Since 2012 I have been honored to be part of a creative collaboration with members of the Behchoko community, in the Tłı̨chǫ region, Northwest Territories. I have worked with elders and youth on projects that involve the visualization of regional oral history through participatory design and animation. Since the beginning of this collaboration, we completed one film in 2013: The Woman Who Came Back. In 2016 we began our second film, based on the nineteenth-century making of peace between the Tłı̨chǫ and the neighbouring Yellowknife Dene.
Through this ongoing work, we adhere to the Tłı̨chǫ educational philosophy of being ’strong like two people’. There is strength in bringing together different forms of knowledge (oral and visual), and different generations (elders and youth). This collaboration is based on relationships: between stories and the land, between community and researcher, as well as the past, present and future.
The Woman Who Came Back was screened by (among others) Ethnografilm, Prairie Tales, the Indianer Inuit Festival, and broadcast by Arte Television in Germany and France. A trailer for the film is included in this section. The film can be seen at the Tłı̨chǫ Research & Training Institute website.
Making a Home is one of several activities developed through my ongoing work with the Edmonton Multicultural Coalition (EMC). As part of a research project exploring ways of building social integration through collaborative creative practice, this activity brought groups of people together to create small-scale models of homes on a common paper surface. The activity took place at the EMC on May 27, 2019. Participants were asked to collaborate (in groups of two)—each individual making a model that meets personal, family, and cultural needs—the two homes were to be physically linked in some way. Making a Home was designed to facilitate dialogue between participants. The material outcomes of this activity (the small-scale homes) provide an embodiment of life stories, lived experiences, and ideas about family that led to a meaningful exchange of ideas—an example of the inextricable link between material and memory, tangible objects and knowledge.
In this section I also include images from a November, 28, 2018 workshop in which participants were provided with a data collection tool kit (containing paper, instructions for group activities, and a glue stick). During the workshop we completed two of three activities contained in the kit—the Connection + Inquiry Exercise, and an affinity diagram exercise using hand written notes.
This data collection tool kit was custom designed for the collaborative generation of a research question. Important themes, along with the focus of the 2018-19 EMC research, emerged from these exercises.
Descriptions of legal blindness, as lived experience—involving continual movement between the world of sightedness and blindness—are largely absent within medical models of disability. In an effort to challenge depictions of blindness as pathology, researchers in this project worked with participants who are legally blind, on a co-created film, exploring built spaces in the city of Edmonton, Canada.
Participants in this research shared stories while recording their movement through a shopping mall, an art gallery, and a gym. Through this project, participants often took the lead, determining the content and context of urban journeys. Stories and images shared through this collaboration suggest that legal blindness is an alternative way of knowing the world, with unique perceptual experiences, and navigational strategies.
This research was developed with members of the CNIB, and Dr. Megan Strickfaden from the Department of Human Ecology at the University of Alberta. Results have been published in Rethinking Disability: World Perspectives in Culture and Society (by Garant in Antwerp, Belgium), and by Societies: Spatial Explorations and Digital Traces: Experiences of Legal Blindness through Filmmaking.
Through practice‐based research on Tlicho lands (in Canada's Northwest Territories), drawing is being used to embody intangible cultural heritage (which includes activities such as oral history and the social practice of walking). Work emerging from this research includes co-created artwork, and several animated films—including the experimental short film, Lines—made of 900 graphite drawings. The process of rendering these drawings embodied experiences on the land that are repetitive, albeit transformative, such as walking or listening to multiple versions of a single story. The entanglement of continually moving lines, evident through the animation, provides a counter‐narrative to colonial interpretations of the land—particularly narratives constructed through Cartesian coordinate systems (on which computer graphics and the geometry of built environments are based). Through this project line‐making provides a trace of memory, rhythmic movement and epistemology.
Lines toured in the United States as part of the 2018 Black Maria Film Festival. Lines was also presented at the 2016 IJADE Conference at the University of Chester in England. An article about the making of this film, Transformation through Repetition: Walking, Listening and Drawing on Tlicho Lands, was published in the peer reviewed International Journal of Art & Design Education.
Ruiz, A. & Strickfaden, M. (2016) Light in the Borderlands: A Film Created by Three Legally Blind Urban Explorers. In: Devlieger, P., Strickfaden, M., Brown, S. & Miranda-Galarza, B. (Editors). Rethinking Disability: World Perspectives in Culture and Societies. Antwerpen: Garant Publishers.
