Living with/on the Land

“Living with/on the Land” is a conversation between Jasmine Sihra and Dr. Julie Nagam that explores Nagam’s artistic practice and digital installation works that offer an immersive experience for participants to understand the dualism of living in the city versus on the land. Sihra, a research fellow on Nagam’s SSHRC Partnership Grant The Space between Us, asks about Nagam’s works like Our future is in the land, if we listen to it (2017) that combine projection and sound to provide viewers an immersive experience of the rural Manitoba landscape where the artist grew up. Nagam also discusses singing our bones home (2013), which situates the viewer in a dome-like structure and juxtaposes the architectural dwellings of a wagon shed and a wigwam, a nomadic form that offered more mobility to inhabitants. Her most recent work, A place to hold loss (2022), deals directly with the transformation of land through urban development and suggests mobile forms of dwelling as a possible way to limit destruction of land. Through her practice, Nagam poses urgent questions that have the potential to think through the current climate crisis and Indigenous futurisms.