‘In this episode, we delve into the life and work of Coman Poon, whose journey from colonial Hong Kong to contemporary Canada shapes his unique approach to art and community engagement. His story includes embracing change, fostering connections, and advocating for social and environmental justice.‘
Sounds pretty good, right? This paragraph was actually written by artificial intelligence software Whisper Transcribe. It’s a good tool but it makes Coman’s work sound a bit … dry.
Let me try reading a bit of Coman’s bio written, I assume, by a human.
Intersecting with his varied inter-arts collaborations, Coman Poon is a bilingual inclusion and intercultural advocate, community and organizational developer, decolonial and indigenous ally of Hong Kong & Toronto upbringing. With Erica Mott, he co-founded re[public] in/decency (Chicago/Toronto), an arts-activist initiative and creative think tank that explored the transnational intersections between live art, social justice activism and arts-informed pedagogy. Since 2013, Coman has been collaborating with his spouse, architect and installationist Brian Smith, under the moniker of [ field ], a life/art collaboration which explores the interstitiality within ritual and performance. Becoming Ten Thousand Things is his collaboration with dancer Naishi Wang centred in contemplative Taoist performativity. With Diana Lopez Soto, Coman co-founded Land Embodiment Lab (LEL), which holds space for the intersection of agroecology, land stewardship and arts practices through research into/of labour. As artist and consultant, Coman chose to be no longer active on social media and has intentionally deleted his website.
That’s more like it but still a bit removed from what I experienced when I spoke with Coman :
So, as you can hear, Coman likes to apply his skills and knowledge in various contexts. For example, in a reevaluation of our relationship with nature and in fostering connections to navigate impending global crises.
Coman also invites us to explore how art can be a powerful catalyst for change and a way to build resilient communities, which will likely be very important for those who survive that gliding plane crash he told us at the beginning of this episode.
A heads up that this is a longer than usual conversation in three parts : the first was recorded in my living room while Coman was recovering from a cold, the second was a soundwalk in Rupert, Québec and the third was in front of my house in Ottawa. They are presented in this order.
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Sections of the podcast (generated by Whisper Transcribe AI and reviewed by Claude Schryer)
Welcome
In this opening segment, the host introduces Coman Poon and the importance of discussing art’s role in social change and ecological crises.
Coman’s Journey: From Hong Kong to Canada
Coman shares his background, detailing his early life in British colonial Hong Kong and his immigration to Canada, which shaped his identity and artistic perspective.
Art’s Impact on Social Change
Coman reflects on his multifaceted identity as an artist and activist, emphasizing the significance of art in addressing social issues and the need for artists to engage deeply with their communities.
Nurturing Transformation in Arts Organizations
Coman recounts his involvement with Can-Asian Dance, detailing the challenges faced and the strategies implemented to revitalize the organization and support emerging artists.
Community and Collaboration: The Arcadia Experience
Coman describes his life in the Arcadia artist cooperative, discussing community dynamics and the impact of COVID-19 on the artistic landscape.
Reigniting Community Through Art
Coman shares the success of the Arcadian Art Gallery story exchange, highlighting how the initiative fostered connections and storytelling among community members.
Hyperlocal Art Initiatives
The discussion turns to the importance of hyperlocal art projects, exploring how these initiatives can strengthen community ties and address local issues.
Bathurst Quay: A Community in Transition
This section explores the challenges faced by Bathurst Quay during the summer months, emphasizing the importance of creating community spaces to reclaim a sense of belonging amidst change.
Anticipating Change: The Future of Bathurst Quay
As federal aviation laws evolve, concerns about the potential expansion of the island airport arise, prompting local artists and activists to foster community connections and prepare for upcoming challenges.
The Role of Art in Social Change
This segment examines the complex relationship between art and social change, questioning how artists can contribute to community issues while maintaining the essence of their craft.
Innovative Projects: Art Meets Environmental Awareness
The section presents collaborations between local artists and community members to create projects focused on environmental awareness, aiming to inspire collective action among residents.
Art as a Reflection of Nature
In this section, the discussion shifts to an exhibition that explores the interconnectedness of humans and nature through art, challenging conventional views on environmental issues.
Reconnecting with Our Senses
The conversation delves into how art can help us reconnect with latent sensibilities beyond our five traditional senses, illuminating our experiences in urban living.
The Pathway of Trust in Art
This section discusses the importance of trust in the artistic process, particularly in community hospice and expressive arts therapy, emphasizing relational dynamics for meaningful engagement.
Land Embodiment Lab: A New Initiative
The introduction of the Land Embodiment Lab highlights a project aimed at bridging agroecology, community development, and art practice, reflecting on transformative experiences with the land.
Rethinking Consumption and Agency
This section explores the concepts of underconsumption and consumer agency, discussing how individual choices can influence systemic changes and the importance of informed consumption.
Indigenous Stewardship vs. Western Conservation
The discussion contrasts indigenous land stewardship practices with Western conservation methods, advocating for a more integrated approach to environmental management.
Listening to the Land: The Role of Humans
Claude and Coman reflect on the importance of deep listening to the land and understanding human impact on ecosystems, advocating for thoughtful interventions in nature.
Art in Times of Crisis
This section addresses the role of art during crises, examining how artistic expression can provide solace and solidarity amidst chaos while highlighting the challenges artists face.
Lessons from the Pandemic: Rethinking Artistic Value
The speakers reflect on the pandemic’s impact on the arts, emphasizing the importance of supporting artists as essential contributors to society, particularly during crises.
Preparing for the Crash: A Call to Connection
The final chapter presents a metaphorical reflection on the impending crises facing humanity, encouraging listeners to cultivate connections and community in the face of uncertainty.
Transcription of e202 coman poon - what are you doing with your life ?
Note: This is an automated transcription that is provided for those who prefer to read this conversation and for documentation. It has been verified but is not 100% accurate (some names might not be quite right). Please contact me if you would like to quote from this transcript: claude@conscient.ca
PART 1 studio recording, my home, Ottawa
Claude Schryer
How is your raspiness? We've begun. Coman Poon, welcome to conscient podcast.