Ruiz, A. (2014). Critical Design and the Social Construction of the Urban Landscape. In: Rowe, A., and Sadler Takach, B., eds. 2014: Design Education: Approaches, Explorations and Perspectives. Edmonton: Department of Art & Design, University of Alberta.
Recent research activity, writing and presentations have emerged through engagement with design futures (in the realm of education). I am part of the Disparate Cultures and World Viewpoints workgroup—part of the Future of Design Education initiative. I have also presented and published through the Futures of Design Education SIG within the Design Research Society. Ideas explored through these initiatives relate to pluriversality, ontological design, land-based pedagogy, and participatory methods for community-based work.
In this section I include images and some footage from 16mm films created over the last decade.
The video file shows Inscriptions. This is a short experimental 16mm film—presented live, using two projectors at a public art event in Edmonton (hosted by Mile Zero Dance, December, 2014). The film is a piecing together of 16mm footage I shot in different countries, capturing imagery of urban landscapes, places of work, and family. In making Inscriptions, the surface of the developed film was altered through scratching, acrylic pigment, laser printing and dry transfer lettering. This transformation of the film surface embodies the role of "forgetting" in the "formation of a new identity" as described by Paul Connerton in his writing on cultural memory. The soundtrack is ‘Unseen Hand’ by Angelmark.
The next image is from Tangible Memory (screened at the 2022 Athens Film + Video Festival). This short film is based on conversations with (and footage of) a veteran machinist who reflects on a lifetime of working with metal. Through the sharing of memories and storytelling this brief account sheds light on the intimate, life-long relation between maker and material (and the degree to which the latter has agency). As people shape material, material also shapes people. The medium used to capture this footage (using a Bolex 16mm camera in an industrial work environment) further reinforces the significance of tools and tactility in shaping things.
The following four pictures are from the short film, Sand, which was screened as part of the 2019 Hispanic Culture Film Festival in St. Augustine, Florida. Footage was shot in southern Spain and the Alberta Badlands.
The film, Emptiness (bottom image) toured as part of Prairie Tales 9.
Whirlwind is a hand-drawn animation, consisting of over 700 ink drawings, rendered during the early stages of the 2020 global pandemic. The process of drawing this film, frame by frame, coincided with a unique sense of time and space that emerged during the pandemic. Rendering visuals within a bounded paper surface became analogous to daily rituals within a bounded living space. The unique flow of time experienced during the first half of 2020 (involving repetition and an overall sense of uncertainty) provided a new type of lived experience—proper for reflection through hand-crafted animation. Influenced by early twentieth century animation, this film attempts to visualize new rhythms of life emerging during a time of rapid sociocultural change—shifting away from carefully controlled perspectives and vanishing points, while depicting a constant sense of movement and transformation.
Whirlwind received a Director’s Choice Award as part of the 2021 Thomas Edison Film Festival, Best Animated Short at the 2020 Gotta Minute Film Festival. Additional screenings include 2021 Revolutions Per Minute Festival, Defy Film Festival, 2022 Video Art and Experimental Film Festival in NYC, and The Wold’s Best Self-funded Films section of Cine Pobre, 2022.
The first two images in this section are from the short film, Meditations. This an animated short that revolves around a psychotherapy session set in a dystopian future. The film received a Director’s Choice Award at the 2024 Thomas Edison Film Festival, and will also be screened at the Juggernaut Sci-Fi & Fantasy Film Festival, and the Philip K Dick Film Festival (at the Museum of the Moving Image, NYC). As part of the Boston Science Fiction Film Festival, Meditations was positively reviewed by The Tufts Daily (under the Csilla section).
The video below is Futures Within—a 1 minute film screened in 2021 at the Gotta Minute Film Festival, Minute Madness Toronto, and at the Norwescon Speculative Film Fest in Seattle.
The Friendship Game is the latest outcome of research with the Edmonton Multicultural Coalition (EMC). The game (currently in the early prototype stage) is custom designed to evoke memories and stories, while building relationships between members of Edmonton’s diverse ethno-cultural communities.
Community members participated in this game in 2019: on March 27 (as part of monthly EMC meetings), on June 8 (a members and animators meeting that included participants from Edmonton’s Sierra Leone community), and on June 20 at Emmanuel Church in north Edmonton.
Projects in this section were discussed in Design Education: Approaches, Explorations and Perspectives (edited by Aidan Rowe and Bonnie Sadler Takach). Each project explores graphic design thinking within the social geography of cities. Issues explored through this work include: alternative use of public space, and psychogeography (encouraging the discovery of new meaning though visual exploration in the city).
