Eve Tagny: Beyond Grieving and Healing

There is a hurricane, inside

of which our whole world spins.

It’s held within.

— Robin Coste Lewis, “Let Me Live in a House by the Side of the Road and Be a Friend to Man,” Voyage of the Sable Venus and Other Poems, 2015.

Submerged in the collective grief of our current times, self-care and healing begin to feel simultaneously like essential and radical undertakings. Living through a seemingly unending pandemic, on land defined by long-standing and ongoing colonial violence, treaty violations, patriarchy, racism, and systemic discrimination—as is the case in so-called Canada—we find ourselves grappling with chronic coping deficiencies. While thinking through these ideas, I feel  particularly drawn to the work of artist Eve Tagny, whose practice provides a roadmap to healing the mind and soul. 

Through her interest in gardens, seasons, rituals, and kinship, Eve Tagny weaves an evolving narrative made of semiotic fragments. Her practice spans from lens-based work, installation, and performance, often using organic and synthetic materials to create paths within the gallery space. In recent projects, Tagny has introduced architectural motifs, such as the arch and the stairwell, that energetically evoke passages between states of being. Over the last four years, Tagny has delved into the personal, producing an abundant body of work that began from an urgent yearning to heal from grief and other states of disruption. Having experienced the traumatic loss of suicide in 2014, she was precipitated into a profound state of bereavement. This period was also marked by an instinct to document her surroundings, both as a coping mechanism and a means of starting her journey toward betterment. Her experience of grief is notably cited in her video The Garden’s History (2020), presented at Montreal’s Centre CLARK in January 2020. The piece is a fixed long-take of a domestic garden in Johannesburg over which a secondary scene appears and disappears on the screen. The overlaid scene depicts the artist behind a screen of plastic, performing a choreography of hand gestures as words slowly relay across the screen:

The new tenants of the house do not know

That between the layers of the garden 〜 growth over decay over growth over decay

Lies the history of you​​¹

It is in the garden of decay and of growth, the garden of manicured nature, that Tagny recognizes the potentialities of gestures of care, and the significance of attuning to the rhythms of nature. The garden in Tagny’s work becomes a metaphor for love, loss, death, renewal—the duration inherent to the alchemy of cycles. Through the garden’s motions, and the human intention to transform, the generative process of healing becomes possible. However, gardens also signify privilege, exclusion, and control, all echoes of societal conditioning. The affordance to heal, much like access to gardens themselves, is a matter of class and privilege. Gardens are enclosed, they are private properties, and they are limited to few in populated urban environments. Beyond this, gardens are tamed and conditioned to perform a certain version of nature, a carefully controlled and restricted nature. In this sense, gardens represent and reproduce what healing looks like in society at large.

One of Tagny’s first projects involving gardens, Solace—presented in 2016 at the Gladstone Hotel and curated by her long-time friend and collaborator Geneviève Wallen—involved starting a garden and providing instructions to visitors to tend to its growth. The garden was dependent on a collaborative trust and willingness to participate in tending to the plants. Exploring the therapeutic potential of gardening, the show was based on experiences of collective trauma. Her garden was “a communal project of care, thinking of PTSD. People think about it as something that happened to someone. I think it’s a collective thing.”​​² The installation was a response to PTSD as an affliction that can be experienced by a group, or population, and passed down genetically. Solace insisted on the necessity of engaging in forms of therapy as a commitment to the self, but also for those who surround us, and need us.

Most cultures have celebrated the passage of seasons since time immemorial through festivals and rituals that conjure nature’s bounty. In her most recent installation, presented as part of the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal’s group exhibition  “La machine qui enseignait des airs aux oiseaux” (2020), Tagny asks us to consider why we participate in inherited rituals that are no longer linked to our lived realities. She has recently turned to childhood memories of such celebrations, having received an early education from the alternative École Rudolf Steiner de Montréal, which famously centres its Waldorf pedagogy on imagination, creativity, and nature. She notably recalls participating in maypole ceremonies during May Day, a Pagan tradition observed in Germanic countries where a group dances around a garlanded pole to show reverence to the awakening nature of spring and summer. She references such rituals from around the world, notably ones in West Africa, in the Caribbean, and in Europe, which originated from a time when societies were organized around the patterns of nature. Often these rituals involve majestic characters covered in flowers or hay, embodying nature itself.​​³ For Tagny, the continued observance of these customs today, divorced from their intended purposes, demonstrates a shared need for rituals and identity benchmarks in contemporary life. This urge tells us the spiritual realm is hungry for systems of understanding both the world and ourselves outside of rationalism. In a series of videos presented in this exhibition, Tagny investigated what “knowing” looks like through the body and its psychosomatic messages.

Processions are one form of ritual that has been front-of-mind in Tagny’s reflections. With the recent invigoration of the Black Lives Matter movement and the emergence of other racial justice uprisings, she has been fascinated with how protests are akin to processions and perpetuate similar codes: slowly moving forward collectively, in large numbers, with shared values and intention.​​⁴ She invited two fellow Montreal artists, performer Florencia Sosa Rey and dancer Élisabeth-Anne Dorléans, to take part in a video performance as part of her current installation at the MAC, “Gestures for a Mnemonic Garden” (2020). In casting these performers, it was important to her that they have a common lived experience to hers, sharing in their understanding of what it means to possess a racialized body in Quebec. Set against the backdrop of a quarry, these videos show the performers, including Tagny herself, walking in a procession-like manner, carrying rocks together, and performing ritualized hand gestures. The quarry, similar to the garden, is a beautiful location that represents an interruption of nature. As a site of ecological extraction, it reverberates themes of exploitation, control, and restriction.

Tagny’s choreographed procession intended to represent the process of healing in a hostile setting, but the unity of the performed movements had an added magic during production. Tagny recounts moments when the performance created a perceived sense of catharsis among the womxn, both validating the intentions behind the work and offering welcomed respite in these times of chaos and uncertainty. In conversation, Tagny tells me that she positions “kinship and sisterhood at the heart of processes of renewal. For me that’s essential, it has to be that energy.”​​⁵ With the breadth of structural destruction that has come into focus—this 20/20 vision—Eve Tagny has a compelling ability to capture both the unravelling structures and the intrinsic powers of the collectively afflicted, kith and kin. Her work points us towards familial paths of knowing, doing, and undoing. 

Mojeanne Behzadi is a Tiohtià:ke/Mooniyang/Montreal-based art historian, curator and poet. She currently runs Art speaks, an international contemporary art speaker series, and coordinates research and exhibitions at Artexte. 

Her current research focuses on love as a radical tool for resistance, protest, and social transformation. 

1. From Eve Tagny, “The Garden’s History,” 2020, video.
2. Eve Tagny, in conversation with the writer, May 6, 2020.
3. Eve Tagny, in conversation with the writer, September 24, 2020.
4. Ibid.
5. Ibid.

This article is published in issue 37.3 of BlackFlash magazine. Get this issue