Coman Poon
Thanks.
Claude Schryer
We met at a retreat of the Chaoyi Fanhuan Qi Gong practice.
Coman Poon
CFQ.
Claude Schryer
CFQ practice. And I didn't know you very well by reputation a little bit, but. And then we started talking about art and social change. We started talking about art and ecology, and I said, got to get this guy in my showroom. There you are.
Coman Poon
And I was trying to recommend you to other people.
Claude Schryer
Well, it's also a nice opportunity to talk about what you're doing in social change and your thoughts on the ecological crisis and the role of art. That's what I've been talking about for like, four years now, and there's always new angles, new things coming up. And I'm also interested if we get a chance to talk a bit about this idea of wellness practices, meditation, how that fits into the kind of work that people do and the wellness that is necessary when you do social change, you have to kind of stay healthy one way or another. But let's begin at the beginning. And can you tell me about your background, where you're from, how you came to become an artist and curator and producer and all these things?
Coman Poon
Well, I was born in British colonial Hong Kong, and I came to Canada at the age of ten after my father had passed away. My mother had immigrated and was based in Montreal, and in the late seventies relocated to Ontario along with the rest of her family. So I spent ten years of my life in a completely different cultural context, linguistic, cultural, and socioeconomic. And I would say, aside from that early history, I want to acknowledge that my ancestral territory is from the Guangdong province, and the Guangdong province is the southeastern province of China, of which Hong Kong is part of. And in 2015, my uncle gifted myself, along with all my distant relatives and cousins from the 22nd generation of the Chan clan that I belong to. And simply said, here's three excel documents tracing your family history back to the late Song dynasty. So that's about 725ish years of continuous lineage that I have on record.
So on the maternal side, I'm able to trace 22 generations back. On the paternal side, I can go back three generations, but still from Hong Kong and the area of China adjacent to Hong Kong. So that's my way of kind of locating myself ancestrally. But I have grown up and been educated in the west, mostly in Canada, with some studies in New York, a little bit of film school, and then living in, I guess, first term of Obama Chicago, and happy to be based in Tkaoronto colonial known as Toronto. And I accidentally came into the arts because for many years I was an eldest child of a single parent family. And that meant I had internalized this idea that I was to be the provider and that therefore I should be in one of three or four, you know, acceptable occupations, doctor, lawyer, engineer, etcetera, banker. Maybe artist is a perfectly reasonable thing to do.
You know, immigrant children mentality. This was disabused pretty soon after I entered university at the age of 17. And my mother turned around and I said to her, you know, I think I'm going to do a liberal arts degree, and I would like to still prepare for med school. However, I'm going to take some philosophy, take some arts, take some east asian studies. And she said, whatever makes you happy, Coleman. That's all that's important. And that's what opened me up to the possibility of exploring something other than the path that I had chosen for myself throughout my Canadian education.
Claude Schryer
And how would you define yourself now in terms of your practice and activities or not defined?
Coman Poon
I don't even know. I would say in the context of an arts council, I would say I'm a full-time artist. In the context of my home community and the social change work that I do in Tkaronto, I would say I'm an artist activist, social change maker. I do some consulting. And the consulting I do is also a little bit odd because I prefer to embed myself. So if I'm working for an organization undergoing transformation, I step into the staff role that is going to support the seeding of transformation and I do the work as opposed to making recommendations for the work to be done. And then if I am consulting for creative practices, often it's also a hybrid.
Sometimes I'm bringing in my therapy skills, sometimes I'm bringing in coaching skills. Sometimes I am, for lack of a better word, doing creation doula work. At other times I'm teaching, kind of like teaching someone how to fish, giving them the fish as well as watching them fish in terms of resourcing and development, both organizationally and individually. So I like to say I customize my work in the not for profit sector, whether it's for individuals, communities or organizations. And most of the time my work is around how to meet with the unknown. Yeah, how to meet with all the things that come up in encountering the unknown. So I'm additionally, as an artist, I'm also trained expressive arts practitioner.
I studied with a school that used to be called ISIS Canada and is now reframed as the create institute. And they're part of a network of expressive arts therapy training institutes around the world that offer access to professional training and allows those who want it to become registered psychotherapists.
Claude Schryer
Well, it sounds like a broad palette of skills and experiences to do a number of things, including social change. And in your bio, I read a sentence that I found, uh oh.
Coman Poon
Which bio?
Claude Schryer
Well, I don't know. It doesn't matter. ‘He experiments with the collision and synergism between art and social change’.Somebody wrote that about you, or maybe you did. But I like that because that's what we need right now, are people who can not only go into the unknown, but deal with these complex situations, climate emergency being one of them, but also the root causes. So, I don't know where you want to begin because you do a lot of different projects, but maybe you can give me an example of something you're working on or something that excites you. That in and around social change and the role of art, because that role of art is the one that keeps coming back. We think art is so powerful, but how is it powerful and how can it be more impactful given the circumstances in which we live?
Coman Poon
Well, you asked me a question that I thought was quite a good prompt. He had said, the Canadian arts sector, as well as Canadian society and large, in my opinion, are in lull in relation to the climate emergency because of COVID recovery, the housing crisis, precarity in the sector, etcetera. What are some of the causes of this fatigue? And what are some strategies to get things moving again? And I feel like this is where I'd like to begin. I'd spent, I think, seven years prior to 2024 nurturing a transformation in an organization that was near and dear to my heart called can Asian dance? And part of the reason why it was near and dear to my heart was because in 97, I worked for its mother.
The Asian Heritage Month Festival in Toronto, which in 97 had its last iteration. And out of that organizational dissolution was born a number of organizations. Can-Asian dance, real Asian Film Festival, south asian visual arts collective, etcetera, etcetera, and all based in Toronto. And many, many years after, I was asked by the co-founder Denise Fujiwara to join the board at a time when they were kind of moving away from a push for growth and recalibrating into being artist governed again, kind of back to their roots. And she said, Coleman, I need people who are connected to the ground to offer some leadership so that we are staying relevant. And the reason why, she asked me, was because at the time, Canadian dance had been offering these international showcases that brought international, national and local artists who were exploring ideas around Asian dance, however that manifests for them. And she felt after a number of years that the international artists were at a caliber that was rarely met by Canadians, in large part because of the funding structure here and the tendency to go wider rather than deeper.
