Feature

Meagan Christou (b. 1991) is an Executive Board Member for OPSEU/SEFPO representing Toronto/GTA, the past Secretary of the Young Workers Committee, and a union steward and Strike Captain for Local 535 at the Art Gallery of Ontario. She successfully wrote and passed constitutional amendments to prolong union membership for precarious workers and a resolution opposing the practice of two-tier bargaining. Meagan helped launch the first series of Labour for Palestine Educationals, winning the OPSEU/SEFPO Human Rights Award in 2024.

Mitra Fakhrashrafi is a curator and archivist mapping legacies of colonial infrastructure and the resistance which has always followed.

Charlene K. Lau is an art historian, critic, and Curator of Public Art at Evergreen Brick Works and Nuit Blanche Toronto 2025. Her writing has been published in _Art in America_, _Artforum_, _The Atlantic_, _The Brooklyn Rail_, _frieze_, _Fashion Theory_ and _Journal of Curatorial Studies_, among others.

Emma Steen is a curator, writer, and the Outreach & Membership Coordinator for the mma Steen is a programmer, curator, and writer from downtown Toronto. Her area of interest lies in art and writing that explore intimacies, bodies, and gathering with feminist and anti-colonial intention. Emma works at the Royal Ontario Museum as a Performance Program Coordinator, bringing live arts performances, parties, and cultural events to the country’s largest museum.

Fan Wu writes, performs, and teaches. He is currently studying Daoism and its capacities to transform our Western political-aesthetic paradigms.

EMILIA-AMALIA (since 2016) is an intergenerational, in-flux working group that employs experiments, citation, annotation, and autobiography to activate feminist art, writing, research, and living practices. Active members include Cecilia Berkovic, Annie MacDonell, Gabrielle Moser, Zinnia Naqvi, and (_C_ editor) Joy Xiang, with support from Jennifer Harwart.

Dot Tuer is a writer and artist whose work explores the intersections of cultural memory, visual storytelling, and decolonial histories. She divides her time between Corrientes, Argentina, and Toronto, Canada, where she teaches at OCAD University.

This issue of C Magazine considers what it might mean to stop. Rather than denote absence, the stop offers an opening for something else to emerge. Across these pages, contributors explore stopping in: forms of rest, blockades, town halls, and critiques of the temporality and archives of empire. From blockades on Wet’suwet’en land to an underground hub in Jakarta, from moccasins cradling lichen to Lebanon’s El-Mina port, each work gathers its own form of interruption. <br/>

With contributors: Whess Harman, Hung Duong and Grace Samboh, Svetlana Romanova, Fan Wu, Meagan Christou, Mitra Fakhrashrafi, Emma Steen, Charlene K. Lau, Dot Tuer, Joyce Joumaa, Ali El-Darsa, Kay Rangel, Jasmine Sihra.

This issue considers what it might mean to stop. Rather than denote absence, the stop offers an opening for something else to emerge. Across these pages, contributors explore stopping in: forms of rest, blockades, town halls, and critiques of the temporality and archives of empire. From blockades on Wet’suwet’en land to an underground hub in Jakarta, from moccasins cradling lichen to Lebanon’s El-Mina port, each work gathers its own form of interruption.

With contributors: Whess Harman, Hung Duong and Grace Samboh, Svetlana Romanova, Fan Wu, Meagan Christou, Mitra Fakhrashrafi, Emma Steen, Charlene K. Lau, Dot Tuer, Joyce Joumaa, Ali El-Darsa, Kay Rangel, Jasmine Sihra.

Stop

Collective

Institutional critique

Fan Wu reflects on the first installment of “Open Hearing: Dreaming in Dark Times.” Initiated by EMILIA-AMALIA, the   gathered over 200 cultural workers in Toronto to confront urgent issues including Palestine solidarity, censorship, and labour. Inspired by the 1969 Art Workers’ Coalition open hearing in New York, the dispatch features transcripts from Meagan Christou, Mitra Fakhrashrafi, Emma Steen, Charlene K. Lau, and Dot Tuer.

Open Hearing: Dreaming in Dark Times, Dispatch I

Review

_Badlands: A Dance in Time_  by Andrea Spaziani and Prince Nifty (Matt Smith), with Julia Male, Sofi Gudiño, and Germaine Liu, was performed on 24 August 2024 at Lobe, Vancouver.

_C Magazine solicits online review pitches for publication in C Online on an ongoing basis. We welcome reviews from across Canada and internationally, and are especially keen on reviews that engage with art outside of Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver. C Magazine offers competitive compensation to our writers. Email your review pitches to pitches@cmagazine.com._

Badlands: A Dance in Time – Andrea Spaziani and Prince Nifty (Matt Smith), with Julia Male, Sofi Gudiño, and Germaine Liu

Gossip, as “unverified” information, has complex relations to power. As a historically maligned oral tradition, with gendered roots, it asks that we question our sources—who we trust and why—as well as who has been afforded belief or legitimization over others. In this issue, gossip takes various forms, from a mode of subversion under settler-colonial states to speculative fiction; it is revealed in the archives, in silence, and in its failures to resist authoritarian imaginings or institutional exploitation. After all, why do we gossip?


Gossip

_Emanations_ was published by Wolsak & Wynn, Hamilton, 2022.

_Emanations_ — Prathna Lor

Humour

Fan Wu reviews the book _I Apologize_ (2020) by Jessica Baldanza, published by Random Man Editions.

I Apologize: Jessica Baldanza

Déjà Vu

Fan Wu reviews Shanzhai Lyric’s exhibition _LOOSELY ASSEMBLED CYCLE 3: J’ai besoin d’a Of North 1986_ at SBC Gallery, Montreal (May 25 – August 2, 2019).

Shanzhai Lyric: LOOSELY ASSEMBLED CYCLE 3: J'ai besoin d'a Of North 1986

Letter

Jacquelyn Zong-Li Ross is a writer and editor based on the traditional, unceded territories of the Sḵwx̱wú7mesh, xʷməθkʷəy̓əm, and səlilwətaɬ nations. Her fiction, poetry, essays, and art criticism have appeared in _BOMB, The Ex-Puritan, Fence, Mousse,_ and elsewhere, and she is currently the Art Editor at _The Capilano Review_. Her debut fiction collection, _The Longest Way to Eat a Melon_, is forthcoming from Sarabande Books in 2025.


Monument

Four letters reflecting on the spring ‘Graphic Design’ issue.

Letters

Prathna Lor is a poet and doctoral student of literature and critical theory at the University of Toronto where they are writing a book on aesthetic difficulty.

Voice

Poetry

Dialogue

Criticism

This article considers Nguyen Tron Hiep’s poem “Paris, capitale de la France, Recueil de vers” (Hanoi,1897), which served as the epigraph to Walter Benjamin’s The Arcades Project. Prathna Lor and Fan Wu bring together critical theory by Jean-Luc Nancy, Anne Carson and Roland Barthes to contemplate on their own friendship. 

Sisyphus’ Music Box: A dialogue on race and interruption

Performance

The article reviews Anne Carson’s poem “Dave’s, Lake Michigan, Early June”.

The Lake Is a Plate of Itself: On Anne Carson’s “Dave’s, Lake Michigan, Early June”

This is a review of The Animated Reader: Poetry of _Surround Audience_ edited by Brian Droitcour (New York: The New Museum, 2015). 

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Fan Wu