Teacher: All That I Touch I Change
with the Odeimin Runners Club
The Odeimin Runners Club has created three films that consider the complexities of human survival, connection to land and rematriation through performative counter-mapping by IBPOC (Indigenous, Black and People of Colour) as a means to thread territories, past-present-futures, and knowledges to help navigate current political and environmental instabilities facing communities, and in particular their own. An interactive webpage situates the three stories of the individual members onto a metaphorical map that shifts between the odeimin or heartberry (strawberry), indicating the teachings that guide the collective and their work around the phytograms, as well as the cartographic representation of the territories they are from.
Teacher: All That I Touch I Change with the Odeimin Runners Club is a part of Durham Art Gallery's 2021 exhibtion theme: Earthseed. It follows in chronology Trickster: Refining Right Relationship or, All That You Touch You Change presented by Yero Timi-Biu and Jaclyn Quaresma, which features the work of Kaya Joan, Laura Joy Pieters, Shamica Ruddock and Whitney French + Lue Boileau produced during the 2020 digital residency supported by Durham Art Gallery, Crate Studio + Project Space and Whippersnapper Gallery.
Viewing Instructions:
Click HERE. The exhibition is also available on the gallery website through the “Earthseed” button. The link and button will open a new webpage where circular images will come to the foreground appearing more clearly when your cursor hovers over the map. Click on the image to watch the film. Please note: The webpage is best experienced on a desktop or laptop in full screen mode or on a tablet in horizontal orientation.
Odeimin Runners Club
Adrian Kahgee, (Saugeen First Nation), founding member of Odeimin Runner’s Club, is an artist and Community Arts Educator, currently teaching Visual Arts and Indigenous Studies, with the Bluewater District School Board. She is former Co-Artistic Director and Community Co-ordinator for the Fabulous Festival of Fringe Film. Adrian is Co-Producer of Saugeen Takes on Film, a community-based film program working with artisans, youth and knowledge keepers from her community. Her current artistic practices, of painting, performance activated installations and film, are centered around research into her Afro Indigenous relations, as a member of the Saugeen Ojibway Nation and as a freedom seeker/ Black Canadian descendant of the New Lowell and Collingwood settlements. Her work further explores the sharing of familial and communal knowledge, of our existence upon Turtle Island since time immemorial. Adrian’s work has been featured at Creemore Festival of the Arts, Reel World Film Festival, imagineNATIVE, FADO, ANDPVA and CBC Radio.
Media and story creator Rebeka Tabobondung (Wasauksing First Nation) is the founder and Editor-in-Chief of MUSKRATMagazine.com a leading digital Indigenous arts and culture magazine established in 2010. Rebeka is also a filmmaker, writer, poet, and Indigenous knowledge researcher with a strong body of work focused on Indigenous birth knowledges. Since 2017, Rebeka has been working as a creator, researcher and writer with award winning Montreal based Rezolution Pictures, who along with APTN are partners in the Spirit of Birth web series and interactive Spirit of Birth mobile App and digital platform. In 2011 Rebeka produced and directed the short doc, Spirit of Birth in partnership with the National Screen Institute, which screened across Canada and internationally. Rebeka’s written works are published in numerous books, journals, and anthologies.
Debbie Ebanks Schlums is an artist-researcher born in Jamaica to Black and Hakka Chinese parents. As a PhD student and Vanier Scholar in Cinema and Media Studies at York University, her research explores methodologies of Caribbean diasporic archiving in the Jamaican Diaspora through storytelling and media installation. Debbie is a recipient of the Susan Crocker and John Hunkin Scholarship in the Fine Arts, and Canada Council for the Arts and Ontario Arts Council grants. She was a founding member of the Out of a War Zone and To Lemon Hill Collectives, both addressing the Syrian refugee crisis. She is a former Co-Director of the Fabulous Festival of Fringe Film and Co-Producer of Saugeen Takes on Film.
Odeimin Runners Club, Everything I Touch I Change, 2021. Still.