So she had devised a program that was about professional development for the next generation, and she called it kickstart. And it was a mentorship, new works incubator for artists in dance, particularly choreographers, to be matched up with a dramaturg that would challenge their practice. So the early to mid-career dance artists, and they would get full production for developing a work that would be, in some ways, stepping out of the known for the choreographer. And I thought this program was really needed at the time, and I really wanted to support it. The organizations shift from being a presenter to being a professional development support. And as the organization transitioned, there had come a time when all the existing staff had exited that had been there for decades. And I brought about a comprehensive organizational review, and we hired some really, really excellent consultants, Sally Lee and also Seema Cetulao, who had just stepped away from her role at Canadian heritage.
And they did a lot of consultation with our constituents, both existing as well as prospective. They did a swot analysis, they did a kind of a loop back consultation, so that after they looked at various models of governance and made recommendations to the board of Can Asian, they would then offer these suggestions as a touching base with our constituents to see how an organization that 25 years was old could shift away from a kind of dyadic, dual leadership mode. And at the end of this long labor, we published the report and the recommendations, and I exited the board after seven years. And it was really meaningful. But I felt like I had given all I had to give to the sector. And in that moment, I had no idea where I was heading. And something showed up quite out of the blue.
I live in a very special vertical community in Toronto called Arcadia. It's one of the oldest artist mandate cooperatives in Canada, and it was built in 1986, and it's based in a part of Toronto that used to be the edge of the industrial waterfront at Bathurst and Queens Quay, and it's currently near the city airport. But back in the day, it was a place that nobody wanted to live in. And it was a place that had no services, no sidewalks, no grocery stores. Even. So, that's where they plunked the artists and now we are in prime waterfront territory.
And people are like, how did an arts co-op get into this location?
Claude Schryer
Timing.
Coman Poon
It's all about timing. It's all about alignment with a national impulse to support co-op housing development in the seventies and eighties. And at the same time, we now live in, 38 years later, a what is called a complete neighborhood. And it's a neighborhood with a community center, a junior school, an alternative high school. It's got a couple of cultural facilities. One being coming from Arcadia. We have quite robust artist amenities.
We have a hundred-seater theater with a sprung dance floor. Flexible multi use space. We also have an art gallery. We have maker space with ventilation for painting and aerosol work. And also, a clay studio with two kilns. And because it was built in the eighties, we have an analog darkroom. We have a band practice room. We have a green rooftop.
All these are part of the gift of being in this community. And the nine years that I've lived there, it's been a place where I have lived, thrived in, worked in community alongside other artists and their families. And like about 110 units. So approximately a community of 300 in a vertical sort of setting. And at the beginning of 24, having joined, I think a year before as part of the arcadian art gallery committee, I was elected to be the coordinator. And our co-op is. It's kind of unique in the sense that the occupants.
That the orgs have been there from like the early eighties. So many are senior artists with 30, 40 years practice behind them. They're in their legacy years. And there, you know, between seventies to nineties. And Covid had a rather isolating effect on them because of immune compromise, health fears and just general isolation. And one of the opportunities that the gallery committee discussed was, how do we go about reigniting this sense of vibrancy that existed in the pre pandemic, restrictive times? I'm saying that because we're still in the pandemic, but we're no longer in the restrictive times.
One of the things that we began dreaming about in the fall of 23. Was to mount an archive-based retrospective. So along with colleagues of mine, we began chronologizing and taking all the ephemera from 38 years of exhibitions and activities. And displaying them in our gallery. And then designing different activations in order to get the community to come out, encounter each other and share stories. And this was just a kind of hunch that we had. And we called it the arcadian art Gallery story exchange.
And to offer a kind of a teaser for the community in Arcadia to reweave across generations and across cultures. And it. It was more of a success than we could have imagined. Hundreds and hundreds of people showed up, repeat visits, lots of stories, people who used to live in a co-op who were, you know, part of the ogs. The originals came out and shared stories. And it was, you know, we held artists talks, we held activities that were suggested and run by members. So we worked in an emergent way, in a responsive way. And then we kind of extended it a bit and organized a curated culture night where we brought in not just the stories and the formal and informal exchange about artist practices, mostly visual and media arts, but then we co curated an evening of music, experimental documentary, social change films, as well as, you know, dancers and dj evening, and poetry and theatre.
So it was a real multidisciplinary highlight for the community that echoed a lot of the what was before my time, these special evenings where the community got together and just shared their practices with each other. So this began and ignited a larger impulse to work in the hyperlocal. And so my way of answering kind of your prompt washing for me, my answer to how do you begin to look at the impact of arts and climate emergency? Well, my first and most strong impulse is to work hyper locally in order to maximize my personal and collective impact. And so my commitment has been reignited to work in my hyperlocal, which is my neighborhood of Bathurst key within the loco of the city of Toronto or within the loco of the waterfront. So many different locals in the context of the hyperlocal. And so that began a journey of thinking about how we proceed from the first two projects.
So my partner Brian and I, we began wondering about how to recontextualize a gallery space, a white cube space, because often we are finding that with older generation of visual media artists that their way that they think of a white cube is quite restrictive by contemporary standards. So we wanted to crack it open.
And we've been hosting kind of residencies. We've been hosting process-based works and explorations that aren't necessarily exhibition oriented. And the latest project, which we call summer of 24, part one and two, is kind of a deliberate pilot in July and August to convert and transform the gallery into a neighborhood cafe and a community art space, and to really extend beyond the work we've been doing within the vertical community of Arcadia into the Bathurst Quay neighborhood, which comprises of 18 buildings, vertical housing units, some of which are communities, some of them are not, almost equally divided into community housing, co-ops and privatized condos. So if you can imagine, just that alone brings a very interesting socioeconomic and cross cultural, mixed and intergenerational as well.
