Introducing Cookie Brunel: 2024 Creative in Residence
The Design Fabrication Zone (DFZ) and Urban Farm at Toronto Metropolitan University are thrilled to introduce Cookie Brunel (external link) as the third annual Creative in Residence (CiR). With a diverse background in sculpture, music, and electronics, Cookie’s interdisciplinary approach critiques Western epistemological biases and emphasizes intersectional research. Their practice aligns seamlessly with our community’s interdisciplinary ethos, focusing on art, technology, and urban ecology.
Cookie’s project for their residency, inspired by the theme of Wind Rose, will delve into the concept of growth as a dynamic force in nature and technology. Through their explorations in post-human circuits, Cookie aims to challenge capitalist interpretations of growth that lead to environmental and social issues, instead exploring natural processes like decay and symbiosis. Their work will be informed by decolonial ideas about community and sustainability.
Join us in welcoming Cookie, and stay tuned for more announcements their upcoming community workshop!
Later this Fall, Cookie Brunel will host a workshop inspired by their residency, exploring human relationships, plants, and degrowth in technology. Building on their work with the Urban Farm’s rooftop farms, the workshop will provide a non-hierarchical space for discussing radical acts like degoogling, right to repair, open source, and reuse, fostering meaningful dialogue on community and sustainability in artistic practice.
Cookie Brunel uses sculpture, music, and electronics to criticize bias in Western epistemology. A former archaeologist, Brunel became disillusioned after witnessing how modern discrimination in archaeological interpretation is widely presented as historical fact. Informed by these experiences, Brunel’s artistic practice argues for the importance of intersectional approaches to research that value subjectivity, bodily knowledge, and poetics. Themes that persist through their research include pedagogy, identity, shapeshifting, surveillance, and waveforms. They strive for an anti-capitalist digital art practice, exploring ideas and movements such as de-growth, de-googling, open source, and the right to repair… and they would love to talk to you about it!
Brunel has exhibited and performed internationally as an artist and musician. They have worked professionally in fabrication and art education, in spaces such as Artscape (RIP), OCADU, and the University of Toronto. They hold degrees in Archaeology and Studio Art from the University of Calgary, the Alberta University of the Arts, and the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.
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