Column

Jamie Ross is a visual artist and ﬁlmmaker living in Los Angeles and Montreal. Their current project touches the microhistorical world of a Los Angeles secret society of drag queens, harmonic hymn singers, and sea-shell collectors raided by the police in 1914.

I remember my first time on the dunes very well. In Grade 5, my class slept over at the nature school on the Toronto Islands, deep in the woods on the inland ocean. Beside myself with freedom, I learned to cross-country ski and heard the coyotes at night. Years later, I would sometimes—after kicking the bonfire out with sand—curl up on the couches and floors of friends’ studios in the same school, now emptied of children save for those of us who had become artists. I began to make an annual ritual of it, hoping to spend the Septembers of my life in a studio there. With the closest fridge to the beach, I would make rent slinging cold drinks with a wink to the tipsy queens.

It was 50 summers ago now that a special picnic was held on those western beaches. The widespread police violence against LGBTQ2S\+ people in North America was more frequently being met with self-defense, defiance, and community organizing. People gathered in public, and especially in the secluded places where we had created sexual commons: the parks, ravines, bathrooms, and neighbourhoods of ill repute. Since the decline of the western peninsula in the early 20th century as Toronto’s wee Coney Island North, we’ve eked out a sanctuary amid the regrowing forest to fool around in and get high, relatively free from the over-policing of our downtown haunts. In the territory now claimed by Canada, the Queer summer celebration known today as Pride began on Hanlan’s Point with this picnic. The next year, the island picnic was but one part of an entire week of social and activist events. It had begun, for better and for worse.

---

In 1842, eight years after Toronto formed North America’s first  
urban police corps, and 27 years before the terms homosexual  
and heterosexual would be coined,[^1] the first two men in Canada were imprisoned for having sex. When Patrick Kelly and Samuel Moore were handed down life sentences to be spent at the nation’s first penitentiary in Kingston, on the shores of the same lake, Toronto Island was not even an island yet.[^2] 

The last person imprisoned for being gay in Canada was released from prison only 11 days before the 1971 picnic. There was urgent work to be done. And although money was raised that day to fund a historic march on Parliament Hill, Cheri DiNovo[^3]—a member of the Toronto Gay Action collective which had a hand in organizing the Gay Day Picnic—remembers it fondly as a day off, when activists could set aside the urgency of their agitation. When I spoke recently with her on the phone, two of Cheri’s recollections really stuck with me. She reminded me that although the roots of Pride could be traced to the picnic of 1971, one could not forget Toronto’s raucous Halloween street parties downtown which predated the summer gatherings.[^4] Night carnivals of drag and gender nonconformity would splash ecstatic public misrule along the longest street in the world. A skepticism about firsts and anniversaries of any sort is healthy.

And her other memory: what a shame it was to have to go back to the city at the end of the day, not a cop in sight.

---

Close your eyes. 

You are walking a path through the dunes on an unseasonably warm evening. Light filters into the sandy hollow, casting gold. You’ve spent the day in delicious anonymity, resting, eating and flirting with people who consider this place a home— for some, more than any other place in the city. The bodies are more different here than in the gay neighbourhood you’ve nervously visited sometimes by night. People move through the woods quietly. It is here at some time today where you have begun to love your nude, late-adolescent body. 

You bend down and scoop up a few condom wrappers as is customary in the care of the little rooms formed under the skirts of the pines big enough for two or three people. This one has a roll of toilet paper on a branch. The picnic has been packed up. The carnival is over.

The ferry home spits you out on Bay Street to walk past the stock-market towers, and those that house the headquarters of the international mining industry. An empire is built on sand. You ease into a long, full gait. Giggling, you make plans to sew a replica of the Gay Day 1971 picnic blanket tapestry, maybe with the words “Fairy Home / Ferry Home” to donate to the gay archives, plans that will be abandoned by sunrise. A monument to the semicentennial of the gay beach’s world-making party could only ever be something accidental, exceedingly difficult to photograph, and impermanent as the shifting shoreline. And it could only ever be cheap or free.

But wait… _you are still on the dune_. The last ferry of the century has left without you. From where you stand, alone on a mound of pounded flotsam facing a prone sun, you can see where the island’s thin loam trickles to the still edge of the water and continues under the waves. You feel joy. You have forgotten your name—and to what city, to what century, to what communities you belong. Your body, now levitating a few metres into the sky, is held in the unsung, word-of-mouth tradition of gay undoing inherent in this place. The homophile orgasmic summer-corn-roast Gay Day BBQ organizing committee has telepathically come to consensus on your body as the beach’s living monument, a role that everyone who has found belonging on the stretch inherits in turn, if they wish. It’s you tonight, kid. The wee bag of condom wrappers you held falls to the ground, and the Mississauga skyline twinkles its assent. 

