Karen Zalamea

Ensemble is derived from a newspaper image that depicts a row of female dancers from the Ramon Obusan Folkloric Group of the Philippines. The dancers are performing the ragragsakan, a traditional Kalinga dance in which women carry water pots and baskets on their heads in preparation for a feast. For this project, Karen Zalamea selected a photograph from the June 12, 1986 issue of The Province that features the Filipino dance group performing as part of Expo ’86 in Vancouver. Zalamea was intrigued by the sister-city relationship established in 1991 between the City of New Westminster and Quezon City in the Philippines, the artist’s matrilineal hometown. She approached Ensemble as a means of tracing a potential motivation for the pursuit of this formal agreement.

For this public installation, Zalamea collaged and reproduced the photograph from The Province as a cyanotype – an early form of photography – to create this blue and white image. For the artist, the blue tones of the cyanotype reference both the Anvil Centre’s adjacency to the Fraser River as well as the Pacific Ocean, which connects the two sister cities.

There is a significant Filipino presence in New Westminster, which began in the 1990s, with Tagalog becoming a common mother tongue spoken in the city. The city’s museum collection and archives, however, do not yet reflect this thriving community. In presenting this large-scale, culturally significant image on the façade of a civic building, Zalamea asks how we can support and celebrate the presence of diasporic communities and their diversity.