Claude Schryer
Well, it reminds me, I had a conversation recently with the young Chinese Canadian scientist and artist Maggie Chang (see https://conscient-podcast.simplecast.com/episodes/e200-maggie-chang-the-power-of-art) , who talked about doing something similar in North York, where she lives, because she doesn't want to go to downtown Toronto every time because it takes an hour and a half to come downtown. So we really do need local everywhere, not just in the urban centers, but the models are there, the artists are there, and to a certain extent, the infrastructure is there, but one can build it, right?
All you need is a space. You need creativity. You need. You need safety, actually, is what you need. You need people to feel comfortable, to be together. And in the post Covid world, I notice that people are trying to get together and not say, in new ways. It's not new to get together, but there's that sense that we need to have solidarity in our communities for all kinds of reasons, in case something happens.
There's that heightened sense, but it's a joyful sense. It's let's get together, let's create. I think that's what you're saying.
Coman Poon
Yeah, well, it's preparing also for, you know, my community of Bathurst Quay is often a neighborhood that is forgotten in the summer months. Partly because aside from being a 24 7365 day a year pathway to the city airport, we are also bifurcated by the bike trail, the Martin Goodman Waterfront Recreation Trail. And not only that, but we are the neighborhood that people regularly pass through to go to concerts at Ontario Place, at the Budweiser Stadium at Echo beach, we get traffic coming through for people who are going to a Blue Jays game, who are going to a Raptors game, as well as tourists and visitors from the city heading to the waterfront, heading to Harbourfront center, heading toward Toronto Island, Carabana, Honda, Indy, you name it. So there is a sense when the summer comes that we lose our neighborhood. We lose this sense of cohesion and quietude that we get after Labor Day. So our summer project in some ways is a deliberate gesture to offer space for the community, by the community, at a period of the year when we feel like our community is invaded. Now, not to say that that's a nimby impulse, but it's just the feeling of unfamiliarity every summer, I guess, because Toronto is not like Paris, where it's like, you know, constant tourism, and people are immunized to that.
For us, it's seasonal. So we're always kind of like, suddenly overwhelmed by throngs of people. And that affects both personal, pedestrian, as well as vehicular safety, but also cultural safety. So the space we're creating is to open a little oasis for and by the community. And again, there is a larger agenda as well that I personally have. And the larger context is that we are fully aware that the federal aviation law regulations have changed recently, which, for whatever reason, will require some renovation to the island airport Runway. So that doesn't necessarily mean an extension of the Runway, but what the community is fully aware of is that Porter Airlines, which is one of the anchor tenants of the city airport, has recently purchased Brazilian jets that they're flying out of Pearson, because jets are not allowed to fly out at the island airport due to the tripartite agreement that's currently in place for at least another half a decade or so.
And with the onset of this new regulation, it means that the airport could expand in a way that if the tripartite agreement was dissolved under, say, a new federal government, for example, that's very pro-airport, then we would have a really, really big fight on our hands, because all of, not just the waterfront, will be not only impacted in terms of noise pollution and air quality pollution, but the vehicular traffic, which includes not only passengers based traffic, but really, really dauntingly jet fuel traffic, which was supposed to come by barge through the harbor, but is now being shipped as it passes through high density populations. So I'm just painting the picture for you of I'm feeling the picture, what is coming. And this is why, in a post post restrictive pandemic context, my contribution as a social change artist is to contribute in the way that I can by helping and supporting to reweave community connection in anticipation that we really have to come together to fight what could very much be already on the horizon for our harbor front.
Claude Schryer
Well, earlier today, I was telling you about the graphite mine at our cottage, which is. And then people have all kinds of challenges around them with economic development and gentrification and dehousing. What's the term? Renovation. That term where people are thrown out, but at a broader level, Coman, I'm interested in the role of art. Now, you've given a very good example, artist as convener, as community organizer and so on. How do you see, the question I asked earlier is, how do you see the role of art in that complexity? I guess it's showing the work, having it circulate, obviously. But what more can we do with the power that's called the power of art in and around these complex issues. Almost the intractable. You talked about the unknown, but there's also the intractable. Just some thoughts on that.
Coman Poon
Well, I recently began wondering the same question myself, because I'm the biggest critic of a kind of instrumentalization of the arts. You know, arts for, you know, economic development, neighborhood revitalization, art for da da da. Which, fair enough, some people do really well because they're skilled at it and they have collaborations that support that type of work and great. However, not all artists are skilled in bringing the arts into the context of social change work. I recognize that because it's one of the things that for me it important to not ask of art that which is outside of its native intelligence. And for me that's. It's a challenge.
And because I still want to make an important contribution as an artist, as a curator, as a community art practitioner, as an expressive arts therapist and coach. And the most recent dream that I had is in collaboration with another arcadian who's a social change activist and a documentary filmmaker. Her name is Joan Prowse. And she and I began talking about something that was happening at the beginning of this year, which was somewhat alarming to me. The silos, the Canada malting Silos, which is within our neighborhood, the industrial landmark that's been designated.
Claude Schryer
You're talking about disciplinary silos at the Canada...
Coman Poon
No, Canada malting silos, part of the industrial past.
Claude Schryer
Fair enough.
Coman Poon
And they have just been reskinned. So the city has leased the North Silo to OCAD University, which is about to break ground and form their global center for Climate Action, which used to be called Global center for Climate action in the Arts, but the latter got dropped. We don't know why, but we'll put.
Claude Schryer
That in the footnotes and try to figure it out.
Coman Poon
Yeah, it'd be interesting. And what I just to give you a geographic sense, the silos are located south of Queens Quay, north of Ireland park, which is a historic monument that is memorializing the Irish immigration during the famine to Toronto. And it's a site of where the Irish immigrants were and refugees were quarantined. And the plaza that is to the west of the Canada malting silos is part of a larger Bathurst Keene neighborhood master plan that the community worked with previous counselor Joe Cressy to pass through city council so that it can be protected from further condo development and preserved for public use. So in its place will then be developed a plaza for cultural events and activities. And that's where Joan and I envisioned a project that has four components during Earth Month, April 25. And the first component is to use the silos as a projection surface for films made by local artists, documentaries, experimental films that center on arts and the environment.
