Explores closeness as a minoritarian method in contemporary art and performance. On Closeness explores closeness as a transformative, if sometimes fraught, mode of engagement across aesthetic, social, and scholarly realms. Olivia Michiko Gagnon theorizes closeness as a minoritarian method that refuses knowledge grounded in possession or mastery in favor of relational ethics defined by vulnerability, partiality, and unknowing. Insisting upon the political urgencies of remaining in close proximity across difference, these forms of relation-with history and archives, artworks and others - privilege embodied and sensuous ways of knowing and remembering that salve historical violence. Analyzing contemporary artworks and performances by Tanya Tagaq, asinnajaq, Cheryl Sim, Elizabeth M. Webb, Pia Arke, and Monika Kin Gagnon - her mother and an influential cultural critic and scholar - Gagnon engages entangled histories of colonialism, slavery, migration, and diaspora. Grounded in performance studies and in dialogue with gender and sexuality studies, critical Indigenous studies, Black studies, American studies, critical mixed-race studies, Asian-Canadian studies, and film and media studies, On Closeness stages an anti-racist, decolonial, and feminist intervention. Adopting closeness as her own method, Gagnon shows how the concept opens up new possibilities for relation across difference, historical sense-making, and knowledge production within and beyond the university.
Olivia Michiko Gagnon is Assistant Professor in the Department of Theatre & Film and affiliated faculty in Asian-Canadian and Asian Migration Studies and the Institute for Gender, Race, Sexuality, and Social Justice at the University of British Columbia.
"On Closeness is more than a host of beautifully rendered studies of artists and more than an argument that their work transforms the turn into the archive into a stage for relation-in-difference. It is Gagnon's striking and inspiring performance of methodological innovation and a modeling of the art of proximity as a means of minoritarian knowledge production. With a crisp clarity, ethical urgency, sharp bursts of critical surprise, and calibrated moments of tender intimacy, Gagnon brings to life the work of Cheryl Sim, Monika Kin Gagnon, Elizabeth M. Webb, Tanya Tagaq, asinnajaq, and Pia Arke, drawing the reader into a vibrant and productive relationship with the powers of performance theory."-- "Joshua Takano Chambers-Letson, author of Unfinished Grief: Queer Love and Loss"