[^1]: While the terms heterosexual and homosexual were coined in 1869 by Karl-Maria Kertbeny, a campaigner for gay rights, they did not gain traction until popularized in the seminal 1886 book on sexual illnesses, _Psychopathia Sexualis_, by Richard Freiherr von Krafft-Ebing. The ontological shift of homosexuality as condition or state to homosexual as fixed identity is important. The term was soon reclaimed by communities for self-definition, enacting our own shift.
[^2]: Residents gave up resisting the vicissitudes of the sand after storms in 1852 and 1858 breached the low shoal connecting it to the mainland.
[^3]: Then a young, street-involved Queer activist, DiNovo went on to become a member of provincial parliament with the NDP (2006 2017), and a United Church minister.
[^4]: The University of Toronto Homophile Association (UHTA), Toronto Gay Action Now, and the Community Homophile Association of Toronto (CHAT) hosted a less public picnic one year before, in 1970, calling into question the anniversary of what some have called the first Gay Day picnic in 1971\. See Don McLeod, _Lesbian and Gay Liberation in Canada: A Selected Annotated Chronology, 1964–1975_ (Toronto, ECW/Homewood Books, 1996).

Writer

Community

issue-149-p88-89.pdf

Memory

Sexuality

Jamie Ross reflects on Canada’s first gay picnic, at Hanlan’s Point in Toronto, on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the nation’s Pride celebrations.

One Thing: Gay Day 1971

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Federation of Canadian Artists 1

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Editorial

**Jac Renée Bruneau** is a writer, editor and organizer based in Toronto. She was formerly the editor of _C Magazine_.

“Community” is at once the word used to quickly refer to a group of living beings who have something in common, and something that’s way more effortful, hard-won. Many of us have been clumped into “communities” we may not identify with, or with whom we have a more complex relationship than the word suggests. The word is also commonly used to refer to museums’ publics, and might be considered a shorthand for work being done in isolation from, or even in contradiction to, those long-standing pillars of the field. This issue of _C_ brushes against all these varying definitions and usages of the word “community,” dwelling longer on some than others. From rounding up resources for those living on the street to organizing petitions to boycott arts organizations that accept money from Zionist funders to running full-blown first-time auctions, with proceeds going to the victims of Beirut’s explosion, Black and Indigenous trans folk, sex workers, and more, there has been a heartening push of self-organizing in the past year. We wanted to acknowledge and learn from such work, situating it in a long history of art’s entwinement with crisis response, mutual aid, and politics, and also consider these practices within an ever expanding frame of artistic, critical thought.

This issue is big, the highest page count I’ve seen in my three years at _C Magazine_, and that’s largely as a result of people wanting, needing, to situate their work in relation to that of others—as inspiration, peers, collaborators, or some combination thereof. As we went along editing, the number of artist-runs, grassroots, or otherwise small and mighty collections of people quickly proliferated, including: Wildseed Centre for Art & Activism, Black Lives Matter – Toronto, Blue Devil Posse, Caribana (Erica Cardwell); Picasso PRO, Equal Grounds, Capoeira Angola (Emelie Chhangur); Encampment Support Network, JaneFinch Housing Coalition, Toronto Aboriginal Support Services Council, Friends of Chinatown Toronto, 7th Generation Image Makers (Benjamin de Boer); Pivot Legal Society, Food Not Bombs, posAbilities, Facebook “Buy Nothing Group” (Emily Dickson); GENDER B(L)ENDER, Montréal, arts interculturels (Dallas Fellini); the Chinese Cultural Centre (in Calgary), Tomorrow’s Chinatown, I LOVE YYC Chinatown, 221A, aiya 哎呀! Collective, The New Gallery, Tea Base, Friends of Chinatown Toronto (yes, again), Joss Paper Library, Hua Foundation, Centre A (Steph Wong Ken); the Initiative for Indigenous Futures, The Nap Ministry (Kite and Alisha B. Wormsley); Isuma Productions’s Digital Indigenous Democracy project (Emily Laurent Henderson); Gudskul, ruangrupa, Grafis Huru Hara, Serrum, LAL/Unit 2, Younger Than Beyoncé Gallery (YTB), Sister Co-Resister, Department of Public Memory, Gentrification Tax Action, The Mobile Recording Studio, Casa Maíz, Centre for Spanish-Speaking Peoples, Youth ‘N’ Charge, Gendai Gallery, Mastering the Art of Misguided Business Administration (MA MBA) (Vince Rozario); Pride, and the Toronto Gay Action collective (Jamie Ross).

While “art intervenes in political life at various distances from particular political issues,” as Leo Bersani wrote in _Is the Rectum a Grave? and Other Essays_, one of the most exciting questions that runs through this issue is: how do we all (not just “institutions,” but everyone, wherever we are) do more than the symbolic? The first feature, written by Benjamin de Boer, offers one of many concrete examples. They and their collaborator, Phát Lê, made a short video of themselves mixing cement at night, pouring it over benches that have been designed with hostility in mind—uneven or otherwise obstructive to the body that simply wishes to lie down. It was screened on the monitor at Albany Pizza, a delicious legend of Toronto’s West End neighbourhood, which might otherwise have been screening CP24. Someone at The Bentway caught wind of the project, and invited de Boer and Lê to do something at their site, a privately owned, condo-destined swath of land underneath the Gardiner Expressway that runs leisure and culture programming in the meantime. Slightly puzzled but curious, the duo scrapped the idea of creating a “facile public spectacle” and proposed that the organization split the $10,000 on offer among a number of grassroots groups that the artists thought The Bentway could learn something from with regards to public space. 

