The Grantham Foundation for the Art and the Environment is pleased to announce its winners in creation and in research of its 2024 Call for Projects.

Creation Award — naakita f.k.

naakita f.k. is a multidisciplinary artist living and working in Tio'Tia:Ke/Mooniyang/Montreal. They use their installations as a means to listen, translate, and tell stories related to changing landscapes, abstract forms of inheritance and legacy, and the pliability of memory. Their current body of research uses hauntology to explore the impacts of extractive industry and the colonial project on built and natural environments, while imagining possible futures contained in a haunted place. The project developed at the Foundation will explore local geologies. Focusing on the impacts of the region's mining operations, this work tells a story about the systems of power that this country as it is known today was built from. It asks what pasts, presents, and possible futures are held within rocks’ layers? How can place be learned in a different way when we are, at all times, surrounded by histories and futures? In the process, it offers reminders that responsibility doesn’t stop at what we can touch, what we have lived, or what we will live to see.  

To learn more about the artistic practice of naakita f.k.:
https://naakitafk.com/selected-works 

Research Award — Kirsty Robertson 

Kirsty Robertson is Professor of Contemporary Art and Director of Museum and Curatorial Studies in the Department of Visual Arts at Western University (ON). Her project takes one of the most common manufactured items in the world – a synthetic textile – and uses its disintegration to read the world. Synthetic fabrics like nylon and polyester break down into plastic microfibers, which disperse into air, soil, and water, and make their way into the farthest reaches of the world and even into outer space. But microfibers also reconfigure and coagulate into strange anthropogenic objects such as fatbergs (formed in sewers from wet wipes and discarded oils) and neptune balls (spherical conglomerations of sea grasses and plastic fibers). Moving from the world of high fashion through to the garbage dump, this project traces the growing impact of microfibers. 

Led by Josianne Poirier, Artistic Director of the Foundation, the jury for the awards brought together the expertise of Jean-François Bélisle, Director and CEO of the National Gallery of Canada, Geneviève Chevalier, artist, curator and professor at Université Laval, Johanne Lamoureux, Canada Research Chair in Citizen Museology, Marilou Lemmens, artist and winner of the 2020 Research Grant, Bénédicte Ramade, independent critic, researcher and curator specializing in Anthropocene issues.