Rock Swap is an invitation to gather and share stories of the many lives lived by rocks. Throughout the day, folks of all ages are invited to bring a rock or pick a rock from our collection at the field house where there will also be questionnaires available for guests to write about where their rock has come from and where they hope it may go next. Guests will then be invited to swap their rock with someone else’s rock, exchanging stories and nurturing the continuation of the rocks’ life cycles. Together we will trace, document, and imagine both the real and fictional stories of rock migration and shapeshifting across time and space. While we may not know (or remember!) where our rock has been, or where it is going, Rock Swap invites a mode of generative and generous speculation to open up possible futures still in-the-making.
Rock Swap is an extension of Rock Garden - an interactive installation featuring hand-crafted rock-shaped pillows designed and choreographed to provide comfort for the body upon the foundational belief that rest is a form of resistance. These two projects look to rocks as teachers for adaptation and transformation, who prompt us to reflect on and deepen our relationship to land, place, and community.
Location under the trees next to Elm Park Fieldhouse
(5837 Larch St., Kerrisdale, Vancouver)
Time noon - 4pm
What to bring your favourite rock, or a few, possibly one to trade
Sarah Wong and Ileanna Cheladyn are dance artists based in Vancouver, Canada on the unceded territories of the xʷməθkwəy̓əm (Musqueam), Skwxwú7mesh (Squamish), and Səl̓ílwətaʔ/Selilwitulh (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations. Their practices find a home in writing, producing, installation, crafting, and performing. Since 2019 they have been working together on projects that prioritize experiences of rest, care, and resistance. Sarah’s work emerges from her lived experience as a queer and disabled second-generation Chinese-Canadian woman, focusing on archival processes and accessing embodied generational knowledge. Ileanna, a queer white woman, explores practices of somatic justice within dance techniques and communities, looking at how they account for and tend to limits of exhaustion, mutual aid, and political action. Sarah and Ileanna come together with slowness at the forefront to remain critical of taken for granted currents of the production and consumption of art, labour, and identities.
