Many people standing around a gazebo to listen to a 5-person choir perform, sunny day

naakita f.k.

CAFKA.25 | Field Guide to the Understory

naakita f.k.

@naakitafk

Chicago, USA / Montreal, QC

website

the rain remembers its life as sea

the rain remembers its life as sea is a sonic composition performed over two days by a local chorus at Kitchener-Waterloo’s shorelines.

Composed through various acts of translation, from the sonification of bioacoustic data from the Great Lakes Watershed, to the notation of hydrophone recordings made with the region's waterways, the work seeks to create a dialogue between humans and beyond-humans outside of language.

In order to create liveable and desirable futures, we must listen to the places around us and those that inhabit them. The embodied gestures and relational connections created through the performances alongside the Watershed asks; what can be exchanged in an act of speech? What worlds can we build when we listen differently?

naakita f.k. is an interdisciplinary artist based between Zhegagoynak/Chicago and Tio’Tia:Ke/Mooniyang/Montreal. Through place-based and site-specific relations, they consider extractivism, including both resource extraction and extractive ideologies that show up in the wake of violence to land. Working through multimedia installation, their research uses hauntology to explore the impacts of the colonial project on built and natural environments, while imagining possible futures that can be contained in a haunted place. This practice is rooted in creating modes of listening to landscapes and the human and other-than-human-beings that inhabit them.


f.k. has shown their work nationally and internationally at institutions such as MoMA PS1, New York, NY (2012); Trinity Square Video, Toronto, ON (2016); Mémoire de l'Avenir, Paris, FR (2019); Videofenster, Cologne, DE (2021); Fonderie Darling, Montreal, QC (2022); Images Festival, Toronto, ON (2023); and Centre CLARK, Montreal, QC (2024). Their research and creation has been supported by grants from Saw Video (2018), CALQ (2022), Canada Council for the Arts (2020, 2021, 2022, 2023, 2024) and LOJIQ (2024).