Alexandra Gelis: Seeds, edited by Mike Hoolboom and Clint Enns (Toronto/Ottawa: Conversalon/Canadian Film Institute, 2021).

Contents

Introduction

The artist is a nomad. Before the endless treks, her living room overflows with cables, cameras, and recorders which somehow find a place in her oversized luggage. If her open heart leads her to plant roots wherever she travels, her recording gear is never far, absorbing traces of encounters, ideas, stories.

She is attracted to geographical wounds, sites of trauma, where the ghost trails of colonialism are all too evident. Wearing her armour of mini skirt and magenta hair, she facilitates workshops in a gender performance disguise, allowing her to pass, even amongst gang members and street youth. What she hopes to achieve in these workshops is the aim of any artist: to allow everyone to find their own voice and express their own life in their own way. Artworks contain potent seeds that when planted in the right conditions begin to germinate.

Many of Alexandra’s works are made in the spirit of collaboration. In particular, her engagement with fellow traveller Jorge Lozano has been essential. They have been working on each other’s artworks since the mid-2000s, lending footages, cutting side by side, weighing colour corrections and philosophical vantages.

The voice of the undercommons spreads through Alexandra’s movies like a weed. Her single-channel work is marked by portraiture, offering glimpses of the homeless, of queer laundromat philosophers, of home-brewed historians. There are some who cannot forget, and she is there to absorb their feelings, and bring back the evidence. As Viet Thanh Nguyen writes in The Committed,

Americans sincerely believe, as all imperialists do, that they have taken over the world for its own good, as if imperialism were a kind of penicillin (for natives), with power, profit and pleasure merely being surprising side effects (for the doctors).

In Alexandra’s installations, there is a persistent look at how her homelands have been marked by America’s cruel imperialism and by the secrets that only plants can share with us. Hers is an evolving practice, as her tech-geek side meets up with local conditions and materials. One installation morphs into the next in a suite of theme and variations, always with the hope of producing contact and community, face-to-face encounters and, above all, new questions. Who are we, if we are not questions?

This book examines the roots of Alexandra’s rapidly expanding body of work. The individual essays within are micro-studies of the environmental impact that her engagements have had on the fragile ecosystems inhabited by artists, activists, and scholars. As such, the book takes on a rhizomatic structure where none of the individual pieces are intended to provide a complete map of the work it’s responding to.

When read in relation to the rest of the writing, each text provides the reader with different approaches to Alexandra’s ever-evolving artistic practice and with ways to navigate the uncharted regions of the work on their own. These essays, like Alexandra’s work, assert that there is space for the political in the poetic and the poetic in the political, and that, through dialogue, collaboration, and solidarity, we can better understand one another and find ways to recognize and fight systems of oppression.