And this is a co curation that I will be doing in collaboration with the Planet in Focus environmental film festival. And then the second component is adjacent to the plaza is the community center, the elementary school, and the alternative high school. And the community center has after school glee clubs as well as musical theater programs for neighborhood kids. And in our co-op, we have a couple of vocal coaches as well as choral conductors and. And musicians. And they will be working with the children and youth in two separate songs that have been composed by hyperlocal musicians and composers that talk about the environment. One is called save our beautiful world, and the other one is earthen.
Our earth, our beautiful earth. I think that's what it was. And one of the proponents is to create a choral concert of children who have co created the songs by adding their own verses and then performing them in the public context for the neighborhood, by the neighborhood. And the third component is a visual arts chalkboard installation on wheels that simply spells out BQ Fort Bathurst key neighborhood, heart Earth. And this particular installation is inspired by another artist who's been doing a similar setup in context of raising awareness around the species that live in our neighborhood, where Ontario place is going to be redeveloped into a spa.
Claude Schryer
Well, there's a hot button issue right there. Yes, we'll leave it aside.
Coman Poon
So we're borrowing from artists, activists, initiatives and bringing it into our adjacent neighborhood. And the idea is, again, to activate a next generation practical solution for day to day actions that can be taken by people from all ages and all socio economic backgrounds in terms of how to work with greater consciousness around our complicity in contributing to the climate emergency, our complicity in late capitalist, extractivist culture of which all humans are enslaved in. So this is part of the work already of one of the musical community art practitioners are two Syrian newcomers who already work this way to create their song. And we're borrowing kind of from their methodology in order to extend to a co-creative practice where we build skills, but we also build ownership, because instead of having a song that's already finished and then taught and then rehearsed and then performed by children, it's actually a song that has been somewhat structured, but finished by children, and then musically augmented and then performed by children as an ensemble. So that's the third component. The fourth component is a curation of a solo exhibition that I made with a Colombian Venezuelan visual and media artist named Alexandra Halis, and she has a very, very interesting practice and I'm going to tell a little story if I can.
Claude Schryer
I love stories.
Coman Poon
And this is something I wrote when I was inviting her to host her research in the gallery for April 2025. And the exhibition is around the idea of inseparability. And this is my curatorial storying. In the wake of environmental, sociopolitical, and economic collapse, what can the more than human teach us? How is this implicated in the cycles of endless destruction and creation? We as humans are constantly enslaved to where there is no refuge, no purity, and no disentanglement. There is courage, complicity, and complexity.
How does art help us to build an active resilience and ground us in a different way of knowing and being put another way? How do we begin to untether from extractivists late capitalist hyper individualism and weave, reciprocate, cooperate so that the conditions for an unimaginable future post human can be seated? Just prior to the start of Covid-19 pandemic, Alexandra Halis and I convened for a few days in Cartagena, where she was in process of working on aspects of an installation for artworks to while in collective remembrance, bereaving her mother with close relatives and her mother's chosen Afro Colombian family. Aside from being offered her mother's bed to sleep in, I remembered helping to document Alexandra collecting red tide seaweed, supposedly invasive to the Caribbean coast of Colombia, without knowing how the handmade paper she would later craft from the sun-dried plant matter would lead her toward a journey of healing and wonderment. Discovery and emergent collaboration with migrant plants migrant plants from the Caribbean coast of Colombia and Panama to the rainforest of pacific coastal Costa Rica. The next time we had a chance to catch up, following several weeks of me living in the off-grid artist residency that her partner, Jorge Lozano separately processing loss was developing in the remote hollow of land deep in the rainforest near Las Monas, Las Costa Rica. This period of pandemic era morning, immersed in full on activity of a restored and tended tropical ecology, was very special.
What was so ineffable and yet so experientially and potently simple is the raison d'etre for this experimental installation and sonic journey. Welcome to inseparability. And it's in with a semicolon or with a colon separability. And I wrote this because I wanted to invite Aleksandra, who has been working with the concept of plant allies as a migrant herself that traverses between Venezuela, Colombia and Canada. And the context of invasive is often polarized as good and bad, and yet it actually is a lot more complex. So plants themselves have agency. And often the fallacy is that humans think that we are the ones that are the masters of the dissemination of plants, trees, bacteria, when in fact, they are our elders.
And they actually have evolved such, in such a way that animals, human and otherwise, eat their seeds, spread their seeds to higher grounds in the context of climate change, for example, or spread nut trees across continents. And that's how plants travel. Plants have their own kind of master plan, so to speak, of which we are but the servants. So this way of rethinking and recontextualizing was something that Alexandra and I always talk about. And in her journey in the jungle, in the rainforest of Costa Rica, what she discovered was that these bromelia, which you have one on your front deck outside, they're usually the size of a six-foot-tall person, and they suspend at great heights in the rainforest, and they are water collectors. They support a plethora of insects, monkeys, birds. They, in the torrential downpour of storms, they will fall.
And because they are deemed of no economic value, they have also been branded invasive by locals or perceived on par with invasive plants. And she went about collecting the bromelia and drying them and creating paper with the plant matter, and then reinstalling these long, long banners in the rivers and allowing them to reconstitute. And a lot of the curiosity I had that echoed both her experience and my experience was that when I lived off grid, something happened that was inexplicable and yet so present and so loud, which was latent faculties of perception opened up. My hearing opened up. I couldn't really tell you when a new bird came, what the bird was, but I knew that there was a new birdhouse, because I could parse out that in the din of the noise of the rainforest, there was a new sound. And likewise, when trees were being cut, such as what we witnessed happen, I felt the pain of that tree being cut down. These were experiences that I can only speak of now.
But at the time, it was kind of a surprise to me because I wasn't imagining it. I felt like someone was pulling my veins out of my hands and arms, that kind of visceral sensation of pain. And I, in many ways, it was just a scratch, because while living off grid, I attuned to the dyadic and nocturnal rhythms that come with the setting and rising sun, like chickens, just as soon as the sun's gone off, I went to bed.
