The Body Like Woven Fabric: A Conversation with Alexa Bunnell | Aaron Obedkoff
June 24, 2021
Alexa Bunnell and Skylar Eyre, video still, Spirrrit Wrrrestlerrrs, 2019
Leo Tolstoy argued the Doukhobors were “people of the 25th century.” Inspired by the small community’s pacifist resistance to the imperialist endeavors of Tsar Nicholas II, Tolstoy advocated for, and later funded, the immigration of the Doukhobor peoples to Canada.
In the early 20th century, the Doukhobors settled on the stolen lands of Indigenous peoples, first in the Prairies and then west in the Kootenay region of British Columbia, where they continued to practice communal living and subsistence agriculture. They had fled outright persecution in Russia, but the community would soon discover that conditions in Canada were not entirely more tolerant.
Ideological and spiritual differences would splinter the Doukhobor community. A fundamentalist sect known as the Sons of Freedom, or Freedomites, rejected any concept of private property or public schooling and railed against the materialist nature of modern society. After their bold nude protesting techniques proved relatively unsuccessful, the Sons of Freedom began a campaign of arson and bombing in the 1920s.
In an attempt to solve the “Doukhobor problem,” the Premier of British Columbia W.A.C Bennett authorized “Operation Snatch” in 1953, forcibly sending nearly 200 children of the Sons of Freedom community to a residential school in New Denver, B.C. Though the children were released in 1959, the Sons of Freedom subsequently fell dormant. The government of British Columbia has yet to make an official apology for “Operation Snatch.”
Today, only a few thousand self-identified Doukhobors remain. Contrary to Tolstoy’s assertion, their tradition will struggle to survive into the 22nd century. As a person of Doukhobor descent, I have come to regard my culture in the past tense, as if it were a way of being that died along with my grandparents. It was with particular excitement, then, that a fellow Doukhobor friend introduced me to the work of Alexa Bunnell.
Alexa Bunnell was born and raised on Treaty 7 Territory in Mohkinstis (Calgary) and attended the Alberta University of the Arts. Inspired by artists such as Benny Nemerofsky Ramsay, Kite, Christina Battle, Zeal and Ardor, and Chelsea Wolfe, Bunnell has worked across media including fibre, performance, audio, and 3D modelling. In 2019, Bunnell collaborated with Skylar Eyre on Spirrrit Wrrrestlerrrs, an exhibition at the Marion Nicoll Gallery in Calgary. To my knowledge, the exhibition (named using a Russian Accent Generator) is the first work of contemporary art to consider Doukhobor culture from a queer, anti-colonial perspective.
Alexa and I corresponded by email over the span of several months earlier this year. Alexa’s responses not only offered a privileged insight into their work, but also furnished me with an optimism for the future of Doukhobor art and practice.
—Aaron Obedkoff
Aaron Obedkoff
What inspired you to make this exhibition about the Doukhobors?
Alexa Bunnell
Spirrrit Wrrrestlerrrs was born out of a discovery. Skylar Eyre and I met at AU Arts and knew that we both had Doukhobor ancestry. At this time, I was starting to look deeper into my own ancestry and found out that my great aunt, Mary Astaforoff, was a prominent member of the Sons of Freedom and had left a generational mark on my family. Mary set fire to my great-grandfather’s farm, and he was jailed for it. My grandfather grew up without him and within the turmoil of the Sons of Freedom movement. Skylar and I had conversations that led us to find out that my aunt and his great aunt, Pauline Berekoff, had set a lot of fires and protested together. We were meant to be close friends. One day, Skylar sent me an Instagram DM saying that we should apply for an exhibition, and I jumped at the opportunity. We met in a bar, drank gin and tonics, and started working on the project.
I think the motivator for us was to navigate our generational trauma and generational friendship within our queer bodies. In so many ways, we were left without simple or clean answers on how to fit these pieces together. It also felt as though we were imagining an unsettled futurity where queer Doukhobors don’t feel so alien, or maybe where our Doukhoborism feels reconciled.
AO
For those who were unable to attend the exhibition, can you describe it?
