Five performers propel human-scale, hand-bound books of white paper and soft canvas along the QUIET PARADE route. Motion and force reveal the abundant acoustic and tactile properties of these human-scale books. The pages are sounded by open wind and by impact with surfaces through dragging, page-turning, hurling, flipping, and the occasional performer wrapping themselves in the book. Tumblebook began as a solo performance, a way to draw without intentional mark-making. The books write themselves as they are tumbled along by foot, composing and decomposing by way of gravity, propulsion, and play. The scale is inherently relational: momentum depends on full, physical engagement, producing every iteration of form in improvised sequence, while the marks and creases on the pages dance with light and perspective.

For the performers, there is something magical about being the custodian of a book that is large enough to hide in. A book is a place of reference and refuge. It symbolizes quasi-permanent information or possibly escape. A blank book holds the potential for any or all knowledge to fill its pages. These books are a survey of the damages they withstand. It is remarkable to me how they might be read, and what they might teach us.

Performers:

Karishma Bristy has an academic background in Studio Art (BA) and Philosophy (BA, MA), a research background in applied ethics, and a professional background in arts education and community engagement. As a conceptual artist, her work is frequently generated by her interests in feminist philosophy, language, and hermeneutics. She also sings! 

Carol Cheong is a Chinese Toronto-based interdisciplinary artist whose practice explores the idea of one’s being as a participant in the world – the passage of time, state of being and intimacies in growth.

Xeno Kairos Couroux is a world builder, comic artist, inveterate punster and emergent video game designer. Between jump scares, he’s a fourth grader at Charles Sauriol in love with kitties and his neighbour’s Cane Corso dog Winslow, even though he is scary loud when he barks.

Anonyme Radix Couroux is an experimental dancer, neo-gymnast and initiator of high stakes scenarios rife with innovative expletives. A first grader shock jock at Charles Sauriol, her hobbies include primal screaming and doll hybridization.

Idil Djafer is a Scarborough-based multidisciplinary conceptual artist working with photography, drawing and installation. Djafer's practice focuses on racial, religious and feminist issues and explores the intersection of her three identities as being a visible Black Muslim Woman.

Catherine Stinson is Queen’s National Scholar in the Philosophical Implications of Artificial Intelligence at Queen’s University and an avoider of parades. Their academic work focuses on the interrelationships between technology, social structures and brain/minds. As a textile artist they explore how living beings and artifacts co-construct one another, take each other apart, and put each other back together.