Coman Poon
We had like a generator for maybe an hour to power devices and to eat in, you know, artificial light. But otherwise, we were like the rest of the fauna and flora. We were attuned to cycles of light and darkness, and that alone opened up something unimaginable. And I was only like, off grid for three weeks. Within three weeks, after reconnection to electricity, getting back on grid within a day, I lost all these faculties. So to me, I said to Alexandra, I said, is really interesting, because Vanessa and Doriathy, who both of us have worked with before, often talk about these latent sensibilities that are available to us humans, and that in the context of urban living and electrical supply and modernity, we've been numbed from these senses and sensibilities. And I think when I answer the question of what can art do, I think that art can be a bridge to reweaving us to what is latently available as sensibilities, as what's beyond the five senses. Right? Often people talk about, oh, there are the five senses.
Well, they're not the five senses. They're way more than that. So when we get sick, we know we're about to get sick. That's an internal sense. It's not one of the five senses.
Claude Schryer
There certainly are very many more.
Coman Poon
We have mirror neurons, you know, that's another sense.
Claude Schryer
And we're going to start wrapping up now because I don't want my listeners to get too ear tired, because it's really interesting that you give these detailed examples. The Toronto community work, the exhibition that you're curating, that will be presented in April 2025. There's so much more we could talk about. But I think you've kind of nailed it that the role of art is what it's always been, in the sense of illuminating and questioning and probing into untapped senses. Because the arts can do that. They can do all kinds of things. They also can do harm, but they are that sense, the many senses that we have.
Coman Poon
I think the arts teaches me particularly because as a creator and also as an expressive arts therapist and coach, that the pathway to moving the dial has to always happen at the speed of trust. So it's relational, it's from moment to momentous. It's rooted in presence. And when I do work in context of hospice, community hospice, working with the unhoused, when I do art that supports bereavement, those things are actively in place, they're very present. And the same with community art practice, and the same with land based practice. And in my other initiative that is also active, but instead of the hyper local, it's regional. Deanna Lopez Soto and I, at the beginning of 2020, during the sort of spring of the first year of the.
Claude Schryer
Pandemic, when I started this podcast, actually.
Coman Poon
Yeah, we began something called Land embodiment lab. Deanna is an aerialist and a dancer, a choreographer, but also a farmer, lives in Uxbridge, Ontario. And we met because I felt like many people during the early days, completely daunted by how under skilled I was in basic survival. I, as an urban dweller, as someone who came from, you know, uber capitalist urban Hong Kong, and lives in Takaronto, the concrete jungle, I recognized that I needed to retool, and I recognized that the future was around upskilling, and upskilling it incrementally, so that the things that I take for granted that enslave me to the neoliberal, lay capitalist world are the things that I need to prepare for. Because eventually my underconsumption will be forced, whether it be food insecurity due to climate disaster somewhere in the world or has to do with just affordability of being able to stay healthy and eat nutritious, nutrient rich foods. For me, I approached Deanna and I said, can I just volunteer and work on your farm? And she said, yes, absolutely.
I planted, blah, blah, blah. You can spend x number of days weeding. This just gave me some banal task. So I spent like three or four days on my hands and knees. And it was a life changing experience because what came from that was a complete embodied understanding that the earth has something to teach. If we pay attention, the land and waters and also the more than human have something to offer. To me, it's my job to listen, it's my job to notice, it's my job to steward, to tend, and to the best of my ability, to offer something that is going to be an act of reciprocity.
And this was how land embodiment lab began. It was a project that was itinerant and dreamed of so that it can cohere and, in some ways, situate itself at the interstices of agroecology, community development and art practice.
Claude Schryer
And I hear a lot of that. Annette Hegel, who runs scale, talked to me about that many artists are working in permaculture. Julia Matamoros, who I just interviewed, Mexican Canadian cultural worker. And so that's interesting trend. It's not a new idea, but it is very timely. And you kind of scared me there talking about survival and, you know, the skills that we'll need in the future and that, but it's so important to talk about what's happening, you know, the good things, the bad things, and to say, yes, I am going to change the way I live. I'm going to maybe under consume because we overconsume.
So what does that mean, to under consume? So I think we should have a part two of this conversation a little bit later, maybe after the exhibit in the spring, and just go deeper.
Coman Poon
I do want to be of service, and I am of service in a number of different ways. And it's not always as an artist, it's not always through making and sharing something I've made. Sometimes it is around reweaving social connection in preparation for political battle. And I contribute in the particular way I do because I know the skills that I have.
Claude Schryer
And I think one of the things that you do very well is tell stories and talk about it. And I appreciate that. In the last hour, we've kind of come full circle, Coman, around this idea of local engagement and a personal commitment to service, which is what artists do. I mean, we do have to applaud artists for all the sacrifices and the pain that they go through to produce art. And not only to produce art, but to generate and regenerate art in their communities through curation, production and all these different roles that they play.
Coman Poon
Yep. Move at the speed of trust. That too.
PART 2 Soundwalk in Rupert, Québec
Coman Poon
I sound as raspy as yesterday.
Claude Schryer
You sound better. Well, you sound different. We're going to do a little sound walk. What do you say?
Coman Poon
Sure.
Claude Schryer
So is there anything? Well, first of all, where are we?
Coman Poon
Well, we're located in Rupert, Quebec, in the hills of Gatineau. And we're just adjacent to the Rupert community center, which is a kind of a regional hub not only for gathering community, but for a very unique repurposed swap. Yeah, like, what do you call it? Like regular rummage sales of which the prophets support the community center.
Claude Schryer
Yeah, I was there today. Well, yesterday we had a long chat about art and ecology and all kinds of things. There's anything that you wanted to add?
Coman Poon
I think I wanted to share a little bit about this metaphor of the plane set to crash. Yes, I think I'll talk a little bit about that briefly with you. I often feel that I'm being called to under consume. And that it's one of the things that I really feel was like a movement that didn't gain full traction during the pandemic, in the sense that if we take a real critical look at how we consume, what we consume, what choices we make as individuals, as families, as a community, we will stand to have greater influence, influence and impact over the larger neoliberal chain that supports that end product. So, you know, when we go to the grocery store and we see food that is wrapped in plastic and packaged over packaged in non-recyclable materials, we could make the choice to not consume products like that. And if enough people actually speak up about it, but also speak with their wallets, then the market will shift. And it doesn't always have to depend on, like, legislation from the government to, like, ban plastic bags and blah, blah, blah.
