Mia + Eric
January 18 to March 23, 2025
In a Strange Place is a meditative 9-channel video installation and social engagement project that delves into the future of our forests and those who care for them.
Born out of a multi-year, international research and engagement process with communities in England, Germany, and Norway, In a Strange Place features 150 foresters, ecologists, activists, conservationists and land keepers performing abstract, slow-motion “dances” in the woods. These improvised choreographies are reflections of the participant’s care work, their connection to their local forest, and their role in an uncertain multi-species future.
The aim of In a Strange Place is to translate the complex knowledge and expertise of forest caretakers into emotional and visual gestures for a non-science audience. Showing forest work as an embodied practice, each video—a type of slow portraiture—captures the forest workers waist up and wearing handmade masks of imagined future forest creature. The culminating installation of In a Strange Place is comprised of nine separate videos. As audiences enter into the installation they are surrounded by woodlands and will be met by the forest workers performing the gestural reflections of their work. Through a series of overlapping, interacting, and individual performances, audiences are asked to move within the installation—a digital forest—becoming active in their viewing. The total running time of the installation is 2 hours 4 minutes.
Artists’ Talk
Thursday, January 23, 2025 | 6 pm
Join artists Mia Rushton and Eric Moschopedis for a talk about their exhibition In a Strange Place, which opens on January 18. The pair are a neurodivergent, interdisciplinary artist team based in Calgary. Eric has a background in theatre and performance, while Mia specializes in craft, printmaking, and the visual arts.
It is free and open to the public to attend.
About the artists
Mia Rushton and Eric Moschopedis are a neurodivergent, interdisciplinary artist team from Calgary, Alberta, Canada. Eric has a background in theatre and performance and Mia has a background in craft, printmaking and the visual arts. Together they create long-term research and community engagement processes that lead to socially engaged exhibitions, performances, temporary public art, participatory works, interventions, and publications. Thematically their practice deals with multi-species ethnography, interspecies relationships, biodiversity and place-based knowledge production in cities, small towns, and rural spaces. Since 2008 they have created and presented our projects, artist talks, lectures, and workshops at both formal and DIY galleries, festivals, residencies, conferences, and post-secondary institutions regionally, nationally, and internationally.
They have presented projects and exhibitions at The Bentway (Toronto), GIFT Festival (Gateshead, UK), Buenos Aires International Festival (AR), Matchbox (Mannheim, DE), Festspillene i Nord-Norge (Harstad, NO), Take Me Somewhere (Glasgow), Confederation Centre of the Arts, (Charlottetown), Parks Canada Discovery Centre (Woody Point, NL), ESKER Project Space (Calgary), Fierce Festival (Birmingham, UK), Grand Union (Birmingham, UK), Battersea Arts Centre (London, UK), Luminato Festival (Toronto), Flux Night (Atlanta), Art Gallery of Alberta (Edmonton), and Stromereien Performance Festival (Zürich).
Presented with support from:
In a Strange Place is co-organized as part of the Living Things Festival, which presents groundbreaking theatre, art, and performances to Kelowna audiences from January 20 to 31, 2025.
Credits:
Videographer: Benjamin Hotz
Sound Design: Kris Demeanor
Collaborative Producers: Maíra Wiener, Jenna Winter
Artistic Assistants: Maíra Wiener, Rachel Rose
Indigenous Relations Coordinator: Pam Beebe
In a Strange Place was originally commissioned by Matchbox (Germany), Gateshead International Festival of Theatre (England), and Arctic Arts Festival (Norway).
IMAGES
