
Building Anti-Monuments: A Conversation with Eve Tagny
A densely packed audience skirted Toronto’s Cooper Cole gallery on the opening night of Unadorned Landscapes (2022). I stood among them behind a wooden structure lined with engraved ceramic tiles comparing land valuation methods in Montréal and London, England. Eve Tagny and her co-performer cradled each other drifting around the space; this tender act was my first encounter with Eve’s work, which I’ve followed ever since.
Eve has been busy the past two years, presenting Assemblies (2023), a 12-hour performance installation for Toronto’s nocturnal art show Nuit Blanche, as well as work at the group exhibition Thick as Mud (2023) in Seattle, a performance installation As Yet to Be Established (2023) in New York, and video artwork Fall (2020-2024) in Florence, Italy.
Eve’s style is instantly recognizable to anyone familiar. Informed by Québécois and Cameroonian roots, her practice weaves lens-based mediums, text, and score (a series of choreographic prompts) with organic installations made of materials like soil, sand, and hay to explore spiritual and embodied expressions of grief and resiliency in correlation with nature’s rhythms, cycles, and materiality. The cinematic and physical worlds she builds are saturated and dreamy yet terrestrial—the kinds of worlds you’d want to be enveloped in.
We met over a video call on a Sunday morning, her at home in Montréal and me at home in San Francisco, both bathed by sunlight and flanked by potted plants. As artists who work with video and performance, we often contemplate similar themes of permanence and public space. In this brief conversation, we touched on alienation from labour, embodied language, and how to practice models of care in an increasingly capitalistic art world.
Tamara Jones: I came to your work a few years ago and was so inspired by it even before Lauren [Runions] connected us for Assemblies. I learned so much from your practice. I didn't start developing an artistic practice of my own until the end of 2022. It was informed by housing insecurity and encampment evictions—just seeing my neighbours and friends brutalized. So it was like a manifestation or a way of processing grief. But I didn't understand the depths of what that work could look like until I came across artists who use site-specific performance, installation, and videography like you. I’d love to know more about your background and where you’re coming from as an artist.
Eve Tagny: I was born and raised in Montréal. I grew up in the Plateau and lived in a few different places when I was older, out of interest: London, Paris, and Johannesburg. It's interesting what you said about witnessing the violence around housing insecurity because Montréal has gone through gentrification obviously but, at the same time, the violence is maybe quieter. I don't see the displacement as much. I remember going back to Toronto to do Assemblies, I was just like, the city's so rough. Just seeing the ways violence has spread or, I guess, conceals itself.
It's funny, I never talk about this, but on my mom's side, we're white Québécois Francophone. My mom's the only one who lives in Montréal, so there's a side that's deep Québécois—very far from my experience. Then on my dad's side, he came from Cameroon when he was 20, so he has been in Montréal most of his life. I just went back for the first time in 12 years in June. My dad's building a home there, so it was nice to go back and think about my work because it talks about certain issues in a very specific context where I labour, but I don’t really do. There are questions of land ownership and labour from the position of someone who is the first generation born here, so there's this notion of a shift in types of labour that future generations might do or choices they might make.
Having a [full-time] art practice is a privilege in this sense. Going back to Cameroon and being in a place where labourers were around the house every day, I would wake up at 10 a.m. and people were already working from 7 a.m.; half of them were kids who get paid like $1 a day working in pretty unsafe conditions. It all reduces the distance between ideas of home, belonging, identity, labour, and how all these things are traversed depending on where you are.
TJ: I’m also first generation, so I appreciate that point about privilege and alienation from labour. You recently unveiled the new iteration of Fall in Florence, Italy. Could you tell me more about this work and how the latest cut differs from earlier ones?
ET: I had a version of Gestures for a Mnemonic Garden (2020) that I presented at the VAC [Visual Arts Centre of Clarington] in 2021. We actually opened the show in 2020, and then they closed all museums because of the pandemic, so it was kind of eerie because the show was running for no public for months. It’s one of three videos that I made, and it featured my two siblings. The genesis of everything was grief going through seasons, so you would navigate the space like a garden and there were architecture points that invited you to walk through, but then I would have devices where access is blocked. So just having that relationship with the body and thinking about how we make space and time through coercive measures that also exist within environments we make, and the artifice of nature that happens in the garden, too.