No, we have our own agency. And I'm not trying to be reductive and say the only power we have is as consumers, but we do have our power of being a consumer in a consumer society. And if we're not, if we're not in, in, in many ways participatory and informed, then, you know, we're going to be like, you know, the American model of democracy. Is it a republic or is it a democracy? Is it truly, like, egalitarian? Or is it like, those people over there know best? And they're going to tell.
Claude Schryer
Tell us this soundscape moment here. That truck at a distance is quite pretty.
Coman Poon
Well, that truck is part of complexity here, because in the small village of Rupert, there's one business, and that business is this trucking company, and it's right at the corner there. This old argument also about, like, you know, people's livelihoods and economy versus, like, the environment. I think the question I also have is, as a city dweller, all types of pressures happen to descend upon people who live in density, whether it be intolerance, violence, crumbling infrastructure due to lack of follow up on political promises. But there's also the good of actually taking up less of a footprint as humans? And can we actually consistently do that versus sprawl? And what might be the impact of us taking up less arable farmland or taking up less space for flora and fauna to rewild or to thrive and flourish in our riverbeds, in our, you know, fields, etcetera. And I was reading Anna Singh's book recently, mushroom at the end of the world.
I'm sure you've read it. And they were talking about the origins of the protection of the forests, which was in the northwest of the United States, a kind of, like, brokered agreement between lumber business and environmentalists. And what they agreed upon was that they were going to join forces and support fire retardation. Now, that sounds all good, but what's uncovered in the book is that so many years of fire retardation practices mean that the trees, like the sequoia and the other kind of conifers that need fire to actually, like, activate their seeds and flourish, they're increasingly left to just die. And at the same time, when there's forest fires, it clears all of the other trees and then what grows up are trees that are a result of human disturbed ecologies and fire retardation is an act of that. It's a human disturbed situation. It's in these places of human disturbance that I think, you know, from a permaculture perspective, this is where the energy is, right?
This is what they call the edge spaces. And you think also of, you know, western notions of conservation, non-indigenous western notions of conservation. And often what's assumed, if you scratch a little further, is conservation of ecology through the expelling of human influence. Well, that's actually the opposite of what the indigenous stewardship practices are about. All healthy forests in pre-colonial times were tended and stewarded. So we have a role to play. It's not about, oh, let's like, you know, carve out this massive like, area.
We'll call it, you know, preservation of nature, because we're taking all the other ones that were on the coast. But in fact, it's also like a clever way of like territorializing indigenous lands and waters. These are things I think people need to be more critical of and more conscious of. So it's not like, oh, yeah, let's, um, let's build more conservation areas because that leaves me guilt free. I'm just going to donate $100 …
Claude Schryer
I'm going to go for a walk once in a while.
Coman Poon
Yeah.
Claude Schryer
Not knowing what I'm stepping on. Well, continuing our sound walk. There are, in French, we call them cigalles, they're cicadas here in the forest and some really beautiful insects. And I've noticed when I come here that the ecosystem seems relatively healthy because there's a lot of butterflies and pollinators and grasshoppers and, you know, snakes and all kinds of wildlife that seem to be the way they should be.
Coman Poon
And yet this is human disturbed.
Claude Schryer
It is, and I'm sure, and then this is probably a, you know, septic field from what I know.
Coman Poon
Yeah. And this hill is groomed with grass and Kentucky blue. Yeah. It's used as a kind of like agricultural sort of equestrian showcase once a year and there's a skating rink with, you know, horses train there and show there. I don't know, I guess, yeah, talents.
Claude Schryer
Well, maybe it's, maybe it sounds better than it looks, but my point is paying attention to the interconnection of all these systems is really what will lead us to decide whether we want to intervene or not. Right. Because sometimes we should and sometimes, we don't. That's a good point.
Coman Poon
Humans don't listen before they act. Well, they should, but, like, they really don't. Like, you know, we were talking about what is deeply listening. Like, how many seasons constitute a deep listening to land and water.
Claude Schryer
A lifetime should do it, or more.
Coman Poon
Yeah.
Claude Schryer
And then you see a pattern and you can actually understand how things are unfolding.
Coman Poon
Yep.
Claude Schryer
There's that truck again. Oh, that's a different truck. It's a trailer. It's almost like birdsong. The birds get confused and say, what kind of bird is that?
Coman Poon
Well, sonically, we are getting complexity. I mean, it's very lush here, but it's also very clearly a human occupy. It's farmlands, recreation center fields, roads that.
Claude Schryer
Are active, electric wires everywhere. Yeah, it's not really, but the hills.
Coman Poon
Are probably in touch since the, you know, first kind of like lumbering happened, and then they've been left as is.
Claude Schryer
Well, I think the late motif for our little soundwalk so far is the variety of trucks and cars going by, dragging things that are rattling, which, you know, artistically is sort of interesting, but the consequences are that people are constantly moving stuff around and exploiting the land. And, I mean, I appreciate that. Maybe that trucking company allows people to make a living and to stay in the region and to, you know, have a relatively small footprint and lots of farmers, lot of ground farmers around here. We went to a farm here today.
Coman Poon
I think those trucks also, they take gravel from the nearby quarry to support construction in Ottawa and the kind of capital region. So, yeah, they're part of a larger infrastructure.
Claude Schryer
Well, let's work our way back to the centre. I don't know that I have more questions for you, but we started talking about art in times of crisis, and I suggested we have another conversation, like in a few months, and go deeper on that once I've done more research. But I'm intrigued because it's actually a very difficult topic because there's not a lot of. There's not much of an upside. When you're in a crisis, you know, the arts can help you feel. Maybe a sense of solidarity or consolation, maybe there'll be a momentary joy. But when you're in a crisis, when you're in a catastrophe, you don't necessarily have time for art. And yet what I hear from many artists and cultural workers is that the arts are extremely important. There's a lot of artistic production in periods of emergency. Has that been your experience, or you have. Have you heard about that?
