Maria-Margaretta: that old home of mine

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Maria-Margaretta, "that old home of mine," 2022

installation view

Exhibition Reception: Sunday, March 20, 2 – 4 p.m.

Reflecting on her family’s historical and anthropological documentation, Maria-Margaretta transforms the gallery space into a Michif self archive. That old home of mine reimagines the Métis home space and the objects contained within them as intervention into colonial archives. Through the insertion of Michif memory and personal experience(s) the artist refuses anthropological framing of Métis identity.

Grappling with the anonymity so often assigned to Michif women within the archives, the artist questions what will become of her? How will she be remembered? Who will tell her stories? Maria-Margaretta claims sovereignty over her own re-remembering and re-telling and in doing so creates a generational strengthening of stories. This in turn opens space for past, current, and future ancestors’ own representation and remembering.

Using the domestic space as an embodied site of remembering, Maria-Margaretta presents narrative and storytelling through playful engagement with objects. The relationship with the objects and their stories are never fully disclosed to the viewers. This act of intentional refusal subverts the presentation of the silent Indigenous objects within museums, collections, and archives. The unsung object in turn becomes a signifier of Indigenous kinship through material relationality revealing the object’s agency through engagement in shared remembering.

Maria-Margaretta is an interdisciplinary Red River Michif Artist from Treaty Six Saskatoon, Saskatchewan. Her family has historic ties to the Métis communities of St-François-Xavier, St. Boniface, and St. Louis, Saskatchewan. She is currently making and living on the stolen territories of the Sḵwx̱wú7mesh, Səl̓ílwətaʔ, and xʷməθkʷəy̓əm Nations.