Aansaamb, 2025

Maria-Margaretta’s practice explores the ways in which her role as a mother and her deep connection to her ancestry and Métis heritage converge to create her understanding of self. For the 2025 Festival, Margaretta was commissioned to create a site-specific installation titled Aansaamb, the Michif word for “among.” This photograph is installed on the façade of the BC Hydro Dal Grauer Substation building on a busy thoroughfare in downtown Vancouver. The word “among” immediately conjures a broader group, a sense of belonging to a community and being in the company of others, ideas that flow through this work as well as the artist’s broader practice. Aansaamb depicts the artist’s young daughter holding a bundle of beaded clothing on her ancestral homelands of St. Louis, Saskatchewan, along the South Saskatchewan River. She holds an infant shirt, made by the artist, her mother, embellished with traditional Michif floral motifs. The shirt is wrapped around a stone axe head that was gifted to the artist by her father. These objects, carrying stories and histories, tether the three generations together. Situated along the riverbank, the symbolic articles are where they belong, held and carried by the artist’s daughter, among the land that has raised generations of Métis families and kin. Aansaamb makes visible a lineage of inheritance through the passing down of worlds and knowledges through love and care.

The BC Hydro Dal Grauer Substation Public Art Project is sponsored by MLT Aikins LLP.