Coman Poon
I think that the pandemic produced a kind of a panic because it stopped production and exhibition and left only creation for those who are lucky to be in Quebec, for instance. But for the rest, especially in expensive urban areas, it brought immense precarity because rents don't magically kind of like, pay themselves when there's work stoppage, and not everyone could translate their work into the digital. So if you're a creator and you are a maker of, and you can sell your goods and you make products great, if you are someone who is research based, whose process is intimate based, and less about quantity of people, then you're faced with what I think. Like a friend of mine said, ultimately, at one point or another, all artists have to face the reality, which is they make work for themselves. They are not making it because they are being driven by the market or because of this chase of, I don't know, affirmation and ego confirmation. But instead they have to go into what drives their curiosity and what they uniquely offer in terms of a kind of intelligence that is not a methodical, scientific, you know, reductively repeatable formula. And this is why, like often when you see these art science collaborations, intelligences that are cohering are taking a really interesting risk, because they really think in very different ways.
I think artists intelligences are more like butterflies. They, like, make a big leap, but they don't know how they got there. But they got there. Suddenly it's like magical. Wow.
Claude Schryer
Well, call it intuition, call it whatever you want, call it genius, but you think we learned lessons from the pandemic? And, I mean, I hear you. You know, I know a lot of musicians, theater artists, dance artists couldn't work at all, and here we are in a recovery period. But there's going to be other disruptions in this society, and artists will go through not only difficult times, but times where we really need their services, we need their insights, we need their… And how are we going to support that as a society? That's an open-ended question, with or without art councils.
Coman Poon
I think that, for me, aside from that kind of jokey thing about the leap of intelligence, the arts offer a kind of a way of knowing that is not necessarily modifiable, and it's valuable in times of crisis to think about how we have values that are either dictated or that we build for ourselves. And I think artists who are tapped into a kind of inner logic of why they are artists, they are going to be able to model in some ways, a kind of stepping into the unknown, a stepping into comfort with uncertainty, a kind of courageousness of curiosity that is not externally driven only. And I think in crisis the arts can offer that, but it can't. It can't offer food on the table per se. It can't offer emergency medical services. That is not its core competence. And it's fine. Its core competence is something sacred in older cultures. That would be the role of, like, the oracle, that would be the role of ritual. That would be the dream interpreter who.
Claude Schryer
Were integrated in society and valued.
Coman Poon
Yeah.
Claude Schryer
And fed by the collective. And maybe that's what we need to do, is feed the artists in time crisis so they can do their work.
Coman Poon
Amen.
Claude Schryer
Now, I just want to recognize the crickets because it's very rich here sonically, and it's bouncing off the hockey boards there. And just appreciate this for a minute. So, Coleman, yesterday I didn't ask you what you were reading or listening to. You said you didn't necessarily have anything, but I'm sure you do.
Coman Poon
I wander a lot.
Claude Schryer
Well, you know, one of my guests said, I don't read books and stuff. I listen to pundits, you know, which is sort of what I do, too. What do you do for intellectual stimulation?
Coman Poon
I've been part of the emergence network for kind of the years of the pandemic.
Claude Schryer
What's that?
Coman Poon
So the emergence network is a creation by Bayo Akomolafe, who is a Nigerian thinker, provocateur, post academic, post activist. And it. It was really grounding to have him kind of throw provocations around, you know, what it means to. What it means to be in crisis. In the context of the pandemic, it was, you know, the need to slow down when in crisis. And how does that actually manifest in my life? It's an open-ended question that, you know, I just digested over long, long periods of time and just saw how it manifested.
It led me to many different pathways. He ties that into the notion of fugitivity. Right. So a deliberate kind of invisibilizing while being full out in the open. And what does that mean? It's also important to me to think about what is, what is the human. And often I think people are forgetting that the human is a territory and the human territorializes.
So what we need to think about is what is the post human? What is what in the context of the human as a territory, what then would be the monstrous? And how might that be emancipatory? How might that be the cornerstone of a myriad of futurisms. How might that practically inform my way of being and knowing and where I put my energy and who I am in cahoots with?
Claude Schryer
How you raise children, how you do whatever you do in life, how I…
Coman Poon
Respond to the choices, the myriad infinite choices that are before me.
Claude Schryer
Yeah. Well, that's great. Well, that's a good book. It's not a book, it's a network.
But I did the same. I was part of four or five different networks that were really informative and had a sense which continue to this day.
Coman Poon
Global networks. Yeah.
Claude Schryer
And technology facilitate those. And thank God we're talking to each other all around the world. All right, Coleman, thanks again.
Coman Poon
Pleasure.
PART 3 A story told on Chapel Street, Ottawa after the main interview
Claude Schryer
So Coman. And we're outside, and I just thought it would be fun for you to tell the story you just told me in the hallway there about Vanessa Andreotti and the plane.
Coman Poon
Well, when I first met Vanessa in 2019, I think she shared this story with me about, you know, the metaphor of the plane crashed as a way of talking about the time of the great turning, so to speak, for lack of a better term. And this idea is that there is no. There is no prevention of the crime, right? If you and I, and, you know, every living thing that is on, so called, the plane is on Pachamama, Mother Earth with us, we're going through a crash. We're going through, you know, six, extinction, we're going through climate collapse, geopolitical collapse, economic collapse, all types of overlapping, interlaced cycles of destruction. And like on planes, what you can do, at best, is to get ready for a glide as opposed to a hard landing, because that means some will survive, and those that survive aren't necessarily the lucky ones. So while we're on the plane, you know, instead of putting on our noise canceling earphones, pretending that we're not in a sardine can, we could try turning to each other, saying hello. So many things can happen between the moment when we know the plane is going to crash, that there's no getting away from that and the crash itself. So my invitation is to the listeners, what are you doing? What are you doing before the crash, in this time? What are you doing with your life? How are you going to actually weave connection? Because it's still possible to operate without hope. It's absolutely imperative.