Lougheed House welcomes Métis storyteller Rick Gaudio

Before the end of this year, Rick Gaudio will be immersing himself in the history of the land around Lougheed House. The Calgary-based Métis storyteller, educator, and filmmaker has been chosen to create a video installation, a key element of the Lougheed House Re-Imagined (LHRI) project.

Just before Christmas, our curatorial team put out a call for a digital storyteller to submit proposals for a four- to six-minute video experience, telling the pre-settlement story of this land, a story that could include deep time and geological histories, Indigenous stories, or descriptions of the land at first contact by European explorers and settlers.

As the chosen artist, Gaudio will create an immersive video experience about the land and the ways of life that pre-date settlement in the Bow River watershed. He’ll begin this year with a deep dive into the literature, archives and archeology of “the histories of Lougheed House and its inhabitants, ancestors and neighbours,” learning about the places and people who lived here for millennia. By late summer, he will be shooting at locations near the house, absorbing the natural history that gave the land its character.

It’s not the first time that Gaudio has recorded the deep history of this region. While leading the Making Learning Visible initiative for Rocky View Schools northwest of the city, he has been creating non-fiction, documentary and educational films, including for the National Film Board of Canada. He has worked with Elders, Knowledge Keepers, educators and students on oral histories, land-based experiential learning, and arts education initiatives. Among his recent work, Gaudio has completed a multi-media memoir about the Métis Sixties Scoop.

As an important part of the LHRI project, Gaudio’s work will be screened for the public in summer of 2024.