Anishinaabe Dream-Visioning

Ecologically Embodied Ciphers

A young Anishinaabe woman (Dolleen Manning) stands with raised arm leaning on rock wall with petroglyph

This community-based research-creation project is in development to employ land-based multi-media installation and performance to explore customary Anishinaabe visionary practices and their contemporary adaptations found in everyday rituals, lifeways, place-based knowledges and Anishinaabemowin. I take these imaging practices up as embodied ciphers, not as conscious reasoning but as embodied consciousness. As such these ciphers are arrived at through aki (earth) and the integration of bodies within ecology. Perturbing one another they emit reverberating frequencies—secret codes—registered in the body and imaged (not imagined but collectively insinuated). The project asks how Anishinaabe philosophy, dream-visioning and imaging-praxis are employed as an interpretive framework, critical improvisational engagement, and relational ethics. Access to such traditional knowledge is gained in dialogue with human and other-than-human relations through ceremonial fasting, dreaming, and open flexible being-in-world-in-community in proximity to specific places.