A lecture and discussion with Domingo Cisneros and Antoinette de Robien, in conversation with Isabelle Miron.
Domingo Cisneros’s artistic practice is a true art of living and surviving in the natural world, deeply intertwined with the stance of an independent researcher that he adopted early in life. Counter to urban modes of living and making, the immersion in the forest ecosystem that he advocates entails a dual responsibility: toward wild habitats and toward the transformative practices that emerge within them. In this demanding environment, the creative process is grounded in a continual quest marked by wandering, contemplation, and metamorphosis.
Throughout his activist career, often as a spokesperson for Indigenous causes, Cisneros has also given form to protest, outrage, anger, and acts of vocal resistance through a wide range of material expressions. Committed to unsettling assumptions and provoking matter itself, he calls for a rethinking of conventional uses of ashes, bark, fats, viscera, and other animal, mineral, and vegetal remains. His teachings, whether focused on decoctions, making, tanning, smoking, or dyeing, bring together the cycles of life and death, organic recycling, and symbolic transformation.
Cisneros’s art and activism respond to the state of today’s world through an exemplary commitment to the Earth, spirituality, creation, and healing. How might we learn to live better through the forest ecosystem?
To explore this question, Isabelle Miron will engage Domingo Cisneros and Antoinette de Robien in a conversation centered on La guerre des fleurs – Codex Ferus, published by Mémoire d’encrier in 2016 and translated from Spanish by de Robien. The book immerses readers in experiences and forms of forest knowledge accessible to anyone willing to open themselves to the forest’s fascinating and enchanting reality. In a gesture that is both radical and generative, does Cisneros not seek to nourish humanity, both literally and figuratively, through the forest itself?
About
Of Mexican origin, artist, writer, and researcher Domingo Cisneros played a leading role in the emergence of art practices committed to addressing the ecological crisis and advancing the self-determination movement of contemporary Indigenous artists in Canada. In 2018, he was awarded an honorary doctorate (doctorate honoris causa) by UQAM.
A Franco-British immigrant to Canada in the early 1990s, Antoinette de Robien is a writer, translator, and multidisciplinary artist. She has written feature film screenplays and short stories, and her work has appeared in a variety of literary, arts, and cinema publications. For the past twenty years, she has dedicated herself to promoting the work of Domingo Cisneros.
Cisneros and de Robien founded the Cultural Territory Group (Groupe Territoire Culturel) and the CREAF (Centre for Research and Experimentation in Forest Arts) in 2000.
Isabelle Miron is a writer, translator, and professor of creative writing in the Department of Literary Studies at UQAM. She is the author of a novel, three poetry collections, and an essay. She has co-edited the collective volumes Imaginaire du terrain vague (2019), J’écris fleuve (2015), and L’expérience américaine du corps. Sens et sacré en littérature québécoise moderne (2012). She recently completed the research-creation project Récit nomade (recit-nomade.uqam.ca), from which she edited and contributed to L’état nomade: Essays on the Connections Between Creation and Travel, published by L’Instant même in 2021.
Partners: The ICI Program of UQAM’s School of Visual and Media Arts and the Canada Research Chair in Media Studies (Médiane).
