Victoria Piersig

Trading Places | Musings and Muses of an Iconic Watery Highway

“If we want to maintain our lifestyles, we can’t just say no all the time”

Trading Places is an invitation to a new conversation that transcends polarized positions about resource extraction and industry in Canada and provides an organizing framework for individuals and groups to begin a new conversation about the way of life we want for ourselves and the systems that make it possible.

Victoria presents work that complicates the narratives of primary industry in Canada. The current conversation around resource extraction and refinement in the Canadian arts community polarizes and prevents any real discourse on how industry, and those dependent on extraction, refining, and manufacturing, should be understood and engaged.

Trading Places offers a new way to reflect on and talk about industry and a model for others to use to begin the critical conversations and activities that will bring us together and move us forward. More than dialogue, Victoria proposes broad creative action that is democratic, inclusive, and celebratory. Victoria believes that opposed interests are not necessarily incompatible interests and the work in Trading Places demonstrates the power and joy in working across boundaries and in unexpected ways.