Below the Radar Transcript

Episode 263: Becoming Anarchival — with Kate Hennessy

Speakers: Kathy Feng, Am Johal, Kate Hennessy

[theme music]

Kathy Feng  00:05
Hello listeners, I'm Kathy Feng with Below the Radar, a knowledge democracy podcast. Below the Radar is recorded in the territories of the Musqueam, Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh peoples. On this episode of Below the Radar, our host Am Johal is joined by Kate Hennessy, Associate Professor at SFU's School of Interactive Art and Technology, and member of anti-patriarchal, anti-colonial folk inspired punk band The Saltlicks. Together, they chat about Kate's practice in anthropology and contemporary art, the experience of working collaboratively and across disciplines, and her recent exhibitions Becoming Anarchival at Gallery 881, and The Water We Call Home on Galiano Island. Enjoy the episode!

[music, "Eyeliner" by The Saltlicks]

Am Johal  01:00
Hello. Welcome to Below the Radar. Delighted that you could join us again. This week, we have a special guest. Kate Hennessy is with us. Welcome, Kate.

Kate Hennessy  01:09
Thank you so much for having me.

Am Johal  01:11
Yeah, wondering if we can begin with you introducing yourself a little bit.

Kate Hennessy  01:15
Sure. My name is Kate Hennessy. I am an Associate Professor at the School of Interactive Arts and Technology at Simon Fraser University. That's part of the Faculty of Communication, Art and Technology. I'm a settler of Irish and German descent, and I grew up on unceded Penelakut and Lamalchi First Nation territory, which is known now as Galiano island, so pretty close to where I now live and work. And I'm an anthropologist by training, but I also work through contemporary art practice and curation and collaborative work. And I'll also say that I am part of a band called The Saltlicks, which is a anti-patriarchal, anti-colonial, folk inspired punk band that I play in with a really amazing group of people who I think are also friends of the Below the Radar podcast and sort of SFU affiliated in different ways: Jessica Hallenbeck, Lyanna Patrick, May Farrales, and Dawn Hoogeveen. And yeah, I'm really excited to be here and to talk to you. So that's me in a little nutshell.

Am Johal  02:30
Now, the field of anthropology has had a long history and connection, of course, with museums, a problematic history with museums, let's say, from its very origins, but this intersection that you're working at between anthropology and contemporary art, or anthropology, technology and contemporary art has so many different routes we can go into in terms of our conversation today. But you do have, as we sit here in November, I know this won't be airing until later, you have a show up at Gallery 881 right now, Becoming Anarchival and wondering if you can share a little bit about the origins of that project.

Kate Hennessy  03:11
Absolutely. Well, the show that is at 881 Gallery right now is a collaboration between myself and my very good friend Trudi Lynn Smith, who is also an artist and anthropologist who's based in Victoria. Trudi and I have worked together for about 15 years, since we met as part of a collective called Ethnographic Terminalia, which is a curatorial collective made up of anthropologists, but people who are working through practice and through art and curation. So, you know, Trudi and I, since we started working on that project together, have been really interested and working in archives through our own, you know, parallel practices within anthropology. We've been, I would say, classified within museum anthropology, visual anthropology, media anthropology, those have been our spaces. But we've been very interested in collections, and in my own work, I have for a long time been working on the idea of digitization of museum collections from a critical perspective, but also an applied perspective, thinking through what it could mean to make collections available, and then in practice, working within communities to see what it means to connect to those collections and also remediate them, and think through some of the complications and ethical questions around the history of anthropology and image making, the history of collecting and colonial project of museum making. So that's kind of a background in my work. Trudi, on the other hand, she's a photographer, and she is very interested in alternative photographic processes. She's interested in repeat photography, and that's been her practice. So we've both been working in our own way on different types of projects, but we've also been coming together to—you know, as friends, we enjoy hanging out together, but also in a really generative way to think through what it means for objects in collections, for belongings in museum collections or archives, to act in ways that might change the way the people who manage archives do their work or actually release those objects from the archive. We're also interested in the kinds of things that don't get archived, and the little piles that sit on the corners of curators' desks.

