Research Creation
Falls
12-minute (loop) audiovisual installation
“Winter”
“Falls” is an ecological and memorial project shaped from video, field recordings, and visits to Ottawa’s Rideau Falls. It is part of a longer cycle consisting of a lecture performance, video installation, scores, and a cycle of poems: Between Water and Stone.
As this mass of water falls into the Ottawa River, facing Québec, through cold, blue baroques of ice, “Falls” witnesses the break-up of ice on the river. This body of water passes retirement and long-term care homes upriver, following a course from the writer’s former family home to this startling drop.
Water’s movement over the geologic boundary of stone (limestone, shale, dolostone) plunges into ice gaps. Valentina Plata’s recordings of this site and Preston’s poems and testimony meditate loss, honouring place and experience through their soundwalks together to the edge of this falling water.
The result combines voices and waters, shapeshifting the source material through its own recorded elements. These include the untitled poem #22 (part of Preston’s cycle), which they sing together.
Developed at the Visualization Lab and Milieux during Plata’s undergraduate LePARC fellowship, and placing this composition on 27 speakers with the support of the lab and music faculty member Kasey Pocius, created an opportunity, along with the dimensions of the screen and room, to imagine a waterfall together through multichannel sound and video.
Valentina Plata - LePARC Undergraduate Fellow - (soundscape composition and vocals)
Kasey Pocius - Artist Affiliate and Concordia Faculty member - (spatialization)
VK Preston - Co-Director of LePARC - (texts, concept & vocals)
David Somiah Clark (Visualization Studio)
Eugenio de la Vega (Camera and Mic.)
Oswaldo Torredano (Editing and Image processing)
Technical requirements:
Screen or large-scale projection (currently 16:3 LCD or 16:9 projection)
Speakers (multichannel or Atmos)
Audio interface + appropriate cables (XLR or ¼’ TRS cables)
A computer
LePARC collaborators::
Valentina Plata is a Mexican-Colombian composer and performer. Her artistic project, Vaiu, weaves improvisation and movement with voice, electronics and field recordings. She recently graduated with Distinction from the Specialization of Electroacoustic Creative Practices at Concordia University and was a resident artist at the Banff centre. valentinaplata.com, valentina.plata@mail.concordia.ca
Kasey Pocius is a gender-fluid intermedia artist and researcher based in Montreal, teaching at Concordia and active with CIRMMT, IDMIL, LePARC, and GRMS. They create electroacoustic and audiovisual works that explore interactive electronics, spatial sound and collaborative improvisation, with pieces programmed globally from DIY spaces to Harvard. Kaseypocius.ca, kasey.pocius@concordia.ca
VK Preston is a co-director of LePARC Performing Arts Research Cluster at Milieux and associate professor of History at Concordia and visiting artist/scholar at Bennington College. “Falls” honours their father during the Covid-19 pandemic and visits to the Rideau Falls in Ottawa. VK comes to performance research through a background in performance practice and a joint PhD in performance studies and history. vkpreston.org, vk.preston@concordia.ca
“Falls” premiered in April 2025 as part of VK Preston’s keynote “Between Water and Stone” at the History in the Making Conference (HITM), Concordia University, on the theme of creative practices. Preston’s photos and poems from this cycle, “Diptychs and Pieces of Loss,” translated by Judith Balme, appear in The Iowa Review (Fall 2025).
Thanks Visualization Studio, Concordia University, & Milieux Institute for Arts, Culture & Technology
Keynote: History in the Making Conference
Diptychs and Pieces of Loss
Poem and photo cycle
“Diptychs and Pieces of Loss” (2025) emerged from family visits to hospitals and long-term care following the first wave of the pandemic. These photographs and poems testify to love and austerity as we witnessed failures of infrastructure, neoliberal cuts to health care, and institutionalized assumptions. The survival of relationships shapes communities. In the urgency of our present moment, connection survives.
I include the French translation of the poems because they address the bilingualism of this care and generational context, and I want to thank Judith Balme for these translations.
Publication - The Iowa Review (Fall 2025) PDF
Photos - series of five exhibited at Lux la lumière (December 2025 - February 2026)
For Caroline, For Becoming
Expanded Documentation
Work since 2021 with dance artist Caroline Gravel. Collaborating with Gravel brings improvisation practices together with delving into histories of emotion, affective computing, and dramaturgy in a dialogue on artistic documentation and process.
An account of our working process together is forthcoming as a critical essay in the volume “Creators” (Bloomsbury). It emerged through talks at the Association for Arts of the Present (ASAP) and the research creation lab initiative at the University of Grenoble (2023).
The poem “For Caroline, for Practical Happiness” appeared The Iowa Review in Fall 2025, and the essay “Improvisation, A Song” is forthcoming in the volume Creators (Bloomsbury, anticipated 2026).
The first phase of the work, “Practical Happiness, a Song, and Other Niceties” (2022-2023) wrapped up with a showing at the OffTA (2023).
Residencies: Place des Arts (2021), followed by research creation residences at Nyata Nyata (2021) and Agora (2022).