My conversation with interdisciplinary artist-researcher, educator, and community-engaged practitioner Devora Neumark and their 30 + years of contemplative practice most recently as a Forced Migration and Refugee Studies Fellow at the Centre for Human Rights Erlangen-Nürnberg. This conversation was recorded on the unceded lands of the Algonquin-Ainishinaabe nation, in Ottawa, on February 21, 2025, while Devora was on their way back home to Iqaluit, Nunavut and spoke mostly about Displacement Codes, a collaboration with Karina Kesserwan, which centers around 13 prompts, adapted from AI-generated outputs, each designed to inspire reflection and performance-based responses to the lived experiences of displacement.
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Can art help us process the overwhelming grief of climate change and displacement? Devora Neumark shares how their project, Displacement Codes, uses contemplative performance and collaboration to explore these complex emotions. Discover how artists and citizens alike can find solace and action through mindful engagement and cross-disciplinary dialogue.
Chapter Summary
0:00 - The weight of global crises and the need for emotional processing.
0:56 - Introduction to Devora Neumark and the Displacement Codes project.
1:57 - Exploring emotions through performance art and holding space for others.
3:02 - Addressing colonization’s impact and mental health disparities.
3:53 - Art as a tool for acknowledgement, support, and co-creation.
4:44 - The importance of present-moment awareness before future planning.
6:05 - The collaboration with lawyer Karina Kesserwan on Displacement Codes.
7:05 - Newmark’s fellowship in Germany and focus on aesthetics in asylum housing.
7:55 - The process of developing performance prompts related to displacement.
8:32 - Incorporating AI and the dialogic nature of the project with Karina.
9:53 - Finding gestures and enacting responses to prompts.
11:13 - Navigating challenges and the evolving nature of collaboration.
12:31 - The power of cross-disciplinary collaboration, especially with non-artists.
13:08 - Actionable steps: contemplative practices and dialogic communication.
14:19 - Reinforcing community connections and shared thinking.
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Behind the Story
Devora Neumark, an interdisciplinary artist and educator, draws on 30 years of contemplative practice to create Displacement Codes. This project, born from their Forced Migration and Refugee Studies at the Centre for Human Rights Erlangen-Nürnberg fellowship in Germany, addresses the emotional toll of forced migration and climate change. By collaborating with Karina Kesserwan, a lawyer, Neumark bridges the gap between art and law, demonstrating the power of cross-disciplinary dialogue in addressing complex global issues.
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
[00:00:00 - 00:00:56] Devora Neumark
What can I do to support the grieving? There's so much to grieve. Whether we think about the crisis of climate, whether we think about the political crises, the issue of displacement, which is around the world. Forced displacement, such a huge crisis. How do we manifest the kinds of spaces that people need to be able to individually and collectively get in touch with how they're feeling and do it in such a way that opens the possibility for what you're talking about with the renewal, or, you know, a post traumatic growth, if you will. And in my experience, you can't get to that post traumatic growth until you actually sit with the emotions, however difficult they are.
[00:00:56 - 00:01:57] Claude Schryer
Episode 221 My conversation with interdisciplinary artist, researcher, educator and community engaged practitioner Devora Neumark and their 30 plus years of contemplative practice. Most recently as a forced Migration and Refugee Studies Fellow at the center for Human Rights and Largan Nuremberg. We spoke mostly about a new project, Displacement Codes, a collaboration with Karina Kesserwan. The project centers around 13 prompts adapted from AI generated outputs, each designed to inspire reflection and performance-based responses to the lived experiences of displacement. Sitting with emotions it's something that I've.
[00:01:57 - 00:06:04] Devora Neumark
Been exploring for a really long time. Like I think about the project that I did with Folie Culture in Prescription, where we were asked as artists like Karen Spencer and Sylvie Coton and I and a whole bunch of other people were there, what is a prescriptive gesture, performance gesture that you would offer to people in this time of difficulty, even at that time? And my gesture at the time was holding ground. So I would hold people in the way that they wanted to be held for as long as they wanted to be held physically, physically. And so it's not something new for me, but I think my own healing process has evolved in a way that I am differently available to myself, but also to others in terms of what that could look like and how that scale, just the enormity of what we're going through as society. As you know, I live in the north and I look at the effects of colonization, ongoing colonization on the Inuit population up there, and the lack of mental health support ports and the lack of infrastructure. There's no options for, you know, schooling past high school unless you're going to the college and the college's trades, Right? So just that endless cycle of intergenerational lateral violence that is imposed by our colonial structures, imposed by the. The structures of power, by the abuses of power. I'll say it that way. Right. So the role of Arts, first and foremost, to acknowledge what is happening, to be able to support people to go through their processes and I think to co create new possibilities. Right. And so my practice as a community-based artist, or as somebody who does contemplative performance, which is one of my latest projects, is really. It's actually in the title. Right. Displacement codes. Before, you know, contemplative performance in the. And the climate crisis is to explore what that could look like, what are we envisioning? Right. And it's something that I really learned very personally and very profoundly when I spent 10 years working in a women's shelter in Montreal. And there's this tendency to want to get people who are in those kinds of abusive situations to think about what comes next, what's the future? Right. Where can you go from here? And one thing that you learn very, very quickly is there is a need first to take stock of where you are before you can imagine where you might go. And I think that is where I'm trying to put my focus on right now, whether or not it's embracing what's happening with the climate, especially up north. Because as you know, the Arctic experience is experiencing climate change four times faster than anywhere else in the world. And we actually see it on a daily basis in Iqaluit. So how do we. How do we engage with those systems? But on a really emotional, whether it's personal or collective, emotional level.