And so through this work, we've been thinking about this idea of the archival and the an archival, so things that are inside archives, that work within official structures and processes and techniques and so on, of conservation, and then the things that because materially they're degrading and cannot be preserved, or things that people don't necessarily value or care about and decide that they are no longer fitting or worthy of being that in that archive, then become an archival they get cast out. And through that work, talking to conservators, for example, at the BC provincial archive, we've been thinking about this as "fugitivity." So an archivist that we worked with there, named Ann ten Cate, talked about these objects as being fugitive. They can't be kept. They're fleeing. They're, they're leaving the archive. So Trudi and I, over the last, you know, almost 10 years on this project, have been thinking about fugitive belongings, fugitive collections, and this force of what we call anarchival materiality in archives, which is the sort of lively force of all kinds of objects transforming, which changes the way the archive might be structured, or the way that object might be classified within an archive. And we see there's something quite powerful in that. So that's kind of the background of how we came to this current show. So we were working on a project at the BC provincial archive back in about 2017/2018 when we heard about Paleontology Research Centre in Tumbler Ridge, which is Northeastern British Columbia, just south of Dawson Creek. And we heard that the center was being closed because it had been defunded, and that the fate of those dinosaur fossils was uncertain. And this really resonated with us, because we were interested in how different kinds of collections suddenly go from being preserved and kind of important as part of a human or non-human legacy that should be preserved to suddenly being fugitive or becoming anarchival so we decided to go up there, and we reached out to the last paleontologist who was employed there, whose name is Lisa Buckley, who had been there for many years with her partner, Rich McCrea, developing a research program around paleontology to see if we could document the collections and photograph the spaces before the centre closed. And as we went there, we learned that Tumbler Ridge is the newest incorporated town in the province. That it was built to service a coal mine, and that over time, depending on the value of coal and the profitability of the mine, the population ebbed and flowed depending on whether or not the mine was open or not. And that was also interesting to us, just to think about the persistence of structures that, like a town, that you assume will be there forever. But of course, cities and towns also come and go, like things and collections. So, that became part of the project.

So what you'll see in the exhibit, if you were walking through it, was some documentation of these paleontology work benches and workstations that have been left, and some of the plaster casts and dinosaur fossils in the big storage rooms, and also some video that just gives a sense of the kind of labor that was carried out in preparing and revealing fossils in rock. And then a series of anthotypes that are plant based emulsions that themselves are a very fugitive and impermanent and unpredictable photographic process that we created based on those dinosaur fossils. So just thinking about, you know, history of photography its connection to mining and, of course, paleontology's connection to mining and the process of documenting those fossils as akin to something like a contact print or resonant with photography. And so those are some of the things that are in that exhibit and clearly has quite a long backstory.

Am Johal  09:53
Yeah, the sort of move from anthropology to contemporary art is, you know, very different than the move of anthropology and its relationship to the museum. And I'm wondering, just in terms of, as you approach an exhibition, what that looks like, in terms of creative process with your collaborator, and going to think about how it sits in a, in a gallery, and the kind of work it does once it's placed into an exhibition like context. But also being such an emergent form and space, what's the kind of theoretical armature behind how you think through the kind of vexing questions that emerge in a process such as this?

Kate Hennessy  10:38
Well, if I go back to the Ethnographic Terminalia collective, so Trudi and I are members of that, along with Craig Campbell, who's an anthropologist at University of Texas in Austin, and Fiona Campbell, who's a professor at UBC Okanagan, Stephanie Takaragawa, who's a professor at Chapman University. We were all grad students when we started that collective, and we were already making work that didn't fit into the conventions of our annual conference that we were all meeting at. So we all know those conferences you get 15 minutes, or maybe you get a round table, or there's more discussion, or maybe there's some other kind of format. But we were creating video works or installation type work, work that actually needed something like a gallery or a different kind of space to experience. So, you know, while we all had our sort of parallel, our own research projects that we wrote our PhD dissertations on, and so on, we were all, I think, on the side making this kind of work and then curating these exhibitions every year that went—that we found gallery space for in the cities where our annual anthropology meeting would take place. So the goal was to pull people out of those conference spaces and come to the shows and experience the work in different ways. So there was a lot of kind of improvisation, a lot of experimentation, a lot of uncertainty in how things would come together. And I think those are things actually, I've come to value hugely in our practice, and Trudi and I working together, we've also come to really appreciate our friendship, connection and the way that we can improvise together, you know, to create certain like video works or in the way we install the anthotypes that are in, on the wall in the 881 gallery. This kind of intuitive work is something that we create space for and allow things to emerge. You know, and I think this is what artists do, you have to create that space to allow the work to develop. But that's kind of antithetical, in some ways—well, let me think about that for a second—in some ways, to [the way] some people perceive academic or scholarly research. At the same time, that is what writing is. That is what you know, within anthropology, that's the way people should and I think do that work.

