Everyone has a different perspective and tolerance to workload. My vision of the art world has changed over the ten years I’ve been contributing to it. While it has a lot of positive aspects (or else I wouldn’t work in this field), I feel like it is based on idealized beliefs and unhealthy work ethics. If you’re employed by an institution, you’re expected to work full-time and visit exhibitions/attend openings in the evenings or weekends. There isn’t a lot of flexibility in terms of schedule and the pay rarely makes it possible to work part-time. I always had a good work capacity, but it led to a lot of stress layered in my body. I wasn’t very aware of the consequences that this could have on my mental health and in the fall of 2019, after a busy year of work, I burnt out. Five years later, I’m not sure if I fully recovered from it.

I started climbing nine years ago. In the first few years of my climbing journey, and especially after my burnout, I realized that work shouldn’t hold so much space in my life because it wasn’t bringing me the amount of joy I needed to feel fulfilled. Don’t get me wrong: I love what I’m doing professionally. I get a lot from it. But it was just not enough and too much at the same time. Climbing created balance. It brought me to question my relationship to work and set boundaries. Although I loved art, thinking about it from 9 to 5 made it hard for me to visit exhibitions during the weekend or attend openings in the evenings. I didn’t have the mental space to take on more analyzing and networking.

For a while, I felt like I wasn’t “normal”. I felt like I was erratic — in a context where this work system was the norm, why was I so uncomfortable with it? The COVID-19 lockdown sparked conversations about mental health, work logistics, and social interactions. Just before that, I started climbing outdoors. I have always enjoyed being in nature but climbing added depth to this feeling. Rock climbing became my compass — guiding my life to bring it closer to happiness. I let go of the pressure I was putting on myself to conform to a model that wasn’t good for me. Eventually, rock climbing even pushed me to rethink my whole career goals and dig deep into how I wanted my life to feel. 

In early 2023, I quit my full-time job at MOMENTA Biennale after 6 years of incredible learning opportunities and started working as an art consultant, in addition to continuing my independent writing and curating projects. Working as a contractor “full-time” certainly made it more enjoyable to deal with the workload — and the art world — as I’m now in control of how much I work in a day. I intended to centre my life around climbing rather than work. In May 2023, I moved to Squamish, British Columbia, the capital of rock climbing in Canada. Located on the traditional, ancestral, and unceded territory of Sḵwx̱wú7mesh Úxwumixw (Squamish Nation), who has been stewarding the lands and waters for thousands of years, the town is nested among massive mountains, towering trees, and the turquoise waters of Howe Sound.  

Spending almost half of my time in the forest has made me more aware of what it means to be part of nature and not just witnessing it from a distant standpoint. It gradually infused my professional interests. I started researching sustainability, environmental justice, biodiversity, geology, outdoor art, Indigenous and land-based practices. Since presenting their work at MOMENTA in 2021, I’ve been following the initiatives of BUSH Gallery, a collective of Indigenous artists and thinkers whose projects are rooted in collaborative engagement and radical inclusivity. A recent project is their re-enactment of the late Mi’kmaw artist Mike McDonald’s butterfly garden project, prompting, as Secwépemc artist Tania Willard shared on her Instagram, a reflection on gallery collections as ecologies.  

Climbing also expanded my interests in embodiment, performance, gestures, and materiality. I often think about Trisha Brown’s significant experiments with movement, especially her works around gravity such as Planes (1968) and Walking on the Wall (1971) where dancers climbed the walls of galleries and theaters. For Planes, Brown created a climbing wall designed as a grid of round holes that allowed the dancers to move up and down. With the iconic performance Walking on the Wall, dancers stood, walked, and ran along walls while suspended from the ceiling. They wore a special harness, which, fastened to a trolley on industrial tracks, gave the performers a great range of movement. 

I never tried to bridge art and climbing but it happened at a deeper level. Both participated in shaping the person I am today, carving my values and worldview. Climbing contributed to cementing my self-confidence and today I fully assume my “inability” to work within the same parameters that I was before. In geology, an erratic is a rock that has been transported by ice and deposited elsewhere. Glacial erratics, often simply called erratics, or erratic boulders, are made from a different type of rock than the bedrock where they lay. I like to think that these boulders are cherished by the climbing community. They helped me shift my perspective and take action when I felt like an “erratic” myself.