During the summer of 2016, SAVAC hosted a summer long residency, The Lie of the Land with artist Golboo Amani. The residency consisted of two social practice works that focused on breaking down the myths and fallacies of the colonial expansion and development that often shape the relationships settler colonials have to Turtle Island (North America). Through her work, from space intervention to social practice, Amani uses both real and virtual landscapes to intervene in the settler colonial narrative. From this residency she created the game Unsettling Settlers of Catan, which aims to research and produce an expansion pack that acts as an intervention into the board game Settlers of Catan by unsettling the colonial narrative of the game. Her new version allows for players to develop strategies of building and repatriation on the colonized landscape, offering the opportunity to play out numerous strategies for radical social, political and industrial change.

Golboo Amani is a Toronto-based interdisciplinary artist who creates works focused on process and research through a variety of medium including photography, performance, space intervention, digital media and participatory practice. She received her Bachelor of Fine Arts from Emily Carr University and her Master of Visual Studies at the University of Toronto. Her work has been shown nationally and internationally in venues including the Hemispheric Institute at FOFA (Montreal), FADO Emerging Artists Series (Toronto), TRANSMUTED International Festival of Performance Art (Mexico City) and the LIVE Biennale of Performance Art (Vancouver).