Am Johal  13:00
One of the questions I wanted to kind of get at in terms of the relationship between academia and art, or in this case, the specificity of anthropology and contemporary art, there are things that aren't acknowledged by the academy, or that art can transform academia in a different type of way. But what does being inside of a gallery allow you to do, as a scholar, that traditional forms of scholarship or knowledge mobilization, or those kinds of aspects of how work gets out into the world. What, what is it that's different for you in terms of what that relationship to contemporary art can do?

Kate Hennessy  13:39
That might be a good segue, actually, into talking about collaboration with Meghann O'Brien, who is a Haida Kwakwaka'wakw artist and weaver, incredible, incredible weaver and thinker. And also involved in this project is Hannah Turner, is a professor in the School of Information at UBC, and then a number of other collaborators. But this, this project has been really interesting because we've been working to support Meghann in creating digital transmediations that are based on her woven artwork. And this work has been primarily shown in galleries. And if I tell a little bit of a backstory, which I think is important for understanding this project, Meghann came to Hannah and me back in about 2018 because her incredible woven robe, which is titled Sky Blanket, was part of an exhibition called Border X that was touring across Canada. It was curated by Jaimie Isaac, who was then at the Winnipeg Art Gallery, and the blanket was going to be in this exhibition for a number of years, and Meghann was realizing that she just didn't feel good about it traveling for that amount of time, and she had important ceremonial work that she wanted to do at home. So she said, "Could we like," and this is actually Jaimie Isaac's idea, "could we 3d print the blanket?" You know? "Could we replicate it somehow?" So the original can come home, and the replica can tour in the exhibition. So we thought that was really interesting, because that's a big conversation within museum anthropology that, you know, institutions like the Smithsonian will digitally fabricate, let's say, a Tlingit headdress, and they will repatriate the original, and they'll put the replica on display. And so that's a way to facilitate repatriation, and that's something Hannah and I have been really interested in in our work, before that. So we thought, okay, that's interesting. Let's think about it as a replica, and let's see what it would take to scan it or create a 3d model, or something like that, so that we can do this like you're asking. But as we were doing it together, and we were working with an amazing digital modeling artist named Conrad Sly, we started to really fall in love and be very interested in what the digital modeling aesthetic looked like, or what what was happening as we were trying to translate photogrammetry into something like a 3d model that could ostensibly be printed or replicated, and we realized that the replica was actually much less interesting than what the digital modeling process could reveal about this dynamic of return. And so Meghann with our team, decided that instead of creating a big hunk of plastic, like a 3d model, which feels awful, we instead created this video called wrapped in the cloud, which goes through in about four minutes these different kind of animated phases of the digital modeling process, and it sort of looks like constellation of stars. And then it goes to these, like point clouds and these beautiful polygons and different colors that are inherent to the digital and then it sort of takes on the full resolution of Sky Blanket, and then it goes, kind of dissolves, and goes through different stages, back to the Pleiades constellation again. So that video then replaced Sky Blanket, and it was installed in the gallery the way the blanket had been installed with these beautiful floating balls of mountain goat wool that Meghann made, and it then toured across the country.

