‘We wear one another’

Abstract

‘We wear one another’ is a performance for violin and dance by Tanya Lukin Linklater created in response to an Inuvialuit rain gut parka in 2019. The Inuvialuit rain gut parka, a cultural belonging, is conceptualized by the artist as a score for the performance, ‘We wear one another’.

‘We wear one another’ (2019) is a performance created for dance and violin at the Isabel Bader Centre for Performing Arts (Kingston, Ontario) in response to Untitled (for a rain gut parka made and worn near the Mackenzie Delta, Northwest Territories, collected by the Hudson’s Bay Company in 1924), an installation of a Mckenzie Delta Inuvialuit rain gut parka at the Agnes Etherington Arts Centre (Kingston, Ontario). These works were commissioned for Soundings, An Exhibition in Five Parts curated by Candice Hopkins and Dylan Robinson, and the Ka’tarohkwi Festival of Indigenous Arts organized by Dylan Robinson. The exhibition has gone on to tour internationally with ICI and includes documentation of the performance, ‘We wear one another’, installed as a projection on a plinth. Lastly, I installed the clothing from the performance in a work called Attire for Performance, We wear one another (2019) at Catriona Jeffries in Vancouver.

The idea for this performance initially arose from an encounter I had with a Yup’ik rain gut parka originating from St Lawrence Island, Alaska, at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City in the spring of 2016. I learned about rain gut parkas as a youth growing up on Kodiak Island in southwestern Alaska during my visits to and internship with the Alutiiq Museum.

For Soundings, An Exhibition in Five Parts, the curators borrowed a Mackenzie Delta Inuvialuit rain gut parka housed in the Hudson’s Bay Company (HBC) Collection at the Manitoba Museum as cross-border loans proved difficult. This cultural belonging was installed in the Agnes Etherington Arts Centre in Kingston, Ontario. There is little information regarding the rain gut parka other than it is made of cleaned whale intestines, black thread, crested auklet feathers, and auklet beaks, and that it was donated by the ‘post inspector for the northern Mackenzie River’ probably in the 1920s. I imagined that it held many potentialities, including the possibility to be read as a score for performance. It looked to me partly like notations for performance – movements, rests, breaths, shapes, spatial notations, sounds. My visit to the rain gut parka in the HBC Collection at the Manitoba Museum before it travelled to be displayed in the Soundings exhibition was a significant gesture that aligns my practice with Alutiiq artists and peoples before me who have visited museum collections as a way of locating material knowledge about our ancestors (and ourselves).

I am compelled by cultural or ancestral belongings located in museum collections. Specifically, I am interested in singing, sounding, and dancing these objects – which is what we did in the old days. Our knowledges were felt and held in the body. Our knowledges were activated physically, sonically, in relation to these belongings, to our families, to the land, to the universe. The performance was developed with Laura Ortman on amplified violin, and with dancers Ceinwen Gobert and Danah Rosales.

Figures 1 to 5.

Tanya Lukin Linklater, ‘We wear one another’ (2019).

Figures 6 to 7.

© TIM FORBES/FORBES PHOTOGRAPHER. Reproduced with permission.