Personal Information
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Given name: Lisa









Surname: Mayes









Email: lamayesartist@gmail.com









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Your contribution
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Title: Code-Switching Cartographies: Sound, Language, and Ancestral Resistance in Intermedia Practice









Format: Project presentation (2)









Main language: English









Abstract:
This presentation emerges from CodesWitcher, an intermedia artistic research project that investigates how diasporic and minoritized identities can be reclaimed through visual, sonic, and linguistic practice. Grounded in Stuart Hall’s “encoding/decoding,” W.E.B. Du Bois’s “double consciousness,” and Nick Mirzoeff’s critique of visuality as a regime of colonial power, the project examines how representation structures who is seen, heard, and remembered.

Mirzoeff argues that visuality historically legitimized empire by determining what could be made visible and intelligible. In response, I approach code-switching as a form of countervisuality: a strategy that unsettles dominant mappings of race, land, and belonging. Through painting, sound installation, and immersive media, I rework inherited archives and endangered languages into speculative cartographies of resistance.

The presentation focuses on two interlinked works. Titles of Land _ The Map Folds consists of ancestral landscapes painted on folded brown parcel paper, invoking colonial cartography while destabilizing its authority through bilingual titling in Gaeilge and Muscogee Creek. Language Lessons is a sound installation layering ancestral testimony with beginner language recordings, performing code-switching as embodied recovery rather than assimilation.

Together, these works reframe language as material practice and voice as epistemic infrastructure. By moving between visual and sonic registers, the project claims what Mirzoeff calls “the right to look”—and extends it to a right to speak, to remember, and to remap. I propose code-switching as both a method and medium for engaging endangered conceptual worlds in contemporary artistic research.










Link to the Exposition :  (https://www.researchcatalogue.net/view/4142725/4142726)









Image: https://test.sar2026.ie/system/files/webform/submit_contribution/356/08_Mayes.jpg









Short biographies of the presenter(s):
- Lisa Mayes (b. amiskwacîwâskahikan, Beaver Hills, Treaty 6 Territory, or Edmonton, Alberta, Canada) is an interdisciplinary artist and researcher working across painting, sound, virtual reality, and installation. An MFA graduate in Intermedia from the University of Alberta, her artistic research examin
  
  Mayes lives and works in Edmonton, Alberta. Her work has been exhibited nationally in Edmonton, Vancouver, and Montreal, including presentations at the Royal Alberta Museum, Art Gallery of Alberta, FAB Gallery, Scott Gallery, and Latitude 53. She has participated in artist residencies in Canada and Ireland and is the recipient of several awards and grants, including the Joseph-Armand Bombardier Canada Graduate Scholarship (SSHRC).










Previous presentations or iterations of the research:
It was first shown as a research-creation thesis exhibition at FAB Gallery, Edmonton (2023), it explored diasporic identity through A/R/Tographic, land-based inquiry and intermedia practice. Elements were later presented at In-between Cultures: Cultural Translation in Diasporic Contemporary Art in Canada (II) (Western University, 2025). The proposed presentation synthesizes these iterations into an expanded intermedia framework.














Requirements
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Additional information:
The presentation includes a slideshow of exhibition images, and audio excerpts from the Language Lessons sound installation. The presentation is structured as a narrative of artistic process with theoretical framing, concluding with reflections on endangered language as embodied research.










Spatial and technical requirements :
HDMI-compatible projector, stereo speakers or audio playback option for sound samples. Laptop playback will be used for media. No special lighting required.










Potential risks or ethical concerns:
The presentation includes autoethnographic material, family archives, and ancestral language documentation. Care is taken to respectfully represent all cultural elements and oral histories.










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