Fermentation and Conversation with Haruko Okano

SAVAC is thrilled to host interdisciplinary artist Haruko Okano for a very special event in Toronto. Haruko’s decades-long practice spans performance, sculpture, installation, earth and community work. She combines her concerns for the environment with issues of cultural identity and human rights. This event includes a hands-on fermentation activity alongside a retrospective artist talk, culminating in a communal meal. 

In 1974, Haruko moved to the west coast traveling by foot and canoe through the northern parts of the provinces where she fell in love with the land Canada…not the government. Relationality with all living beings lies at the heart of her practice and life ethic as a third-generation diasporic person. The emphasis across all of her activities is on process, collaboration and integration. We will hear from Haruko about her unique approach to creating art, the food and medicine gardens she has tended since the 90s, and her journey to learn about and address the effects of intergenerational trauma within Japanese-Canadian communities and Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside.

How do I participate?

We encourage you to bring your favourite pickled or fermented foods to share. To participate in the hands-on portion, please bring a mason jar with lid and a non-porous stone that you can hold in the palm of your hand. The stone should fit inside the mouth of your jar. SAVAC will have some extras on hand for those who need it. 

Free admission. Everyone is welcome, including kids. Please RSVP and send any questions to communications@savac.net

Accessibility: Wheelchair ramp at the east entrance of the building. There is an elevator and accessible bathrooms. Dinner will be served. Masks are encouraged and will be provided.

About Ishtar

This event is part of our ongoing Ishtar program. Since 2020, SAVAC has been running a playful and experimental land-based initiative called Ishtar’s International Network of Feral Gardens. In what feels like catastrophic times, we delve deeper into the wisdom of Ishtar’s story to lend perspective amid overwhelming grief. We are in the midst of genocide, encroaching fascism, ongoing pandemic, and the warmest winter in recorded history. Drawing on practices of collective mourning, we ground ourselves in our connections to other human, animal, and plant life to find hope for the future.  

About the Artist

Haruko Okano is a Japanese Canadian interdisciplinary artist born in Toronto at the end of WWII. She has 30 plus years of professional practice. Her work has been exhibited internationally. Over that time, her priorities have focused more on integrating time, creative process and communal authorship.

She has lost everything three times in her life including dying, crossing over and being revived. Her focus has broadened beyond survival and thriving to embracing a more holistic world view. In achieving this, she draws on her ancestral roots in the original indigenous Shinto spirituality of Japan which parallels the indigenous world views here in the Americas. The original Shinto way of being has no founder, no hierarchy or written doctrine.