Alexa Bunnell and Skylar Eyre, installation, Marion Nicoll Gallery, Spirrrit Wrrrestlerrrs, 2019
AB
The gallery’s windows face inward toward the main mezzanine. The windows were covered up in newsprint that read: “2 in court undress, set fire.” As you opened the door, you entered into a dimly lit space. Layered audio of Doukhobor songs and Enjoy the Silence by Depeche Mode played. Deep bass made it feel like you were outside a club, taking a break from the bright lights of the dance floor. Highlighted on either side of the room were two photographs. In the middle of the room, a yellow milk cart lay empty, with shrivelled beets spilled out on the floor. On the wall opposite the newsprint, a video played. In the video, two people tenderly stamped each other with beets, spelling the words “hunger” and “plead.”
You can hear the exhibition audio in that video. It is best to have the volume turned up high. For the original audio, which is my great-grandparents’, you can visit this link. They’re the Quartet of Old Time Friends, and we used the song “If There is No Faith.”
In the performance Skylar and I did for the exhibition, titled I speak my mother’s mother’s mother’s mother’s mother’s tongue, we sung a version of the duet “In The Heavenly Realm” that my grandparents perform on the album.
AO
I want to touch briefly again on the materials used in the exhibition. With photography, video, and installation, Spirrrit Wrrrestlerrrs employs artistic practices that have never been used in Doukhobor culture. At the same time, you refer to traditional artisanry with shawls and carved ladles, and even make a point of juxtaposing the new with the traditional (the ladles over the photograph is, to me, such a striking pairing). How does the Doukhobor past translate into the artistic and technological present?
Alexa Bunnell and Skylar Eyre, mixed media, Spirrrit Wrrrestlerrrs, 2019
AB
Skylar and I often met with this question: How do we navigate the sometimes very material methods of coding our bodies as queer, with the immaterial beliefs of the Sons of Freedoms and Doukhobors at large?
Often, I think we came to this unresolved point and would struggle with knowing that we would inevitably fail to uphold and remember both histories. I think that this failure, this slippage between knowing and not knowing, was a productive place for us to rest and inquire. A lasting truth within this project is that there are parts of it that simply don’t function. This point runs parallel with the fact that our queer identities are often ill fitted within Doukhoborism.
Talking to artist and writer Faust Harder, they brought up the history of lens-based media and the mainstream gaze set on Doukhobors. Many images of Doukhobors in the past were used to construct an outsider and othering gaze on the culture and traditions. In working with media that uses this gaze, Spirrrit Wrrrestlerrrs was able to reframe the perspective as intimate and queer.
AO
You write that the exhibition was developed "using knowledge well known and unknown" — what was the research process like? Were any Babas consulted?
AB
A lot of the research for the exhibition came from intensive conversations with Skylar. We would talk about our research and the family histories passed down to us. There was a lot of combing through Google results, trying out different keywords and skimming documents to find any information about our shared history, anything connected to Mary and Pauline. Skylar had a few conversations with Pauline about Mary, about their relationship and what had transpired with the Sons of Freedom. I learned bits and pieces from my mother, as she described my grandfather’s elaborate breakfasts and the songs that were sung in her grandparents’ home. The unknown knowledge emerges from the fact that Skylar and I felt no longer directly connected to what Doukhoborism is and was. We were disconnected from our language, our traditions, our clothes. I only learned to speak a little Russian by repeating the same phrase over and over, carrying a piece of paper in my bag with a prayer I’d been trying to learn. Unknown knowledge also implies that the ideas we were toying with were carried in our bodies, even if we didn’t know it—for example, the fact that our great aunts had burned fires together, or committed arson. They had used their bodies together as a form of protest.
Alexa Bunnell and Skylar Eyre, performance photograph, Dying to be like aunty, 2019
So often, the ways of Doukhobors were described as queer by the colonial agents of Canada, and so, we started drawing parallels between the illegal naked bodies of Doukhobors and the illegal bodies of queer people. Our ancestors were often defined by their resistance to Canadian colonial ideologies, as well as to Russian persecution. When we think of our queer ancestors, they too were defined by forms of resistance.
AO
The sense of cultural disconnect that you mention resonates with me. During the tumult of the 1950s and '60s, my grandparents decided to assimilate into the broader non-Doukhobor settler Canadian culture. My father wasn't taught Russian and learned about Doukhobor practice from a distance, so, like you said, I have this strange sense of being connected to a way of being that I am distant from. Did Spirrrit Wrrrestlerrrs help you reach any closure? Did you come to know this "unknown knowledge"?
AB
When I moved out this past summer, my mother and I went through my grandmother’s things. She had doubles of nearly every kitchen item you might need, including two chicken-shaped kitchen timers. My mom and I opened up a box that contained my great-grandfather’s wooden bowls, complete with stamps that bore his name. I was so proud to bring them to our new home, and I would show them off. I started using them as fruit bowls at my new house. Then we forgot a pomelo in the bowl, which rotted and then stained the bowl’s bottom a bright orange.
