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Faithinterface
is a community-based
intervention project that has materialized within my investments in
contemporary public art movements through my studio, writing and researching
practices that examine dualistic behavioral survival techniques used
by women in reaction to personal and social traumatic narratives.
I belong to a silent and invisible community of ex-members, through
parental affiliation, of an apocalyptic cult that was partically dissolved
in the early ninties. Using slick media campaigns throughout the seventies
and eighties, the Worldwide Church of God under the godhead of Herbert
W. Armstrong seduced many thousands of Canadians to devote their lives,
families, money, and often careers, to the preparation for the Final
Judgement. The inherent violence and abuse knitted into the fabric of
tyrannical and dictatorial doctrination began to surface upon the leader’s
death; many women's histories have fallen through the cracks of silence
in the aftermath of this dissolution as new splinter groups construct
histories that attempt to justify and/or erase the past.
August,
1999 - May 2000
I will
be embarking on a Recollection of female ex-members through the popular
press and the Internet with the conviction that my own sect-induced-sobriety
is shared by other women of common experience, a commonality that is
often neutralized out of a sense of uncomfortable incredibility. As
second-generation ex-sect members, we struggle to find agency outside
of the sect-structure of imminent world-destruction. This project is
an attempt to account for the incredulous, to enliven the space of silence,
and to materialize, with creative means, internalized apocalyptic fear
as we approach another destruction date set by the cult and other similar
religious groups: the end of a millenium.
Overturning traditional Western constructions of portraiture as capture
and representation of the Silent Other, I intend to transform Sect-Induced
Silence into an active listening space between myself, and other willing
ex-members of the cult. The resulting "portraits", which will
be given to the story-teller, may serve as testimonies to our stories,
or as objects as metaphors for the listening-centered relation held
as we seek to tell our way through the abusive veil of sect-silence.
As the artist-facilitator, I seek to enliven interspaces in collective
faith of matter-determining decision processes; the movement within
the wave of our words might take the form of a collection of visuals
and/or words, a performative action, or an audio-visual presentation,
hopefully in the Spring, 2000.
The transformative potential of sharing sect-survival stories which
serve to illuminate the cult-control mechanism of the Worldwide`s sect-specific
language has been initiated by Ed Mentell, in his The Painful Truth
about the Worldwide Church of God web site where I have posted both
my story and a call-to-collaboration. (www.members.tripod.com/~ejm/pain.htm).
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biography:
Bred on
the shores of vancouver island as an undercover child closet-scribbler,
colette spent two years daubing in a vancouver art school before moving
to switzerland where, for a brief episode, she undertook the profession
of wifery. encouraged to choose between the generative capacities of
matrimony or markmaking she chose the latter with a one-way ticket to
montréal where she completed a visual arts degree.
colette likes to see through Words and other objects in the objective
of sharpening the sense-space of interactive creative forces that often
materializes as Word public interventions and private explorations,
as activist work at the Concordia Women`s Centre, and mostly as scribblings
(she maintains that if everyone scribbled more then there would be more
of us scribbling and less of us scrapping and scratching scrumblingly.
and that, would be a Very Good Thing.)
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