GODDEN, Vanessa

Transference
Sunday October 13, 2 pm
630 Queen Street East

In Transference, Vanessa Godden’s body traverses containers of water that gradually shrink in size. They begin inside a rain-water collection barrel, swirling their body through the saltwater that fills the container, creating sounds that interact with a sound composition. Moving between containers, their body begins to overtake the surface area of a steel drum, then a mixing bowl, displacing the liquid within. The sound composition contains field recordings of sounds in Trinidad and Tobago mixed with collaboratively constructed experimental steel pan recordings and recordings of voices from Godden’s Queer community. The performance serves as a bridge between Godden’s Queer diasporic existence in the US, Canada, and Australia alongside their lineages of movement instigated by colonization of South Asia and the Caribbean.

Vanessa Godden (they, them) is a queer Indo-Caribbean and Euro-Canadian artist, educator, and curator based in Tsí Tkarón:to/Toronto. Godden’s transdisciplinary practice explores how personal histories and the body in relation to geographic space can be conveyed through oral and somatic storytelling in art. They draw from their multi-ethnic diasporic experiences to build multi-sensory performances, videos, sound installations, book art pieces, and net-art that unfurl the impacts of trauma on the body, connections to community, and tethers to culture.