[00:06:05 - 00:06:15] Claude Schryer
I've experienced your work as a performance artist, and when I read your most recent project, you're collaborating with an artist whose name I forget right now, but I want to acknowledge her.
[00:06:15 - 00:06:16] Devora Neumark
She's not an artist, she's a lawyer.
[00:06:16 - 00:06:17] Claude Schryer
A lawyer, that's right.
[00:06:18 - 00:06:20] Devora Neumark
Karina Kesserwan, right? Yes. She's a lawyer.
[00:06:21 - 00:06:30] Claude Schryer
And so I was really. I really liked that framing of the collaboration and also looking at gestures and. And the rich history of performance arts, which is really a type of ritual.
[00:06:31 - 00:06:43] Claude Schryer
Think about it. So I'd like. I'd like the listeners to. To have an idea and then I'll point them in the right direction to see more of what that project was, what your intentions were and how it went.
[00:06:43 - 00:13:08] Devora Neumark
Mm, yes. So displacement codes, contemplative performance and the climate crisis. I just came back from three months in Germany. I was a fellow with the center for Human Rights in Nuremberg. Erlangen. Erlangen, Nuremberg. And the project there was about displacement, specifically asylum housing. And they invited me to be the fellow there because of my work on beauty in the built environment and how important that is both individually and collectively. For displaced individuals. I mean, aesthetics is important for everybody, but particularly for people who are experiencing forced displacement. And I knew that there was going to be a delay in the start of that project, which is called More Than Four Walls. And I knew that I wanted to be able to bring also my artistic praxis into my time in Germany for those three months. And so I created this very, very structured, intense, actually, process by which I had developed a series of prompts for weekly performances based on what does displacement related to climate change evoke? And there was a whole AI component to it, which Karina has written quite eloquently and very, I think, significantly about. And so I had done a project where there were daily prompts for a month when I was doing the work in Hong Kong at Things that Can Happen with Jennifer Vanderpoel. But there wasn't that same because I was on location with Jennifer in Hong Kong. We had that daily dialogue going. And so it didn't quite feel as, in a way, stressful. Whereas coming up with a performance a week on my own, and I'm so much a dialogic thinker, I knew that it would be really important to be able to have somebody to speak that through with and to have that kind of feedback. And Carina is a lawyer in Montreal who I've known for over 10 years, and somebody who has just such a broad knowledge base and such a broad interest in healing, cultural significance works a lot with indigenous communities, so really understands the cycles of colonial violence. And it was really important for me to have that kind of lens also to this project. And so we got into a rhythm where I would have the prompt, I would hold it really in my hands, my heart, my body, for a week, and over that week try and figure out what is the gesture, what's the performance event that I could respond to based on that prompt. And we can think about them as prompt, or we can think about the Fluxus movement. This is not something new. They called it, you know, something else. Yoko Ono, of course, did the whole book called Grapefruit around scores, right? So it's not quite a score, but it's along that line in terms of that lineage of art practice. And so I found that holding these prompts and finding the gesture, creating the conditions under which I could enact the response to that prompt, and then sending some artifact, whether it was a video, an audio piece, sometimes it was a photo to Karina. She would write about it and then post it to the blog. And we had this whole exchange we went through about eight of them, I think, out of 13. And when we got to the one called the Weight of it all, unsurprisingly, because very often what we end up focusing on is what ends up happening in life in general. Karina ended up finding the weight of it all in her life very, very intense for a whole bunch of different reasons. And so she hasn't quite finished that one, even though I finished the video artifact for that. And as soon as she is done with that one, we're going to get back into the rhythm. I have completed 11 of the 13. And then I took a pause for the 12th and the 13th because I wanted to make sure that Karina had caught up. But the exchange with Karina and the way in which she interpreted the performance gestures that I did brought a whole other understanding that also had shaped what I ended up doing. Right. Because there was a call and response and one week led to another week. And then how did. How do you navigate that? And I think it's one of the ways. If I go back to your original question, what is the role of artists? I think that one thing that comes to mind is how important it is to collaborate outside of the arts. This co creativity with Karina as a lawyer, I think is part of the answer. I think we have to step outside of our worlds as artists and collaborate. Of course, artists and scientists have a long history of collaborating, but artists and lawyers maybe not so much. And I think that that is part of the answer as well.
[00:13:08 - 00:13:24] Claude Schryer
Well, you've anticipated my question, which is what are action points that you would recommend for artists and citizens coming out of your work? I know we only have a minute or two, but just some thoughts on what people can do because there's that sense of disempowerment that we need to bring through.
[00:13:27 - 00:14:59] Devora Neumark
So I'm going to go back to part of the title of this piece, which is the contemplative part. I absolutely think that for me, if I didn't have a 30 plus year meditation practice, it would be near impossible for me to get out of bed in the morning. Right. And I think that that is a potential action point. Not that I'm somebody who goes around saying, oh, you should meditate, like, you know, do what you need to do. Right. But I think that it is a way that we can sit with whatever arises and learn to be friends with it, whether it's difficult or not. Right. So that is something about learning how to regulate our emotions for ourselves is something that I think would be helpful in this world that we're living in. And I also think the dialogic is really, really important. Whether you reach out across political divides or reach into your community, I think we need to really reinforce the ways that we can be in communication with each other and out of those dialogues, try and come to thinking together to towards. I don't know. I'm not sure how I feel about hope these days. Right. So not living this time alone I think is really important.