bio

Emilio Portal is a Canadian artist of French-Irish-Peruvian heritage who works with sound and light to deconstruct colonial perspectives and reconnect us with animism.

Portal’s work has been presented at venues including Burren College of Art (Ballyvaughan, Ireland), debaser (Ottawa, on), Banff Arts Centre (Banff, AB), la Galerie du Nouvel-Ontario (Sudbury, on), Grunt gallery (Vancouver, bc), Open Space (Victoria, BC), Between Pheasants Contemporary (New Liskerd, ON), Fabulous Festival of Fringe Film (Durham, ON), l’ecart (Rouyn-Noranda, QC), Kitchener-Waterloo Art Gallery (Waterloo, ON), Labo (Toronto, ON). 

Emilio is a prolific collaborator who has worked with Elyse Portal, Jessica Karuhanga, Myths & Mirrors, Daniel Aubin, Lisa Marie Naponse, Darlene Naponse, Bawaadan Collective, Rebecca Belmore, Peter Morin, Clayton & tara Windatt, Max Moon, Dog Dad Posse, Sparx, Polly Kultur, Candice Irwin, Chloe Laduchesse, Michel Laforge, Patrick Harrop, Shane Cinq-Mars, Will Morin, Lindsay Delaronde, Anthony Almendarez, Connor Lafortune, Manidoo Bineshii, Isak Vaillancourt, Ra’anaa Yaminah Ekundayo, Helena Martin Franco, Fenyx Flo, Michelle Loubert. 

Portal has been awarded numerous awards from the Ontario Arts Council, the Canada Council for the Arts, the Banff centre, and the kinadas artists collective. A highlight in his portfolio is the OAC-supported release eau b​é​nite, a monumental production featuring 27 performances with a runtime exceeding 6 hours, released on his Bandcamp page in June 2023. He is currently working on co-composing, producing and engineering his next OAC-funded album magnetism, which will feature 6 local artists.

He holds a BFA (laurentian University), a BEDS (Dalhousie university) and an MFA (University of Victoria).

I am most interested in how sound and music can be used to deconstruct colonial perspectives and reconnect us with animism. Intuitively, I find or create recordings that resonate with me in a deeply personal way - in a way that connects to my mixed heritage, which is both indigenous and settler. I dig deep into my ancestral pasts to honour ancient, forgotten or annihilated cosmovisions. I express ancient and hidden worldviews through sound with whatever methods or technologies are at my disposal now. 

One such method is tape loops, specifically disintegrating ones. What is intriguing about this technique is how it mimics reality itself, and even our memory process. Sounds are recorded to tape (digitally), which have a specific feedback percentage programmed. This allows every recorded loop to decay at a certain rate, eventually disintegrating and vanishing from existence. This directly relates to my quest to remember, but also paradoxically, to find some kind of peace with letting things fade. I also see an uncanny ecological connection between tape music and our fractured, fragile and unpredictable reality and future.

Over decades, I keep coming back to the Andean concept of pacha, which roughly translates to an energetic, spiritual or power centre, which is found everywhere and in all things, including sound. This is why I often say that sound is not some manipulable abstract thing, but sound itself is a nonhuman, an entity. This animistic understanding of the world is a guiding principle in my practice, and is deeply connected to improvisation, indeterminacy, anarchism and decolonization. These concepts, tools or methods help me to connect with ways of being that dwell outside the capitalist stronghold that has transformed music from a sacred offering into a disposable cheap commodity. My hope is to inspire and motivate people to perceive and think about music and sound in an expanded and lucid manner, beyond the conceptual constriction of colonialism and capitalism.