“Meating the Challenge” is a participatory performance that was part of Nuit Blanche in Saskatoon, SK (#nbyxe2017), responding to budgetary cuts in education imposed on the province by the Saskatchewan government.

Dressed as butchers, we created a popup butcher shop with chopping blocks, meat grinders, sausage makers, and a Canada 150 burning barrel. Over the course of 6 hours we ground, chopped,and cut up Canadian History textbooks and Saskatchewan education curriculum. Grinding the pages we mixed in baloney, creating a meat-like product that we turned into sausage and packaged for the public to burn.

In our desire to re-educate the public and encourage them to make the “right kind of cuts,” we offered history books containing colonialist narratives asking the public to place them in the fire and keep the fire burning throughout the night. We created books that bled and asked the public to speak the budgetary cuts in unison, creating a chamber of dissident choral voices. The environment became a platform for the sacred rituals of mourning, a physical space to dismiss, to discharge the losses caused by these cuts.

From the right side, we were illuminated by an overhead projection of educational and historical materials that will be forgotten. From the left side, there was a projection of domestic processes that are mostly invisible. We performed laborious actions such as sharpening, inspecting, de-boning, and wrapping—actions performed by people that are most affected by these cuts. In these actions, we have found an active way of surviving the violent rhetoric and political positions of current administrations around the world. This project strives to expose the invisible-visible focus on the unnoticed labor left for second class individuals—labor necessary for the proper functioning of cities participating in Western economies.

“Meating the Challenge” is the latest durational public performance that explores the Canadian-Mexican Partnership (CMP), and the strategic nuances of our world in efforts pursue relationship patterns based on a historical analysis of political, social and commercial interests. Given the current political state, the world stage has been altered unpredictably and forever. There are no guarantees for what our collective future will look like, only spaces for exploration that demand us to push our boundaries.