SMALL GALLERY

September 5 – October 4, 2025

XEL
Against Erasure, Earth Keeps the Score

Artist Talk + Reception: Friday September 5th @ 5PM

Sechelt Arts Festival Opening: Friday September 19th @ 6PM

Forests are not simply collections of trees. They are complex, interdependent systems where vertical diversity — canopy, understory, root, and soil — sustains life. When deforestation occurs, this layered structure collapses. The same is true under colonialism: when cultures, languages, and peoples are erased, a vital system of global diversity is severed.

In the clear-cut or selective-cut forests of the Pacific Northwest, the absence of birdsong mirrors the silences left by other forms of violence. These are not poetic parallels. They are converging realities of destruction. Colonial systems do not only take land, they rewrite meaning, and extract from the force of life. They frame the devastation they cause as progress, spiritualize stolen land, and sell sustainability while accelerating ecological collapse. The greenwashed image of a livable future is built atop silence, denial, and selective memory. But the earth remembers. And they listen.

To listen deeply is to confront what has been deliberately silenced. It is to recognize the continuity between ecological loss and systemic oppression. Forests teach us to hear what dominant narratives ignore: that breath, life, and resistance continue beneath the surface. Against erasure, the earth keeps the score. They do not forget. Neither do we.

Hadis Fard aka XEL is an Iranian/Canadian expansive human being from Lur ancestral lineage. She is living and creating in ancestral land of Sḵw̱xwú7mesh and shíshálh nations. She is a sound and vision composer and multi-disciplinary artist. Hadis uses sound, visual art, data, code, and poetry to bridge art x tech x eco and creates multi-sensory & immersive performances and installations. Hadis has had a non-linear path in her creative journey. She holds a master of computer science, bachelor of engineering, continuing studies in fine arts, and has studied sound composition independently with various mentors over the years. Hadis’ muses and explorations are rooted in eco-feminine, mythology, decolonization, geo-psychology, interspecies dialogue, and collective consciousness. She has performed and exhibited in various festivals and venues locally and internationally. Hadis’ purpose and community service is to live by the earth-oriented practices within communities and bring the integrated authentic voice in areas less heard, she finds community in diversity.