In her 75-minute performance Eating bones and Licking bread
(2020), Lara Kramer returns to a recurring dream that has periodically
visited her since childhood: she is standing in a long line waiting
to enter a huge dome-like glass house. Soldiers filter who can get in.
The dream is a thicket of nostalgia, scarcity, and otherworldliness,
and basking in those—at times contradictory—impressions is the
character that Kramer embodies. The dome dream is temporarily
blurry, overlapping, ambiguous.
For Kramer, a multidisciplinary artist of mixed Oji-Cree and settler ancestry, the dream reads as a future memory that requires our collective
attention. Interested in the paradoxical way that colonialism maintains its subjects in a constant state of hunger, all the while consuming both
bodies and lands, Kramer adopts the posture of an anachronistic pathfinder, at once past, present, and future, operating in the strange temporal realm of dreams.
Dubé, Joëlle. “Dreaming Undreamt Dreams with Lara Kramer.” Esse: Dreams n°112 (09 2024).