And it was just really fascinating to see that, and for Meghan also to see that somehow when people were in that gallery space they were encountering her blanket, and the questions that it provoked in very different ways. So questions of digital return, questions of why the original was not there, questions of what it means to digitize something and why this might be connected to like environmental concerns or, you know, hydrology and clouds and the mountain goat that the wool came from, and all of these questions kind of can be brought forth in a different way. So we were all, we didn't expect that necessarily, but we were very excited to see that working within this contemporary art space is actually incredibly generative for speaking back to museum anthropology, or to the way people might be theorizing, and perhaps also in practice, thinking about using the digital to support repatriations or return and so we've written about as a group how, when that sky blanket was taken off of exhibit in Border X, Meghann brought it back to Campbell River to dance in a naming ceremony for her niece, and that it was worn by her grandmother, and that that was a really powerful moment for her. And so I think, I think for me, that's a good example of how working in that space allows us to put kind of the theory into practice, and to also generate these relationships with amazing people like Meghann, and to hold that space to keep thinking and iterating and seeing where the work leads us. It's just been really fun.

Am Johal  18:59
Yeah, when you were at, say, the beginning of the process of this research and collaborative work to where it ended up after it had circulated and been through galleries. I imagine that some of the ethical questions or questions around consent to just other kind of questions that you might not have imagined at the, at the beginning. What were the sort of new things that emerged that you weren't expecting at the front part of the research to kind of where it ended up?

Kate Hennessy  19:32
Yeah, I mean, in this space of digitization, art, museum belongings and collections, there's, so much to be thought about around ownership and who has the right to circulate images and duplicate them and change them. This project with Meghann, it was important to all of us that we have those conversations really early on and be clear that the work that we were producing is Meghann's work. And that we are working with her, you know, technically and you know, sometimes conceptually, to help build, help make the work. Like many artists, have people working with them to support them in the way that the work is realized. So there was that question, and you know, to be really clear about ownership. Then interestingly, like, I think when you try something different within a university, you often come up against moments of the bureaucracy that make your project difficult and require some rewriting. So, well, one of the things that is also important, I should say, is fundraising. So we applied for a SSHRC grant that would allow us to work with Meghann over four to five years, and it would allow us also to pay her. So for example, in setting up that relationship where we can pay her, we have to rewrite the contracts that come from the university that are often very IP oriented. So if someone's a contractor, you know, it says very clearly the IP belongs to the university, and that doesn't work for our project, so we ask for that to be removed, and it's a lot of that kind of pushback. Yeah, so I think that's those are some examples of the kinds of things that come up. But even, you know, making sure that an artist like Meghann can be compensated, you know, not enough, but in a regular way, like any graduate student who was working with us would be paid as a research assistant. We get that this is Meghan's project, but it was important to us that we compensate her for that time.

Am Johal  21:36
I know that you've done a lot of collaborative work as well, recent exhibition that was on Galiano island with Rosemary Georgeson and Jessica Hallenbeck. And wondering if you can share a little bit about that project,

