Mia + Eric
In a Strange Place
November 7, 2024—February 9, 2025
In a Strange Place is a meditative 9-channel video installation and social engagement project that delves into the future of our forests and those who care for them.
Born out of a multi-year, international research and engagement process with communities in England, Germany, and Norway, In a Strange Place features 150 foresters, ecologists, activists, conservationists and land keepers performing abstract, slow-motion “dances” in the woods. These improvised choreographies are reflections of the participant’s care work, their connection to their local forest, and their role in an uncertain multi-species future.
The aim of In a Strange Place is to translate the complex knowledge and expertise of forest caretakers into emotional and visual gestures for a non-science audience. Showing forest work as an embodied practice, each video—a type of slow portraiture—captures the forest workers waist up and wearing handmade masks of imagined future forest creatures.
The culminating installation of In a Strange Place is comprised of nine separate videos. As audiences enter into the installation they are surrounded by woodlands and will be met by the forest workers performing the gestural reflections of their work. Through a series of overlapping, interacting, and individual performances, audiences are asked to move within the installation—a digital forest—becoming active in their viewing. The total running time of the installation is 90 minutes.
In a Strange Place is designed to be iterative so that it can grow as it tours to different locations. With each new edition, and as the project grows, the performances of local forest workers are added to the chorus of forest workers from previous versions, adding complexity to the meaning and provocations of the piece around climate change, global ecology and forest management. Western Canada was added to the installation in Summer 2024.
About the Artists
Mia + Eric
We are Mia Rushton and Eric Moschopedis, a neurodivergent, interdisciplinary artist team from Calgary, Alberta, Canada. Eric has a background in theatre and performance and Mia has a background in craft, printmaking and the visual arts. Together we create long-term research and community engagement processes that lead to socially engaged exhibitions, performances, temporary public art, participatory works, interventions, and publications. Thematically our practice deals with multi-species ethnography, interspecies relationships, biodiversity and place-based knowledge production in cities, small towns, and rural spaces. Since 2008 we have created and presented our projects, artist talks, lectures, and workshops at both formal and DIY galleries, festivals, residencies, conferences, and post-secondary institutions regionally, nationally, and internationally.
Mia + Eric have presented projects and exhibitions at The Bentway (Toronto), GIFT Festival (Gateshead, UK), Buenos Aires International Festival (AR), Matchbox (Mannheim, DE), Festspillene i Nord-Norge (Harstad, NO), Take Me Somewhere (Glasgow), Confederation Centre of the Arts, (Charlottetown), Parks Canada Discovery Centre (Woody Point, NL), ESKER Project Space (Calgary), Fierce Festival (Birmingham, UK), Grand Union (Birmingham, UK), Battersea Arts Centre (London, UK), Luminato Festival (Toronto), Flux Night (Atlanta), Art Gallery of Alberta (Edmonton), and Stromereien Performance Festival (Zürich).
