8. Listening As Wayfinding With Lindsay Dobbin
Description
Please join us on Thursday December 17th 2020 at 4PM AST (12PM PST) for our upcoming national call. We will have the honour of engaging with Lindsay Dobbin and there will be the option to either listen to the call in French or English. For further instructions to join the call please scroll to the last section.
I consider my artistic practice to be a living process – asking questions, following curiosity, with the intent of understanding and kinship. The works I create are environmental studies, and recognize the natural world as witness and teacher. Through placing myself and my practice in relation to the invisible histories and physical processes of the body and environment, I've found that one can communicate with and be in relation to all things, tapping into deep sources of wisdom.
In my creative process, which is centred in the practice of listening, I engage in a sensorial intimacy with the living land and water in order to truly be collaborative, rather than imposing a vision. For me, collaborating with nature is not about using it as a medium for my individual expression, but in finding that place where true communication and relationship exists, and improvising there. The work I create is simultaneously a way to move more deeply into this space of deep relationship with the natural world, and to also share it with others in community.
It strikes me that many of us have forgotten how to listen, and that this capacity is essential in restoring our connection to the earth, and with each other. While science strengthens our gifts of seeing, Indigenous traditions work with gifts of listening. Potawatomi botanist and storyteller Robin Wall Kimmerer said, “In Indigenous ways of knowing, we say that we know a thing when we know it not only with our physical senses, with our intellect, but also when we engage our intuitive ways of knowing, of emotional knowledge and spiritual knowledge. And that’s really what I mean by listening. By seeing that traditional knowledge engages us in listening. And what is the story that being might share with us if we know how to listen as well as we know how to see?”
For the Ocean Bridge National Call, I will share my practice, and demonstrate how listening is a pathway to understanding and connecting with the natural world.
Lindsay Dobbin
Lindsay Dawn Dobbin is a Kanien'kehá:ka - Acadian - Irish water protector, artist, musician, storyteller, curator and educator who lives and works in Mi'kma'ki, the ancestral and unceded territory of Lnu’k (Mi’kmaq). Dobbin was born in and belongs to the Kennebecasis River Valley (from the Mi'kmaq word Kenepekachiachk, meaning "little long bay place"), a tributary of the Wolastoq ("beautiful river"), in the traditional territory of the Wəlastəkwiyik and Mi’kmaq. Dobbin has lived throughout Wabanaki Territory, mostly around the Bay of Fundy, as well as the Yukon in Kwanlin Dün territory.
Dobbin's relational and place-responsive practice includes music, sound art, performance, sculpture, installation, social practices and writing, and is invested in Indigenous epistemologies and cultural practices, such as drumming. Through placing listening, collaboration, play and improvisation at the centre of the creative process, Dobbin's practice explores the connection between the environment and the body, and engages in a sensorial intimacy with the living land and water.
As a passionate educator, Dobbin employs land-based practices, creativity, play and improvisation as tools for self-awareness, collaboration, experiential learning and community building — revealing that people and the environment are related in dynamic ways. Dobbin is also an active artistic collaborator, and have worked on projects with musicians, sound artists, dancers, visual artists and filmmakers.
To find out more about Lindsay's work:
Visit lindsaydobbin.com
The call will take place on Thursday December 17th 2020 at 4PM AST / 12 PM PST :
Click here to tune into the call in French
Click here to tune into the call in English
If you have any questions about participating, please contact cyrielle.noel@ocean.org prior to the call.
Task
Please participate in this month's discussion post about unconventional approaches being employed to combat negative environmental impacts.
Continue to 9. The Journey from Businessman to Eco-Activist »
