BANAL collective probes artistic and cultural relationships between Montreal and Mexico
Members of Concordia’s Faculty of Fine Arts and the research-creation collective BANAL recently embarked on a residency in Mexico City. At the invitation of the Centro de Cultura Digital, they collected street data for a performance using video projection and live music.
The collective includes PhD candidates Léah Snider, José Cortés and Annabelle Brault, MA 17, alongside artists and scholars Veronica Mockler, BFA 15, MFA 22, and Vivek Venkatesh, former chair of Art Education at Concordia and dean of education at McGill University.
Their diverse expertise in performance, music and visual arts converged in this international project called Dark Diplomacy. It builds on a previous residency hosted at Concordia’s 4TH SPACE, which involved discussions on cultural diplomacy and Mexican-Canadian relations.
“We designed a two-part Dark Diplomacy survey to capture public opinions about Mexico from passersby in front of Concordia’s 4TH SPACE,” the collective explains.
“With the support of art education graduate and research assistants Jacky Lo and Kaida Kobylka, we collected more than 123 responses in one afternoon. The correlation between live performance and passersby’s participation was significant.”
Across the two countries, BANAL gathered feedback from more than 225 respondents to explore biases and perceptions between them. The collective aimed to highlight the political and imaginative dimensions of the relationship between Mexico and Montreal through performance-based surveys.
The BANAL collective aimed to highlight the political and imaginative dimensions of the relationship between Mexico and Montreal through performance-based surveys.
Enacting a social pedagogy
The collective then presented the Montreal-based perspectives using various music and artistic performances in Mexico, at the Centro de Cultura Digital in Mexico City and the Museo de Arte Zapopan in Guadalajara City.
“Within a two-part workshop, we discussed and reflected on what that these surveys revealed with the local Mexican attendees and invited them to engage. Through this activation, we enacted a social pedagogy, revealing what is usually quite difficult to access: what people ‘really say’ about Canada in Mexico. And vice-versa," highlights the group.
Each member of BANAL brought their unique artistic skills to the project. Brault drew on her background as a music therapist and contributed synths and music composition. Cortés intertwined his art education expertise with his percussion and installation work, while Snider played the flute and engaged in the project’s curation and production. Mockler contributed her expertise in performance, video art and participatory dialogue, and played the drums. Venkatesh provided guitar and bass, and his research on radicalization and xenophobia informed the project’s theoretical framework.
Looking ahead, the collective plans to share their findings with Montrealers through an art exhibition featuring video documents, performance artifacts and survey installations. This will include a listening installation that will showcase the musical compositions and invite the public to contribute their insights. Additionally, BANAL is developing a space to highlight the artistic research initiated by Dark Diplomacy.
This fall, Montrealers will also get the chance to see Mockler’s work I Won’t Do It Alone at Dazibao from November 14, 2024 to January 18, 2025.
Find out more about the Dark Diplomacy project and the BANAL collective.