I was also thinking of processing grief through embodied language and thinking that the body is the same that will enact gestures of violence and care, and I just think it's so fascinating that we all have the ability to do both. A lot of the movements are very much centred around hands as a tool that extends or enacts will or emotions. Are you hitting? Are you grappling? Are you caressing? Are you holding things or just holding on? So the video was centred around gestures between my siblings looking at rituals in central and west Africa, costumes embodying shapes created from nature, and becoming these new characters. The link with realigning grief and trauma onto the cycle of the seasons, knowing that there are moments of rest that could look like death, but there’s still life happening at all times; it just takes different forms and paces. I think about the ways we were living when we hadn't distanced ourselves so much from the seasons. There's a disconnect within your body when you don't have to pace yourself with your environment. We've forced temporalities into different modes.
I was invited by the curator, Michele [Bertolino] at Gucci Gardens in Florence, to make a shorter version to be screened alongside a performance of Montreux by Nina Simone. It was interesting because I thought this film was dead forever, and it wasn't even my favourite of the three that I made. So I tightened it and added sound as well. I feel like it's better now, but I've removed some of the pointers to the ritual or the masquerade, and now it’s more centred around the sharing of these gestures of the precarious balance of care.
TJ: As a viewer, I think it's even more nuanced because so much research that informed the work had to be left on the cutting room floor. I'm curious about how your practice has influenced your relationship to labour, and whether going down this path of site-specific performance has deepened your understanding of your practice over the years.
ET: I've been thinking about this a lot because art-making is an absurd form of labour. We’re also doing it in a structure that is hierarchical and capitalist and works within those timelines and scarcity of resources. So we're trying to do something that defies capitalism and its value doesn't lie in that. You do a performance and then it disappears; I think there's a form of resistance in that. It’s like an anti-monument. If we’re thinking about labour, it’s an assertiveness of existence outside of these colonial, capitalist rhythms. There’s a lot of freedom in that.
Art-making is an absurd form of labour. We’re also doing it in a structure that is hierarchical and capitalist and works within those timelines and scarcity of resources. So we're trying to do something that defies capitalism and its value doesn't lie in that. You do a performance and then it disappears; I think there's a form of resistance in that.
Maybe in my practice, I'm trying to carve out these little moments of, okay, I got this little grant, let's gather four people and try to do this. And what you create can become a model to think about how it could be translated into different settings, kind of undoing your notions of hierarchy and power, and seeing what works. In that respect, live performance collaborations have often felt like the space that holds me the most, and it's also challenging and vulnerable because I don't come from the performance world. But I love having that relationship where I don't know too much about it, so that it can remain something that feels a bit more free, and I'm not censoring myself too much. I’m just trying to be in the body as much as I can, which is an important process to reconnect with ways of being that have always been at the core of Afro cultures across the globe. That’s been a big evolution in my practice.
I feel that a lot of people don't have to think about what it means to hold space. They get out of the house, and they don't think about the fact that they have a body. I think anyone who is in a context where they might be a minority or marginalized, we're constantly aware of that. Doing these site-specific gestures undoes the notion that anything can be neutral. For instance, performing in a site of extraction, like an active quarry, as you said, even if it's not necessarily visible, I think there is tension. The gestures are like traces that were left by the labour of other people. I'm just marking presence and trying to develop a relationship with it. And then I think through those memories and relationships, you have to care for that place differently than if you're just passing through. I think it deepens your relationship with your environment and with other people and your actions.
I’m just trying to be in the body as much as I can, which is an important process to reconnect with ways of being that have always been at the core of Afro cultures across the globe. That’s been a big evolution in my practice.
TJ: Even though it's so grounded, I find a lot of your work almost has a dream-like quality. How did you develop this visual language?
ET: I think of research as the basis for creation, so a lot of it would be from my photo or video archives. But more and more I'm shifting into imagination. When I started working with soil, it was very linked to mourning, and I was just kind of recreating the way that they make tombstones in Cameroon, also South Africa because my partner died there.
