sounds are pigments are places

eeportal

Coming Soon

flask is working with eeportal on the production of a new artbook multiple

ee portal, (Elyse Portal + Emilio Portal) is a collective of mixed ancestry based within the Robinson Huron Treaty of 1850 territory of the Atikameksheng Anishnawbek in N’Swakamok (Sudbury, Ontario).

eeportal talk about their project:

sounds are pigments are places, embraces a deep engagement with the land through colour, sounds and words transferred to 1000 pages and extended to online encounters. sounds are pigments are places continues ee portal’s collaborations which have always been projects of joint authorship that critically question the capitalist and colonial status quo, and engage in transdisciplinary actions.

This cumulative research in sound art, pigments and ecomaterial processes will form the series of 20 art books of 50 pages each. Within these 1000 pages, eeportal experiment with letterpress printing processes, and mark making. Each book is its own art piece, uniquely made with handcrafted inks from the boreal forest. Embedded with the ethics of ecomaterialism, each book will attend to the pragmatic urgency of environmentalism, together with poetic relational exchanges and inspiration from art books such as “Water Yam” by George Brecht, “Grapefruit” by Yoko Ono, and Brian Eno’s “Oblique Strategies” card set. A collection of sound art performances by Emilio, inspired by the concept sounds are pigments are places, will be shared via QR codes printed in the books. The codes will bring readers to hidden web pages where sonic and visual performances will be embedded.

sounds are pigments are places, is an interdisciplinary meditation on our collective ecological entanglements.  sounds are pigments are places is not only an ethic it is a magical statement. At its essence, it conveys that everything is interchangeable, that everything is fluid. eeportal’s animist view of the world shows us that all things, animate and inanimate, not only exist in equal ways, but each entity is dependent on one another for their very existence. With this project eeportal expresses how sounds are actually also pigments, and how pigments are actually places, and so forth.  

Emilio is of Peruvian (Indigenous, Spanish, West & Central African), Franco-Ontarian, and Irish descent. He is most interested in how sound and music can be used to deconstruct colonial perspectives and reconnect us with animism. Intuitively, Emilio finds or creates recordings that resonate with him in a deeply personal way – in a way that connects with his mixed heritage, which is both indigenous and settler. He digs deep into his ancestral pasts to honour ancient, forgotten or annihilated cosmovisions. Emilio expresses ancient and hidden worldviews through sound and accessible technologies.

Elyse Portal is a settler of Ukrainian, Baltic, Mennonite and Irish heritage. Her work revolves around climate crisis endurance exercises that respond to climate uncertainty, land-use changes, and biodiversity loss with embodied and sensual research practices, ecological materials, reciprocal pigment foraging, other-than-human invitations, climate narratives, and socially-engaged ecoart.

ee portal offers a third space to collectively exchange, stimulate, coalesce, and bring a spectrum of skills and perspectives into issues that are massively intangible, such as the Anthropocene and the 6th Mass Extinction. Art that opens up channels to feel place in an emotional and environmental way through sounds and pigments is at the heart of our practice. As ecological artists who forage sound and colour, we have naturally initiated inquiries into heavy metal levels found in soils used for pigments. Not only is our practice deeply intuitive and poetic, but it is also an enormous research project that is constantly investigating our entanglements with toxic resource extraction industries. We are acutely aware of the ecological crisis, and actively find ways to minimize our impacts by utilizing small quantities of hand-harvested non-toxic pigments, along with taking care of our existing technological devices, and finding the most ethical solutions (i.e. replacing broken gear with used options).  

eeportal would like to thank the Canada Council for their support