Eve Tagny

born 1986, Montréal, Québec; lives in Montréal, Québec

Eve Tagny’s work explores disrupted landscapes as sites of embodied memory. Her installation, The Carriers, brings together a selection of recent performance videos enacted within a rock quarry in Québec, the ruins of a Tuscan villa, and a construction site in a gentrifying area of Montréal. In these videos, Tagny and her collaborators perform ritual-like gestures in physical dialogue with the site itself. Bodies drape over excavated rocks at the quarry. Tagny’s own shoulder presses against a tree that has reclaimed the villa’s ruins. Hands touch a muddy stream at the construction site. These intimate gestures convey a recognition that gendered and racialized bodies, and the land, share wounds inflicted by the economic forces of extractive labor and property. In the case of the construction site, the presence of Black bodies is an act of resistance against the ways gentrification erases the presence of racialized communities.

Tagny has set her videos within an environment of sculptural objects and architectural forms made from various construction materials, including cob—a building agent of mud and straw used in Tagny’s paternal, ancestral home of Cameroon and around the globe. Textiles installed in the space carry a residue of marks and stains of pigment made with earth and plants that Tagny collected from the construction site in Montréal and the grounds of the Tuscan villa. These textiles resonate as bodily surrogates that carry traces of history, forming tender evocations of the life that persists amid the trauma of extraction, which violates the land and the bodies of those who inhabit it.