Kate Hennessy  21:50
Absolutely. I can say that, you know, I was thinking about some of these projects earlier, and I was thinking about, you know, which projects to me, are personal and which projects were less personal. So this one is a very personal one. I'd say the work with Trudi, the becoming anarchival project, also feels extremely personal, but The Water We Call Home tells a part of a evolving and missing story of connection between Rosemary and her extended family that comes out of work that Rose has been doing with Jessica for many years, and that Jessica and Rose are working on a book about right now. Which is also about the anarchival about the stories and the relationships that weren't documented in a colonial archive, but which have been very important for Rose and family in their reconnections and getting to know each other again and re presencing their relations on Galiano and around the Salish Sea. So the backstory is so important in these collaborative projects, even to talk about them as an individual. You know, there's, there's so much that we all do together, so sometimes it's even hard to separate my own self out of it. But I've known Rosemary since I was a little kid, because we both grew up on Galiano, and I've known Jessica through the Access to Media Education Society. We met when we were board members, and have all become friends. And then Jessica came and joined my lab as a postdoc. So while she was a postdoc, we were able to raise funds to do this kind of extension of the project that she and Rose began, which was a project of finding the names of Rose's grandmothers that had not been documented in the archive, and those names were really important for finding extended family who had been separated because of colonial policies and violence. So this project, The Water We Call Home, was about bringing extended family and friends that Rose had been reconnecting with, back to Galiano Island, where I grew up and creating these gatherings in different places around the island where people could share their stories of reconnection. So there were about three of these major gatherings, two of which were filmed and we edited in two short films, and then a third, which was photographed and recorded in sound, but not video. That became a series of images and the with photographs by the artist Kayli Spitzer. And this all came together into the exhibition at the Yellowhouse Art Center on Galiano, and then it's also now re-curated and installed at the Gulf of Georgia Cannery in Steveston. But one really important part of that project was Rose, establishing a advisory circle of Indigenous women who were connected to Rose through family and through place. So a group of women from around the Salish Sea that was, so in addition to Rose, there was Eva Wilson Coast Salish woman who I, I've also known my whole life, growing up on Galiano; Christie Lee Charles, who is Musqueam; Fay Blaney, who is Homalco from Vancouver Island; the late and deeply missed Karen Charlie, who was a Penelakut woman and elder; and Kimi Haxton, who is a Potowatomi woman who facilitated and kind of held the circle. So these women working with Rose and Jess and myself to plan these gatherings, to review the gatherings after they were completed, and think about what the next gathering would need to do, where it should be, why it should be there, what we needed to eat, what activities we would undertake. Those guided, those gatherings iteratively, and were altogether, I think, a very significant act of re-presencing on Galiano.

And I would also point out, on The Water We Call Home website, there's a full documentation of a symposium that we held the day after the opening of the first exhibit on Galiano, which was really incredible. It was it was in the community hall, and it was three kind of discussion circles, the first one being the advisory circle of these women, Indigenous women that I've just mentioned, reflecting on what it meant for them to be a part of this project and the creation of the exhibition, and what that would mean for them going forward. That was then followed by a group of academics, Indigenous and non-Indigenous academics, who all have a connection to Galiano in their work, also listening, witnessing, reflecting on what they had heard through the exhibition and the films and what that would mean for them going forward. And then a group of policy makers, including representative from the Anglican Church on Galiano, from Capital Regional District representatives, an MLA from Vancouver Island, and Galiano Island, community leaders, including Rosemary's daughter Jeannine, talking about as decision makers and as politicians, people who have power to enact change, what the exhibition means for them going forward in how they will do their work. And there were a lot of tears that day. It was, it was really, really transformative. And I don't use that word lightly, but I think for many of us sitting and listening, and also the way that the whole symposium was held by Indigenous leaders from the region, including Chief Bill Williams from Squamish, who kind of turned the Galiano community hall into something like a long house in terms of the protocols that were followed in order to call forward witnesses and honor them and ensure that everyone had some instructions for taking that knowledge forward. So, I mean, it was like, it was incredible. I had never seen anything like that on Galiano before. You know, those kinds of words hadn't been spoken all in one place before, to my knowledge. And so I think that's another example of, you know, why I think this kind of community-based, but deeply collaborative, long term work has a really important place within the university, because that's, you know, that's who I'm employed by. But in the past, I don't know that that kind of work would necessarily be acknowledged as academic work. Maybe it isn't, or maybe it is.

Am Johal  28:39
And in terms of, you know, you mentioned a little bit about funding structures or the bureaucracy of the university, that these things are in place for particular sets of reasons, but particularly in doing community engaged forms of work over a long period of time, these structural barriers really get in the way of being able to work in that way or to experiment in new ways, because it's not the conventional form that that research often takes. And I'm wondering how you've sort of approached building the work around or the thing that gets around the rules of the possibilities, or to kind of open up the problem that's that's clearly present. Certainly, I know in our own work in community engagement and community engaged research, this comes up over and over again, regardless of what institution people are at. That it's a structural kind of issue that we're all kind of forced to think through in a proper way to create more humane systems and processes by which this work can flourish in a different type of way.

