Refuge

refuge is a destination without borders or fences. Identification is not required for entry. There is no exit visa. No cookies. No tracking. No extra clicks. refuge neither demands nor imposes.

refuge.earth offers a restorative retreat into a digital Neverland for weary browsers, surfers and digital nomads. refuge is conceived for quieting –a jewel of relief amidst the overwhelm of ungraspable immensity that is the Internet. 

refuge.earth is an artistic offering co-created by nichola feldman-kiss and Adrienne Matheuszik. We welcome you, your reflections and comments.

about
feldman-kiss & Matheuszik

Indie artists feldman-kiss & Matheuszik are a meeting of established and emerging pandisciplinary (digital) media installation artists who have worked together in a variety of generational style mentor / mentee roles since 2018. We share the lived experience of Canada born Jamaican German diasporas a generation apart.

Individually and together, we practise decolonial feminist aesthetics as techno-art inquiry, social engagement, poetry and fabulation. Motivated to disrupt and flatten any hierarchical relational encumbrance with our co-work as artist / studio assistant, 2021 - 2023 we developed refuge.earth as a site of shared practice to experiment with bi-generationality in co-creation. We are grateful to the Canada Council Digital Now! fund for enabling this time of play and experimentation as refuge and relief.

As artist, nichola feldman-kiss investigates the instability of identity (human categorization) as a cultural phenomenon –a social negotiation at once projected, harnessed, affixed and uncoupled from one’s own sense of bodily organisation. Like time, history and progress, identity too is fugitive, finding refuge in uncanny inbetweens –in between and outside of worlds, epochs, generations, fictions of culture and frameworks of (non) belonging –borders, nations, genders, races, colours and castes. nichola’s process-rich, relationally intensive practice produces pristine collective experiments with radical empathy that critique categorical systems that serve and protect socio-economic hierarchy, deny our species’ elemental nature, and set us in opposition to our co-species and Earthly source. Since 2019 feldman-kiss has pursued artistic engagement with the north Atlantic Ocean as site, material and muse.

Adrienne is an emerging interdisciplinary artist with interests in the uncanny, especially with respect to hybridity, identity and futurity. In process and as installations, her artworks seamlessly blend and mix digital media tools and capacities to offer hybridised experiences that quietly detangle complexities of identity, perception, fantasy and utopian aspiration. Adrienne’s work takes critical and speculative approaches to the use and development of new technologies. Using technology and narrative as metaphor for experiences of mixed ethnicity, Adrienne’s immersive narrative spaces offer alternative understandings of so-called “post” coloniality.

Gratitude

We are grateful to our collaborators and contributors for the exceptional co-creative experiences we shared in the crafting of beachside, Somewhere over the Rainbow and refuge (SIREN).

Pamela Edmonds curator refuge (SIREN) 2023

SPATIAL-ESK (aka) Samuel Kapasa co-creative and tour guide
Anita Grivan words and voices
Luther Konadu words and voices

Michelle Irving Siren audio stems
Omar Estrada additional editing

Tovi Gruzman Novastar support
Mike Dunn Novastar support

Siren vocals:
Lodi Awad
Valerie Buhagiar
Blandine Kan
Memory Makuri
Ruth Mathiang
Leila Moslemi
Roula Said
Maryem Tollar

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