ECU x Mount Pleasant: Craftsmanship

Participating students and recent alumni from Emily Carr University of Art + Design will share insights developed in collaboration with Western Front visiting artist Itziar Okariz through Craftsmanship, a pair of workshops investigating performance both in its specificity and at the limits that define it.

Drawing from Okariz’s performance Dream Diary, which uses dreams as a score, the workshops combined practical exercises that explored the body as a sign and language in its positional and performative dimensions, alongside new proposals developed by the participants. The public presentation will reveal experiments, fragments, and performative sketches that offer a glimpse into the ideas and processes emerging from the workshops.

In Dream Diary, Okariz continues her practice of recording dreams. In the month before the performance, she keeps a diary of recollections written immediately upon waking—brief impressions that often take the form of vivid narratives or fleeting images. During the performance, these texts are transformed through fragmented, cyclical readings: phrases are multiplied, inverted, and connected, with each reading carrying the last word into the next. Gradually, the full dream emerges.

Itziar Okariz is an artist based between Bilbao and New York. Her work revolves within the framework of action and performance, questioning the ways of regulating language and the production of signs that define us. Her work –vocal performances, instant acts, videos, installations and text pieces– examines the ties between architecture, territory, body, ritual, sexuality, and semiotics. Often associated with feminist practices, punk-rock and the queer critique of normative gender constructs.