So I had these photographs of these mounds of soil. It was winter when I came back to Montréal, but then summer came and I would drive past these mounds of soil with weeds growing out of them. It's soil that's been extracted and therefore devalued because it's contaminated, but even if we reject its value, it's still teeming with life, producing and still inscribing itself; it's a wider cycle of life. Soil is such an essential material for me. It’s a constant in different forms, whether its presence in videos or the gallery or the use of clay or cob [soil mixed with hay, sand, and water]. It’s at the essence of histories; it kind of encapsulates the marks of our presence.
With the gestures and the language that I developed, it’s such a meditative practice. How can we heal through gestures when we don't have language or if language is not enough? There's a will to gather with people who have an understanding of the body and how to navigate public space because what we’re doing is creating a new language, learning how to speak it together, and presenting it in an intimate public space.
TJ: In an interview with BOMB Magazine you described soil as a natural archive. I thought that was a beautiful way to think about it. Could you expand on that?
ET: I did a show in Seattle called Thick as Mud and had interesting conversations with the curator Nina [Bozicnik] around the potency of mud. Through my work I was thinking about, on one hand, soil containing so much life you don't see, and what that means in societies that value the visible and the tangible. I'm not religious at all, but I do understand there are a lot of ways of knowing and connecting that we've lost touch with. So I think with soil, in the face of a loss of guides, specifically following the death of my partner, I was like, I don't understand how to keep living. Then I looked at the garden and was just like, this place keeps breathing and making life whether I see it or not.
When someone who takes care of the garden passes and ownership passes onto different hands, the new person might not know what the other person has done, but the garden will forever hold the process and imprint of that person. Another strand of research is agro-capitalism and extraction of land. How much violence are we going to enact to make sure profits keep going up? Who is enacting the violence, and what is the kind of madness that lies at the heart of these behaviours? I just imagine the soil as this witness. We come and go, and then you just still have this core accumulating all of that.
When someone who takes care of the garden passes and ownership passes onto different hands, the new person might not know what the other person has done, but the garden will forever hold the process and imprint of that person.
TJ: On your experience creating Assemblies, you mentioned that working in real time was challenging or there was a tension in the “liveness” of those kinds of performances. Almost a year out from the performance, what reflections do you have on building durational, site-specific work? Do you see yourself doing similar work in the future?
ET: I will definitely never do another 12-hour performance at night ever again.
TJ: [laughs] Okay, that’s fair.
ET: It was exhausting. I didn't realize it had to be all night when I said I would do it—it just kind of happened and then it was too late. I thought we could finish at 2 a.m. and go party or go to bed more likely. Going back to this idea of labour, I was like, wow, this is a little unhinged. I think that's why I set it up in this way where it couldn't be a choreography. It had to be very much around this language where we listen to each other and improvise from that. There were some cue points throughout the night to mark time, but the rest was all improv. So it was really about how we live together and how we labour.
The site was also important because it was behind City Hall, so it's this symbol of political power, but the site itself is a parking lot, this transient place used by people who have been pushed to the margins. Yet it's also surrounded by a core that’s devoted to the production of capital. In doing those gestures—covering the space with soil for 12 hours only for it to get removed—it’s not obsessed with the colonial idea of permanence.
My biggest takeaway was around the notion of care because it was a tight budget and tight deadline on which we were working. Again, going back to this idea that you have a structure with constraints, and you're trying to work in a way that doesn't correspond. As someone who’s leading the project, there's tension. How do I take care of people? How do I make space for people who have different expectations? There's this constant fear of failure and the need to perfectly respond to everyone's needs, and that's just not possible. So for me, it was a big lesson in humility. I think care is not about an absence of conflict, it's more about how to show up for it and ensure you remain accountable throughout the whole process.
But I have to say, it was so amazing. What we created in so little time together, and the level of generosity that people gave to me and this project was astounding. I think that then becomes a model for what it means to be ethical as an artist within a community. Going forward, I need to be cautious about providing enough resources to make sure that everyone has the level of care they need.