Workshop: Passing Through the Heart

This workshop is informed by the ongoing collaboration between Patricio Dávila and Immony Mèn, who collect recipes and approaches to cultural food practices from immigrants and refugees in Canada. The workshop aims to build an understanding of how diasporic voices and recording technology can form intimate markers for narratives of settlement, refuge, remembering and loss.

About the Artists:

Immony Mèn

Immony Mèn is an artist, educator, and community-based researcher. He is an Assistant Professor in the Faculty of Arts and Science at OCAD University. As an artist, he has exhibited nationally and internationally and has been awarded municipal, provincial, and federal arts council grants to support his work. His research focuses on developing a theoretical framework for understanding (specifically Khmer/Cambodian) diasporic experience through media praxis, critical race theory, and various forms of community engagement. Men’s practice takes the form of research-creation projects such as interactive installations, interdisciplinary performances, social artworks, and participatory community projects. Works include Receipts, Fabulous Ones, Post-Colonial Hot Ones, Traversal Residency, Passing through the Heart, Shadows!, Cite, Chthulucene, Powers of Kin, Everything in Place, and Taking Care of Business. Immony is co-director of Public Visualization Lab / Studio.

Patricio Dávila

Patricio Dávila is an artist, designer, researcher and educator based in Toronto, Canada. His creative practice explores locative media projects, essay videos, landscape film, new media installations, and participatory community projects. Recent projects include: Shadows!, Powers of Kin, Chthuluscene, Tent City Projections, The Line, and In The Air Tonight. He has created curatorial projects including Multiplex Essay Film Festival, and the Diagrams of Power exhibition, public workshops and a book published by Onomatopee Projects (NL). His creative research practice focuses on the politics and aesthetics of participation in the visualization of spatial issues with a specific focus on urban experiences, mobile technologies and large-scale interactive public installations. He is also co-author of Critical Visualization: Rethinking the Representation of Data, published by Bloomsbury (UK). Dávila is currently Associate Professor in Cinema and Media Arts at York University. Patricio is co-director of Public Visualization Lab / Studio.