I like to appropriate the tropes and attitudes of European art history to speak to current Indigenous realities, but also to imagine what art movements such as Dadaism (CREATURA DADA, 2026), Renaissance (HISTORY SHALL SPEAK FOR, 2018), or Futurism (ECHOES FROM A NEAR FUTURE, 2022) might look like, from an Anishinaabe point of view. My new film project PIDIKWE, in the same vein as my works featuring Indigenous women, looks to the Roaring Twenties period to capture feelings of freedom, self-expression, exuberance, and creativity. The Années Folles (1920–1929) occurred after a pandemic and was a period of economic prosperity with a particular cultural dimension, known as a time of social, artistic, and cultural dynamism.
For me, dance and language are linked to a system of knowledge. They are healing tools rooted in the community.
Shot entirely on film to recreate the aesthetic of 1920s cinema, PIDIKWE blends traditional and contemporary dance to create a unique object that blurs the boundaries between cinema, artwork, and performance. For me, dance and language are linked to a system of knowledge. They are healing tools rooted in the community. It’s important to emphasize that Indigenous women are survivors of centuries of assimilation, abuse, exploitation, and dispossession of matriarchal values. The colonized female body is doubly threatened. It is subject to both the colonial gaze and the male gaze. Female bodies have always been anchored in colonial and patriarchal spatial constructs. This contributes to the belief that Indigenous women’s bodies are up for grabs; they are objects or landscapes to be owned and controlled. I want to put these bodies back into our cities, our lives, our families, and our imaginations.
Caroline Monnet
