Olivia Vidmar
About Olivia
Olivia Vidmar is an artist, writer and emerging curator based in Tiohtiá:ke/Mooniyang/Montréal. She holds a BFA from Concordia University and an MA in Art History, where her thesis research focused on the relationships between public art and urban renewal in post-industrial neighbourhoods. Olivia’s research practice is informed by feminist methodologies and embodied, situated approaches to understanding spatial histories. She recently completed a collaborative curatorial residency at La Centrale galerie Powerhouse and her writing has been published in Esse arts + opinions.
About the Project
In exploring the Esse and Érudit archives during this residency, I am interested in how contemporary artists and curators contend with environments formed by the interaction between human intervention and non-human life, or “third nature.” Anthropologist Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing defines third nature as “what manages to live despite capitalism,” resulting in places or systems neither entirely uninterrupted by capitalist infrastructure (first nature) nor fully controlled by humans (second nature). Urban edges, abandoned industrial sites, or post-extraction landscapes exist in the liminality of third nature, open to transformation by entropy, living organisms, and ecological processes. What role do artists play in these assemblages of life forms, relationships, and ecologies that persist, adapt, or emerge in the ruins left by capitalist transformations? Further, how do artists and curators address the ethical and practical considerations involved in engaging with these complex environments?
