“score to perform” is a collaborative video formed around notions of communication. Artists Rita Evans and Nicole Shimonek experiment with a performative score and subsequent set of parameters to create work at the time of COVID-19 exhibited and juxtaposed alongside one another. 

Octavia Butler’s “Speech Sounds” is a starting point for the collaboration, reflecting on how, in the story, a pandemic takes away a civilization’s capacity to communicate in written and spoken language. People communicate through gesture using symbols to introduce themselves to one another.

This work questions around what new languages are potentially formed with the technologies we are all currently using, what is lost and what is gained across this medium. It relays around ideas of the politics and proximity of touch and how this effects the human body. Funded by the Manitoba Arts Council.