As an artist who explores associations and disassociations of culture and nature, I am playing with sunlight in performance in the hot Montréal summer. This is an extension of a body of collaborative research creation work.

My project this summer, Halo Event, thinks of sunlight as a material and as something that’s alive. This isn’t a new framework: the belief that natural phenonmena are alive, or animism, is as old as human culture, and has more recently been articulated in schools of contemporary philosophy.

Creative efforts to shape sunlight are as old as human culture, evidenced in the variety of ancient structures built around solstices by Mayan, Druid, Indigenous and prehistoric populations.

Our relationship to the sun, to ecological entities, matters. It matters because those relationships affect how we shape ecologies, how we consider our impact and how we respond to the increasingly real pressure of climate change. These are inherently cultural questions, which artists are uniquely equipped to address.

Canada and climate change

This summer has been particularly hot because of global warming. Canada is warming at about twice as fast as the global rate: a 2 C increase globally means a 3 to 4 C increase for Canada.

The biggest contributors to global warming are major corporations and companies, many tied to fossil fuel industries, which operate internationally.

Resistance to global warming takes particular forms in North America. Aside from provincial initiatives, like Québec’s 2021 ban on future fossil fuel projects, Indigenous resistance to fossil fuel infrastructure expansion has had a proven, consistent and dramatic effect.

In Halo Event, I worked with sound artist Kathy Kennedy and performance artist Laurence........

© The Conversation