Kate Hennessy  29:40
Well, I want to give big props to Jessica Hallenbeck, who is a amazing grant writer, and she's ferocious in her grant writing. So you know, it's like we will apply for all the grants, all the different kinds of grants that could possibly support this kind of work. So if you look at our, you know, list of funders for The Water We Call Home, there's many different types. So we had a, you know, one grant from Social Science Humanities Research Council, an Insight Development Grant that was really written around the idea of collaborative and community based filmmaking as a method for decolonial curation. And that's something we had to think through before, like, "what's our angle here?" That we could write that would allow us to do what we want to do? And, you know, think about what the contribution can be to thinking. And I think that's something that the Water We Call Home, that's one of its big contributions, back to, you know, methodology, or back to anthropology or filmmaking, is that these processes of bringing people together with the outcome being a film is a way for us to curate exhibitions that that can tell these stories and speak back to the archive, or speak back to the colonial story that this kind of work undoes in little communities like Galiano, but we have to, you know, we have to work around so to be creative in the way that we think about how we write them, but then how we use the funds is also important. So part of that would be, you know, choosing to pay for a lot of people and their family members to travel to this little island to feed them, to put them up in, you know, comfortable family homes and to cook for everybody. These are actually really important parts of the process, and I have to say, that's something I really thought was amazing about the way that Jessica thought about those gatherings and the centrality of things like food. But I can see and also through other projects I've worked through in other communities that take this community based and sort of collaborative media production approach that those gatherings and eating together and building those relationships really are super, super important. And those aren't things that are usually budget lines in grant applications. And it takes, I think funding organizations like SSHRC, or like the Virtual Museum of Canada is another funding body that I've worked through a lot in projects like these, and they can see and they acknowledge that that kind of gathering and that kind of community life is an important budget line that should be acknowledged.

Am Johal  31:06
I was going to ask a little bit about, broadly, the Making Culture Lab, where you do some of your work out of that, in terms of projects you're starting to take on, or intend to take on, or want to take on in the future. But wondering if you can give us a little bit of an insight into where you see the Lab going and what you're currently working on?

Kate Hennessy  32:43
Oh, that's a great question. Well, the Making Culture Lab is, it's a group that I started when I was hired at SFU and interestingly, at the School of Interactive Arts and Technology, that is the culture of how graduate students work with supervisors, is in a kind of lab or a studio environment. So through design, computer science, people are doing a lot of work in, you know, VR, XR, realities and things like that. So we have spaces, and students work in those spaces. So when I started that was new to me, because generally, anthropologists don't work like that, but I could really see that that was a good fit for the kind of applied work that I value and enjoy doing. The way that those projects come into the lab, well, it could be like the story I told around Meghann, is someone approaching us and saying, "Hey, I've got this idea. Do you think we could try something?" And then being open to that turning into a bigger, longer term project, if it's a good fit. It might be, you know, often it comes out of relationships with people that I know, so like friends or researchers who I already have a level of trust and understanding with, makes it more possible for us to imagine working on these longer term projects with. And then, of course, meeting new people and developing those ideas. But a lot of irons in the fire and a lot of patience and letting things happen when they're going to happen, and also being ready to go in a new direction when the time is right. So that's maybe part of that sort of intuitive feeling about when a project is the right project to take on at that time.

Am Johal  34:17
I know from the great work of the Below the Radar research team that the Ethnographic Terminalia Collective was awarded the Council for Museum Anthropology's Michael Ames Award for Innovative Museum Anthropology. I know Michael Ames, or knew Michael Ames. Michael Ames and Jim Green used to teach Urban Field School in the Downtown Eastside in the late 90s, early 2000s. A really wonderful person that we miss a lot. Of course, they passed away, I believe around 2006 I think it was. I'm wondering if you can speak a little bit to how your collective work with your collaborators, in terms of how it's read within the field of anthropology? And alongside, you have a kind of adjudication in the field of contemporary art. These are two different sets of eyes or ways that people look at the work that you're producing, but wondering if you could speak a little to the reception of this work in these areas.

