WILD: Fabricating a Frontier

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Joachim Koester, "The Place of Dead Roads," 2013

film still, Courtesy of the Artist and Greene Naftali, New York.

Opening Reception: Thursday July 13, 5-7pm

FESTIVAL / July 7 - 16, 2017, Daily Performances + Film Screenings + Talks

EXHIBITION / July 7 - August 26, 2017 Globe Cinema, Illingworth Kerr Gallery, and Victoria School

RECEPTION / Friday, July 7, 5:00 - 7:00 PM | FREE | Globe Cinema (18+)

WILD: Fabricating a Frontier is a collaboration between Mountain Standard Time Performative Art Festival and Calgary Underground Film Festival; the project has been supported by a program grant from the Canada Council for the Arts.

A frontier, unlike a border, represents a zone of relations where it is possible for all those involved to be affected and changed by the encounters. WILD: Fabricating a Frontier examines and complicates frontier narratives by producing and performing alternative vocalizations of what it means to live in contested zones. This project particularly examines this concern within settler colonial contexts—geographic, political, post-colonial, psychic, interspecies—and looks for ways to retain their narrative complexity. Exploring the affectations of settler colonial romanticism and its persistence in performances of the “Wild West”, this project troubles settler hegemonies and offers alternative practices of wildness.

In a moment in which issues of belonging, settlement and migration dominate global political discourse, within the largest mass movement of refugees to have taken place since the Second World War, WILD addresses the long-lasting nature of the debate, and the necessity for an urgent reshaping of the narrative of who is welcome and who is not, the historical effects of displacement on immigrants and the requirement for a national discourse on care and empathy as a part of national identity.

Exploring interspecies relations, the intersectionality of the frontier, and feminist and Indigenous discourses, WILD: Fabricating a Frontier offers an incisive, humourous and rambunctious counter-telling around the campfire through two major components: an intensive ten-day festival held primarily at the Globe Cinema over the duration of the Calgary Stampede (July 7-15) featuring nightly performances, film screenings, and discussions by local, national, and international artists, filmmakers, curators, and writers, and an exhibition running from July 7 to August 26 across three venues throughout Calgary: the former Victoria School (411 11th Avenue SE), the Illingworth Kerr Gallery (1407 14th Avenue NW), and Globe Cinema (617 8th Avenue SW).

Contemporary Calgary is located on the traditional territories of the Blackfoot and the people of the Treaty 7 region in Southern Alberta. The City of Calgary is also home to the Metis Nation of Alberta, Region III.

Please join us on July 7th as we kick off the WILD Festival with Buffalo Boy's Stampede Tickle and Slap, a performance by Adrian Stimson occurring throughout downtown Calgary. Keeping with the traditions of the Greatest Outdoor Show on Earth, Buffalo Boy will convene a band of merry revellers for the first ever, Buffalo Boy parade. Winding from Victoria School, to the Contemporary Calgary Pit Stop, then onto Globe Cinema for Tick and Slap, a dance party to celebrate our histories of inclusion and exclusion, where Buffalo Boy gets to Tick and Slap you with his/her colonial baton! So come join the fun, march to a de-colonial tune, celebrate yourself and come tickle, slap and dance your colonial blues away!