REAL AND OUTSPOKEN
Musician and Polaris Prize winner Lido Pimienta says her big win hasn’t changed anything,
Lido Pimienta is expanding.
She has just gotten the keys to a bare, bright but industrial-feeling space behind her College St. apartment, and the Polaris Prize-winning musician and artist has plans to turn it into her new studio space.
Just back from tour, the feisty and outspoken Pimienta really wants to find the time to work on her next album, but she also has a local performance at Aluna Theatre’s Caminos festival this week, which focuses on new, boundary pushing work by PanAmerican, Indigenous and Latin artists.
On Friday, Pimentia will perform We’re in a Non-Relationship Relationship, which she bills as a live graphic-novel performance.
She’s long been an outspoken artist; when called to the stage as the surprise winner of the influential Polaris award for La Papessa, her genredefying Spanish-language album featuring rock and electronica, she used the moment to criticize the sound tech of her performance, call out racism and also give thanks with acurse. She insists the win hasn’t had an effect.
“Polaris hasn’t changed anything,” she says.
“I don’t know if it’s because of the Polaris Prize or because of my mouth, that people are like, ‘Oh my god, she cursed onstage. Oh my god, she doesn’t sing in English’ — none of that fazes me. All I want to do is clean my house, feed my kid, and go back to making art and finish my album.”
About reaction to her comments, she thinks it’s fake Canadian politeness.
“No one is allowed to express themselves. We really live under that ‘keep calm and carry on’ bulls--t . . . they say they are polite: no, Canadians aren’t polite, Canadians are repressed,” she says.
“I want to be passive-passive or aggressive-aggressive. No in between . . . That’s something we have to un- learn as Canadians. I am not proud to be quiet and polite. I’m not proud of that.
“It’s time for people like me who are always speaking up, who are not afraid, and are not scared of who they are and what they want to do, who they want to be, to get these platforms.”
In conversation, Pimienta can seem confident to the point of stridence: aware of her talent and value, and boastful about how important her next work will be.
She has been outspoken about causes such as water rights and land issues involving Indigenous people.
At her apartment, she was warm and maternal, offering hugs and making sure her guests were being treated well, and in the next moment forcefully art-directing the photographer shooting her for this story.
She knows what she wants, but every once in a while a moment of doubt creeps in.
She admits she wasn’t prepared to win the Polaris because she assumed her friends and collaborators A Tribe Called Red would win.
She says her next album is where she feels she’ll be able to sonically get to the point she wants to be.
“I want it to be the A Seat at the Table for South America,” she says, name-checking Solange Knowles’ critically acclaimed album. Pimienta plans to release it in 2019 and says it is about three-quarters finished. The Polaris Prize money ensures she will be able to travel to South America to finish recording it.
As a completely DIY phenomenon, Pimienta jokes that she “just learned what a marketing plan is.”
Her first album was recorded using grants or by her own fundraising.
“Anything I’ve done to this point it’s been me deciding how much money do I need for that and then I do it. Throw an art show. Throw a party, charge five bucks at the door. Do it for three weeks, I have the money. OK, now I have the money to go to Santiago and pay the studio and do the things that I have to do,” she says.
The Caminos festival is important because “these are my people. And you can’t just wait for white people to give you a chance. You have to take the stage and that’s what this festival is for.”
We’re in a Non-Relationship Relationship is a self-published account Pimienta wrote and illustrated of a woman looking for love. She plans to monologue the piece and tell the story while displaying the art behind her.
“She always thought by the time she was 30, she would have the whole heteronormative reality and she doesn’t have it. Because she lives in Toronto and she has no money. And it’s hard to find love. It’s hard to find true love and we live in a digital era where people meet in an app, and men have more power than women,” Pimienta says.
“The stories are based on true things that happened to me personally, or happened to friends of mine. So I compiled all of them, and I’m excited to perform it one last time and then get different women to perform it after because the woman in this story is all of us.”