Kate Hennessy  35:13
Well, you know, one of the things I would say about my lab is that there's a, this framework called "research creation," that a lot of people are are talking about, and I think while my understanding is it has perhaps, sort of neoliberal roots in the UK, around the need to somehow quantify the impact of something like artwork. So that's problematic, because I don't think we should have to do that. But research creation is becoming, I would say, a legitimized and well understood funding category within the Canadian, you know, research funding landscape, and also, I'm hearing other people use that term in the United States on other projects and in Europe. So there is this framework now that acknowledges that making something for its own sake, is an expression of research, and it is knowledge creation, and perhaps a really effective way of, if you want to use like a SSHRC term, "knowledge mobilization," because you're reaching so many people, probably many more people than you might with your journal article behind a pay wall. So you know, that's one part of the story. And if I think about where the making culture lab is going in the future, I would say it is to continue to theorize and think through the different ways that research creation is a generative space for us to work between contemporary art, between the academy and research, and thinking about methodology and making a contribution in that space in many different ways. Ethnographic Terminalia, I think we were doing something like research creation, although at that time we didn't have the language to describe it. We kind of just knew that what we were making didn't fit within the structures of what was seen as valuable in terms of tenure and promotion in the academy, or publishing and that kind of thing. And we had to work quite hard to always document those exhibitions. We made a series of catalogs. We invited a lot of reviewers to come in and write about the shows and what they saw as valuable. And I think there's a pretty you know, going back and looking at them, it makes me feel really good to read what people would say about the work, because they would see in those exhibitions important contributions back to anthropology. And so I think it has opened a space within North American and maybe even European anthropology that welcomes these alternative expressions of what people see in the world as anthropologists and as artists.

Am Johal  37:43
Yeah, there's this kind of the legibility and the possibility within interstitial spaces that aren't sort of, you don't have an over-coding armature of looking at it, that these places can maybe produce something other than and you can feel that in the work and in the process and its own kind of mode of working.

Kate Hennessy  38:03
Yeah, it is those spaces in between the border zones. You know, we often talked about that within the Ethnographic Terminalia collective between anthropology and art and other disciplines. I do think at the School of Interactive Arts and Technology, which is itself a highly interdisciplinary department, where I am the only anthropologist, that's been a really privileged space for me, because the disciplinary expectations that I would have had in an anthropology department have been quite different. And I do think there's a conversation that I'm seeing around, you know, research creation, or other types of contributions that academics make, or that graduate students, in terms of their theses and the formats of their theses and dissertations can take, there is a real desire among many people that I talk to from all over who want to see these alternative forms be accepted and they continue to be pushed back against in all kinds of different departments, so—I kind of lost my train of thought. [Laughs].

Am Johal  39:06
I consider you one of a long line of weirdos and misfits that have joined us in solidarity because we feel the same way about the work that we do inside the institution, about mis recognition or non recognition in the way that we that we work, but we hope that our listeners will understand what we're trying to do.

Kate Hennessy  39:27
Yeah, I mean, I do think that. I think what I was trying to get at before is that it's a privileged place to be in an interdisciplinary department where you are encouraged to not only sort of invent yourself and do things that you couldn't do in your home department, but, you know, push those boundaries and also be compelled to explain yourself to your colleagues. Because, you know, in a in a very focused disciplinary environment, everyone might have certain agreed upon standards of what is, you know, seen. As good or not good, or what is seen as excellent, or what those criteria are, and so it becomes much harder to push back against, especially, you know, when you have this sort of like, you know, age hierarchy, or more entrenched beliefs about the discipline, more resistance to change. So I think one of the things that I would love to see more of outside of an interdisciplinary department like mine is more inclusive tenure and promotion criteria, policy documents, for example, or in our school, it's very clear that collaborative authorship, co-authorship, making, alternative forms of knowledge mobilization and expression are appreciated and encouraged. So instead of being seen as not counting, which always made me feel very sad within more disciplinary frameworks.

Am Johal  40:51
[I'm] wondering if you can share a little bit about the origins of The Saltlicks. Well, you know that story is really Jessica Hallenbeck's story to tell. So maybe you'll ask her about that too when she comes by. But it's a band that was started by Jessica, and she, she has a story to tell about that, but I think, you know, my understanding is she really wanted to bring people together to make music and build relationships through the writing of music and the performing of music, and so she's brought different people together over time, but there's sort of a group that gelled together. And if I reflect on The Saltlicks, it's probably more about process and practicing and getting together than it is about performing. But we did, you know, just before the pandemic, do some live recording for an album, and then when the pandemic happened and we couldn't get together, we did some, like, backyard completion of that album. So that is some of the music that we've put out. Yeah!  Could, could you describe a jam session or your relation to improvisation? Punk, improvisation.

