LESIA MARUSCHAK

This Land Was Made For You And Me is a retelling of history and an exploration of cultural identity. It is a story of a young woman Anna, a being of memory, narrative, and myth. It is a story rooted in the past, extending into our time.  The story begins with the idea of belonging when belonging is impossible.  As a child growing up on the Canadian prairies, I understood that my family and I were different. My first memories of this are from 1967, I was six years old. I couldn’t speak English. No one outside our community could say my name. It is Lesia.   I am a descendant of Ukrainian immigrants who came to Canada in search of a better life. Instead, alongside 8,579 other men, women and children, they found themselves interned from 1914-1920. They were surrounded by barbed wire and armed guards. Their dreams collapsed, along with their rights and freedoms.  I began work on the project in 2020 and unearthed a carefully curated past of marginalized histories: lands emptied by colonizers; the subsequent immigration of thousands as vehicles for the government’s economic expansion program and their later internment as weapons of war. This project is my response. As if  a travel diary, I use a coding system to unravel the emotionally driven plot and to explore the palimpsest/fluid nature of cultural identity. Hierarchies of historical storylines are flattened; archival texts accompany recolored pictorial landscapes of the time; government advertising posters precede images of Canadian winter landscapes; and newspaper cuttings follow Anna’s letters, which I have written as if a woman interned.  These layers are inspired by Stuart Hall’s notion that cultural identity is “a matter of becoming as well as of being”; the letters express the lived experience of “the others”, as discussed by Eduard Said’s in his book Orientalism. I insert myself into the work, with image and text, as the enunciated – marked by hybridity – to open a dialogue on the post-colonial experience.

The film OH CANADA! OH CANADA! memorializes Canada’s 1914-1920 first national internment operations, where thousands of men, women and children were imprisoned.  The government’s operations were political and intentional; an assault on several ethnocultural communities as part of Canada’s War Measures Act that required the imprisonment of nearly 9,000 Canadian residents who were “aliens of enemy nationality” because of their country of origin.

This film has been made possible by a grant from the Endowment Council of the Canadian First World War Internment Recognition Fund.

The Government of Canada established the Canadian First World War Internment Recognition Fund 9 May 2008, to support commemorative and educational initiatives that recall what happened during Canada’s first national internment operations of 1914-1920.

Eduald Camps for El Temps De Les Arts

2021 Shortlist VEVEY IMAGES Dummy Book Award, VEVEY, Switzerland
2020 Special Award Honorable Mention, InCadaques Photography Festival, 2020
2020 Winner Arriving/Departing, Singapore International Photography Festival, 2020

2021 Canada First World War Internment Recognition Fund THIS LAND WAR MADE FOR YOU AND ME Limited Edition Book
2021 Canada First World War Internment Recognition Fund THIS LAND WAR MADE FOR YOU AND ME Rare and Special Collection Book
2020 Canada First World War Internment Recognition Fund FIlm Oh Canada! Oh Canada!