An Exhaling Aviary of Scattered Flights

Curator: Michele Fiedler
06/10 - 02/11
 

An Exhaling Aviary of Scattered Flights is an online programme of films and podcasts that touch on crucial socio-political events of the contemporary cross-border and diasporic reality of the Americas. Referring to only a few among the innumerable stories of the region, the exhibited works consist of documentaries, fiction, reenactments, conversations and commissions. 

The title, An Exhaling Aviary of Scattered Flights, is translated from a verse written by Chilean poet Jorge Lizama Pizarro which in Spanish reads “Pajarera sopladora/de vuelos dispersos.” It was published in his 1991 book El trapecista del infinito [Trapeze Artist of the Infinite], by Editions Gráfico in Montreal where he moved to in 1980 after working in different cities as a sailor. The text on the back cover of the book says he, like thousands of others, left Chile in 1974 after the Coup as part of “la generación quebrada” (the broken generation).*

The verse, not originally intended to mean this, has been borrowed for our program to express the immense number of stories before and after diasporas or of political, economic and social complications of the American South--some of which are shared by ways of indigenous populations throughout all the Americas. The four films that will screen, one per week, are about the uprising and self government of the Purhépecha community in Michoacán, México (Cherán, Victor Arroyo); a story of childhood memories from the Chilean migration (Tales from My Childhood, Francisca Duran); the rewriting and reenactment of a theater play that was censored during the Guatemalan Civil War by the military government (Place of Solace, Naufus Ramírez-Figueroa); and a bar’s power of community building for the trans and gay Latin American diaspora in Los Angeles (Wildness, Wu Tsang). The podcasts include conversations with the filmmakers, invited guests Tatá Meche, Dr. Susana Vargas Cervantes and Wingston González as well as a new commission by artist Helena Martin Franco. 

*I found El trapecista del infinito in a thrift store at Rue St-Hubert shortly after moving to Montreal. It was one of those rare finds that gives one a feeling of being in the right place at the right time. I didn’t know about Jorge Lizama Pizzaro before, but we shared a language and a city which at some point had been new to both of us, for extremely different reasons. Some of his life is told in the book, but apart from it, the information on the back cover is still all the information I have on the author. 

Michele Fiedler 

Montreal, 2021