Kate Hennessy  42:01
You know, we get into Suna Studios on Clark Drive, we do our best to set up the gear as quickly as we can. We connect with each other, we talk, we catch up, and we play our songs and we make new songs. And, you know, none of us are, like, super trained musicians in any way. I've like sung in bands in the past, but no, I think it's about, you know, making music about things that we are struggling with in our own world. So we, you know, write about oppression, we write about the experience as parents. We write about, you know, songs I think, that are inflected by our own research with many of us are working in deep collaboration with community organizations, with First Nations communities, with making films. There's a lot going on in that work that I think maybe we can find another way to express and come together around through three chords, and, you know, a lot of yelling. And [laughs]. You know?

Am Johal  43:07
Kate, is there anything else you'd like to add?

Kate Hennessy  43:11
Wow, well, I want to thank you for your interest in, in this work and for inviting me to talk about it. I think I would just add that I'm always so grateful to all of the people that I've had the good fortune of working with, and I feel very privileged to be invited into a lot of different types of projects. There are often digital projects, website sort of facing projects, design oriented projects, or projects with First Nations communities like, I'm thinking of Stó:lō Nation, or the Sq'ewlets First Nation, or the Doig River First Nation, where I first started doing Virtual Museum of Canada exhibit design work when I was doing my PhD. It's been a real honor to get to work on these projects, and with each one, I have learned so much about these politics of collections and ownership. About collaboration and those, the importance of those working relationships. So I just think, you know, this has been a huge privilege, and I really just hope I get to keep doing it into the future. I think coming out of the show and getting feedback from largely an arts community, as opposed to presenting that work within an anthropology conference or publishing and more disciplinary focused types of publications, I did feel quite encouraged about our path of collaborating together, not with a particular disciplinary outcome, but letting the creative practice lead our work. I felt very appreciative of people's engagement with our work that largely came out of our commitment to improvising together. Commitment to creating together, to friendship that allows us to have deep conversations about the work and how it makes us feel and what it brings up for us. So I think, you know, if anything, I just feel really inspired coming out of that and excited to continue to produce work together and gave us some clear directions about some like generative ways or methods for developing that particular art practice going forward. You know, but I think what I'm able to do with Trudi around video and photography definitely has some resonance with my experience with The Saltlicks as well, because, you know, a lot of I feel very close to these amazing people in this group, even though we can't get together as much as we used to, now. You know, our lives have changed, and you know, we do have a rehearsal scheduled for this week, so I'm pretty excited about that. But, you know, there's something a kind of like a solidarity and a closeness that comes through creating work together, and I, and I really appreciate that, not as a sideline to work in academia, but as something that actually generates and makes things possible. And if I think back on the projects that I've been talking about with you, which are all deeply collaborative, and I know I want to point out that I'm not in any way at the centre of these projects, but they're projects I have been involved in, and I think it's really helpful, and like useful to look back at how those projects have fit together and emerged from one another, and—but those projects only come to be because of the relationships that we can forge, and it's not always an easy thing to do or to maintain. Sometimes they're really intense, and then sometimes they, you know, you step back and can't keep those relationships as strong as they once were, but that's okay, and that's part of being alive and working with people and moving through time together. So that's, that's probably where I would leave that.

Am Johal  46:58
Thank you so much for joining us on Below the Radar.

Kate Hennessy  47:01
Thank you so much.

[music, "Waxing and Waning" by The Saltlicks]

The Saltlicks  47:04
And the moon's waxing and waning is kind of like the ocean, you know.

Kathy Feng  47:18
Below the Radar is a knowledge democracy podcast created by SFU's Vancity Office of Community Engagement. Thanks for listening to our conversation with Kate Hennessy. Head to the show notes to learn more about her work, and thanks from all of us at Below the Radar.

[music]