Processions and Publics

Emelie Chhangur curated a large-scale 300 person street procession by Trinidadian artist Marlon Griffith. The 2 year project Ring of Fire consisted of multiple collaborations between various cultural organizations and groups in the Greater Toronto area. The culminating procession was staged at the Parapan American Games, August 9, 2015. Details about the collaborations, the procession, and the various Mas characters used in the procession can be found at the Ring of Fire official site.

Large-scale walking and immersive projects like Ring of Fire are often framed through discourses of participation and interaction. However, the dilemma of participation in contemporary art is that under the guise of collaboration, sociality, and inclusion participation becomes a method of appeasement as opposed to any real process of transformation.

Walkinglab‘s research complicates how we understand participation from a vital and materialist perspective, where to participate is an always already mode of encounter. Thus, participation as relation asks questions about the how of coming together and taking part, and as such offers new pedagogical and political modes of being.