It all started with a rebellion in Colombia and the sight of a young girl shouting from a statue.
That’s how Winnipeg-based artist Jaime Black said the idea for the REDress Project was born.
Black was invited north by the NorVA inclusion committee for the Women’s Memorial March and the Flin Flon edition of the REDress Project earlier this year. Last week, Black joined in the event, meeting with students and giving an artist talk at the NorVA Centre.
In a speech following the Women’s Memorial March on Feb. 14, Black expressed her thanks for Flin Flon’s support of her work.
“It’s been overwhelming, the support I’ve gotten in this community. It’s just amazing. All the different organizations from the city have come together to make this happen. I feel like I’m just a little spark and you guys are the fire. You’re really making it happen,” she said.
“I know it’s been happening for three or four years. It’s really a growing movement and maybe every year, we can have more and more people involved with this, which would be quite amazing.”
Black, who began the REDress Project as a visual aid to promote awareness of missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls, shared the events behind the campaign’s creation.
While travelling in Colombia, Black witnessed a protest in Bogota, the country’s capital. More than 200 women, many clad in red dresses, were protesting the impact of the country’s drug trade and the unexplained disappearances of hundreds of loved ones.
“People were disappearing in really high numbers and that had an impact on the communities,” she said.
“It was like mothers, grandmothers, daughters – all these women and girls came together in the public square. The performance itself was about six hours long. It went on all day and then it went well into the night. Because it was public, their voices were being heard, in that very moment, on that very day. The reason they were out there was because they had all lost loved ones and they had all lost family.”
Black was struck with how the women had their voices heard.
“Just to see that they had, in a public space, their voices heard in that way; through art, through dance; they brought all their creative talent into the public square. They didn’t ask anybody. They worked together to really have their voices heard here and now,” she said.
“That’s a very, very simple gesture that anybody can do. If we worked together and supported each other in doing those sorts of things, we can do that and make such a huge impact.”
After hours in the square, Black said some of the protesting women broke from the pack and ran away in a full sprint, shouting the names of their missing and dead loved ones while doing so.
“It was if they were looking for people. One of the girls in a red dress climbed up to the top of a statue, so you could see her across the town, and she called out ‘Where are they?’ in the top of her voice. It was one of the most powerful things I’ve ever experienced. In that moment, I knew that I really wanted to take that kind of energy and that potential for art to make change in our communities back home to Canada when I came back,” said Black
Black said she hopes to return to Flin Flon for other events in the future.
