Paul Couillard
the experience of memory is the making of experience by Paul Couillard, 2020, a 6 hr. Zoom performance as part of Intergenerational LGBT Artist Residency, 2020, technical assistance Giuliana Dieni aka Nuns With Guns
Canada
Paul Couillard is a queer performance artist, curator, and scholar. He has developed well over 300 performances in 26 countries, often working with his partner Ed Johnson. Their ongoing Duorama series (most recently #129 at the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Oaxaca, Mexico in 2020) explores notions of relationship—to each other, to the surrounding environment, and to audiences. Paul's solo work acts to build community and address trauma through responsive, durational explorations of our bodies as shared vessels of sensation, experience, knowledge, and spirit. He has a particular interest in considering the leaky borders of our entwined existences, searching for ways to convey complex layers of situated, personal histories and cultural specificities. Paul was the Performance Art Curator for Fado from its inception in 1993 until 2007, and he is also a founding co-curator of Toronto's 7a*11d International Festival of Performance Art. He is the editor of Canadian Performance Art Legends, a series of books on senior Canadian performance artists, including Margaret Dragu, Tanya Mars and Alain-Martin Richard. He has been a lecturer at McMaster University and the University of Toronto Scarborough and is currently preparing to defend his dissertation, Rethinking Presence with a Thinking Body: Intra-active Relationality and Animate Form, which investigates the role of presence in enabling shared meaningfulness. The text integrates insights from phenomenology, neuroscience and performance art to untangle the human tendency to treat body and consciousness as distinct and mutually alien entities. One of the chapters focuses on Marilyn Arsem's 2001 work, Meridian..