After trying desperately to scrub the orange off, I burst into big sobs, crawled into my bed and punched a couple pillows. What bothered me about the orange stain was that my great grandfather was dead and couldn’t fix it. And I didn’t know how to fix the stain myself because he never taught me. Leaning into that grief was rough, but I’m understanding more how this pain and loss is manifesting.
I think Spirrrit Wrrrestlerrrs opened a door to reconnection more than any sort of closure. Artist asmaa al-issa and I had a conversation once about how generational remembering occurs within the body like woven fabric, with the threads being generations of memory. Spirrrit Wrrrestlerrrs tugged at those threads, creating a desire to connect further to something that in the past I mostly avoided. Working with Skylar, we had conversations about how our relationship felt very intimate, like we had simply forgotten one another but we had set fires together in the past.
AO
At a certain point, all conversations about Doukhoborism seem to circle back to the Sons of Freedom and their protest techniques. I must admit that I grew up hearing about Mary Astaforoff. In another sign of our small world, my non-Doukhobor grandfather was actually your great-aunt’s defence lawyer. Nudity is a potent and evocative feature of Doukhobor history, and I'm wondering if you could elaborate on the ways in which you see the presence of nudity intersecting with the queer body?
AB
This is a great question. I believe that there are many intersections between queer bodies and Doukhobor bodies. Both the Sons of Freedom and our queer ancestors have used their bodies as tools of resistance. There is an obvious policing and attempted assimilation of queer bodies that also occurred to Doukhobor bodies. Queer bodies are often rejected for being unclean and undesirable to the heteronormative eye. The popular opinion of Doukhobors around the 1950s and ’60s was suspicious. Their practices were considered deeply troubling. Nudity also revealed to me and Skylar our shared heritage: narrow hips, wider shoulders, and round prominent cheeks seemed to jump out so much more when we were both naked playing with beets and dancing.
Alexa Bunnell and Skylar Eyre, mixed media, Spirrrit Wrrrestlerrrs, 2019
I must admit it’s a push and pull. As a queer person, I am very wary of the idea of God and any usage of that name, as I have come to associate it with Catholicism, homophobia, and colonialism. Navigating ideas around being within a culture that uses the terms like God and holy is a jarring experience. Returning to the body, naked or not, soothes a lot of my inner turmoil. I know I’m meant to exist in this body, queer and Doukhobor.
AO
You speak about futurity, and I’m interested in your thoughts about cultural resurgence. I’m often reminded of the Globe and Mail article from a few years ago which questioned whether Doukhobors are “dying out.”
AB
I think of our performance Dying to be like aunty. That performance created a ritual that immersed us in a queer and Doukhobor futurity occurring in the present. That performance was simultaneously a memorial, a celebration, and a ceremony with audio clips from both the band Queen and survivors from New Denver. Working regularly on the Dirty Douks projects, I have felt as though we are developing a secular, queer, and contemporary Doukhobor practice, though in a lot of ways it can feel insular to our partnership.
So much of my reconnection to Doukhobor practices has been through the internet and alone. So many of our practices come from communal and intimate sources such as choirs and the Living Book, so there is an innate disconnect from traditional communal modes of practicing when we aren’t physically together. Taking inspiration from projects like Queering the Map and H.O.R.I.Z.O.N, perhaps we can imagine forming digital gathering spaces.
AO
What are your upcoming plans? Do you think Doukhoborism will feature in your future work?
AB
I am trying to find the right balance between a financially sustaining job and having the time to work on artistic projects that don’t burn me out. I do feel a need to work further within Doukhoborism, though I’m not entirely sure if art is the avenue I am able to sustain. I’ve been gravitating toward learning the language, learning to embroider and create ladles, and engaging with the magic surrounding those traditions. I’m sure art-making will resurface in the near future.
Alexa Bunnel works across media including fibre, performance, audio, and 3D modelling. Of Doukobor descent, Bunnell was born and raised on Treaty 7 Territory in Mohkinstis (Calgary) and attended the Alberta University of the Arts.
Aaron Obedkoff is a writer of Doukhobor descent from Kelowna, British Columbia. He is currently working on his Master’s at Concordia, where he studies contemporary American fiction from a geocritical perspective.
