The Paydirt Residency | Styvens Barrios-Loch & Romi Fischer-Schmidt
- RP
- Apr 1
- 3 min read
Updated: Apr 11
Announcing Styvens Barrios-Loch and Romi Fischer-Schmidt as recipients of The Paydirt Residency
The Paydirt Residency is an extension of the artwork, One Hand Washes the Other, by Joshua Schwebel, that took place at Struts Gallery, Sackville, in 2024. This project looked at how philanthropic donations from resource extraction affect the integrity of art and educational institutions. The exhibition and extended transactions reflected on the interconnection between Canadian cultural infrastructure and resource extraction. As a counter-philanthropic gesture, Schwebel allocated funding from his grant from the Canada Council for the Arts to create The Paydirt Residency dedicated to supporting artistic positions against resource extraction. The residency awarded $8,000 to the selected artist(s), a working period and studio in Sackville at Struts Gallery, and access to Struts’ media lab and equipment.
Following an open call, the artist duo Styvens Barrios-Loch and Romi Fischer-Schmidt have been selected as the recipients of The Paydirt Residency.
Barrios-Loch and Fischer-Schmidt will approach The Paydirt Residency in two phases: first in community in El Estor, Guatemala (March 3-26), and second, at Struts Gallery, Sackville (April 4-25).
Taking direction from Q’eqchi’ leaders, Barrios-Loch and Fischer-Schmidt gathered with land defenders, journalists, and community representatives of various ages to listen to stories, record testimonies, and deepen their understanding of Q’eqchi struggle against ‘la empresa,’ the mining company. They aim to make an immediate impact by compensating contributors for the time, effort, and trust, while collecting sounds and footage from nature, cultural workers, and other sources to incorporate into a soundscape.
The artists’ stay at Struts Gallery will be dedicated to the composition and assembly of their soundscape from materials gathered in El Estor. They will compose a sound-driven storytelling, using Guatemalan soundscapes alongside collected interview footage, recorded scenes and local musical tradition. These elements, together with recordings of their own musical performance, will 'sound-paint' different scenes to convey the complexity of resistance and resilience in the face of imperial violence.
Barrios-Loch is a Guatemalan cellist and archivist, and Fischer-Schmidt is a multi-instrumentalist, activist and media artist settler born in Tkaronto.
The artists are an emerging queer transnational duo taking aim at transnational corporate mining and its ties with Guatemalan and imperial militarizing and policing apparatuses. Their work is propelled by deep and longstanding commitments to justice movements, and continuous relationship-building in El Estor over six years. El Estor is the epicenter of a sixty-year struggle against a historically Canadian mining company —known as la empresa–- on Q’eqchi’ territory. The Indigenous eco-cultural fabric of El Estor is profoundly disrupted by the still-operational Fenix mine which was complicit in the first massacre of 626+ beginning Guatemala’s genocidal era (1960-96).
Fischer-Schmidt and Barrios-Loch fuse community-based participatory research with musical and sonic-centered- audiovisual creation. In collaboration with a comité dirigente (leading committee) of Q’eqchi’ activist elders and youth, their collective works to gather prominent stories, sound fragments, and testimony of territorial resistance against the mining company ‘la empresa’ across generations of struggle. Throughout their process, they convene and center the comité with an aim to avoid harmful patterns of cultural-extractivism and to work ‘with’ rather than ‘about’ community. They offer their skills as musicians and media artists to document and mix a 6-decade historically interpolated message of resistance, amidst the heavily censored experience of life and death in one of modernity’s most important mining
industry sacrifice zones.
Schwebel gratefully acknowledges the Canada Council for the Arts for their support.
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