EMILIA/AMALIA: Holes and how to fill them

HOLES AND HOW TO FILL THEM is a year-long collaborative project between EMILIA-AMALIA (E-A) and the Canadian Filmmakers Distribution Centre (CFMDC) that takes the hole as its organizing principle and guiding metaphor. Designed as a test-site for feminist research, commissioning, writing and exhibition-making, HOLES AND HOW TO FILL THEM takes up E-A’s ongoing interest in practices of failure, refusal, withdrawal, deliberate omission, and generative stoppages as sites for feminist organizing and conduits for lost intergenerational knowledge.

The hole is the gap left in feminist histories. It is the void left by withdrawn or failed or abandoned projects. It is the blank spaces made by striking workers. It is the vacuum of whiteness as the universal norm. The hole traces both absence and presence. The hole is the grave and the womb. It is the blindness of the unseeing eye, and mouth open wide to take it all in.

In addition to thinking about holes and how to fill them, EMILIA AMALIA is considering:

HOLES AND HOW TO FEEL THEM

WHOLES AND HOW TO FOIL THEM

HOLES AND HOW TO FALL INTO THEM

HOLES AND HOW TO FIT INTO THEM

HOLES AND HOW TO FIND THEM

Combining public lectures and workshops, commissioned performances, curated screenings and publications, the program activates the CFMDC’s collection and institutional space to explore gaps, holes, fissures, failed and abandoned projects, and the undetonated potential of the past.

HOLES AND HOW TO FILL THEM is supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and the Canada Council for the Arts.