The question of material support recurs, often opening out onto more ideological contemplations. In Steph Wong Ken’s survey of different organizations working at the intersections of art, activism, and community building in Canada’s Chinatowns, she speaks of the influence of tongs, family clans, or benevolent societies. “Dating back to as early as the 1880s, they emerged across Canada as a way for newly landed people from China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Vietnam to find one another, acting as integral hubs for generations of immigrants”—not only “to exchange knowledge, language, and history” but to share financial aid. Vancouver’s 221A, one of the organizations profiled in the piece, cites being more inspired by such groups than by traditional art institutions. In 2017, they adopted a fellowship model, wherein artists and designers are paid to work on long-term projects with very few limitations. “Art practices are often seen as non-functional or not expected to be involved in generating economic security,” says Brian McBay, 221A’s executive director. “We want to get artists and designers directly involved in determining how society operates and to have an economic base to sustain themselves.”

It was exciting to see this removal of contingency from opportunity crop up across numerous pieces in different ways, considering how at odds it is with commercial exchange, the nation’s granting model, and most residencies. Hopefull highlighting this radical openness to let artists do their own thing, trusting them to define success on their own terms, will beget more such opportunities. (Is this not _literally_ what self-determination is?) The Wildseed Black Arts Fellowship, a 20-month long journey spearheaded by Black Lives Matter – Toronto for 13 artists working in many disciplines, similarly, has no deliverables. Erica Cardwell had conversations with a number of the program’s participants and administrators in order to understand the thoughtful, holistic framework and how it was working. A DJ named Me Time reflected on how important it was that much of the experience be loosely defined, especially considering how drastically the past year has affected her relationship to her work. In a word, she felt liberated by it, seeing the primary objective of the fellowship as “focused on cultivating and preserving the collective imagination of the fellows.” Citing the rarity of being in an exclusively Black creative space, she says, “Very early on, we realized that just us being together was the work.”

In thinking about how organizations can tailor their programs in ways that truly meet artists where they’re at, I’m reminded of Dallas Fellini’s text on the relative absence of trans women in Canada’s art world, and the spaces they’ve made for themselves instead. They draw from a conversation with the artist Kama La Mackerel, who asks: “What can you offer, beyond just a show, that can actually be transformative for a career? I think of my relationship to the MAI \[Montréal, arts interculturels\] for example, which is where I’ve been developing my show _ZOM\-FAM_ for the past couple years. They gave me a one-year mentorship program and money that I could use to get whatever training I needed. They actually gave me resources to allow me to empower myself to learn new skills, to grow as an artist. \[…\] Instead of asking: what will this artist do for us? we should ask: what can we do for the artist? \[…\] How do we take a chance on them?”

“Institutional Failures and Legacies of Transmisogyny in the Arts in Canada” also tunnels down into a matter of inclusion which I’ve scarcely seen explored and is maybe even kind of taboo—something I’ve tentatively dubbed “aesthetic gatekeeping.” As Fellini writes: “Institutions are deeply tied up in classist, exclusionist frameworks of valuing artwork, and yet feign shock when marginalized communities are unable to access the material resources, formal education, and thus theoryspeak and elitist aesthetics necessary to achieve conventional ideas of success. Whether or not an artwork conforms to these norms dictates in large part who benefits from inclusion efforts. What the artwork looks like, how it operates, and how its intelligence is understood become conditions of participation.” In other words: in today’s acute reckoning with Euro- and US-centric canons, legacies, and practices, the art world has been perhaps overly fixated on including artists on the grounds of their identities, rather than on the diversity of _ideas_ and the ways those ideas are made manifest in visual languages. It must be said that decentring whiteness means destabilizing our conception of what art looks like. But lest we forget, there _is_ one demonstrable way that artists who work in non-hegemonic modes find their way into these spaces despite tight controls; Fellini again: “if they are willing to perform their trauma, by putting forward work that is excessively biographical or that mines emotionally difficult experiences.”

It’s unsurprising, then, that many artists opt to find artistic community in spaces they have a hand in defining. The artist and composer Kite and artist Alisha B. Wormsley reflect on a virtual gathering they organized for 18 Black and Indigenous artists to nap and dream together for a whole day. “In this current labour force, in this slave model, we are not sleeping and not dreaming,” Wormsley writes in the collaboratively written feature which attempts to mirror the non-linear logics of dreaming. “We are not supposed to dream, so there must be extreme power there.” Redolent of Me Time’s sentiments about Wildseed, the pair’s project centred togetherness, the necessity of imagination, and the importance of acknowledging individual needs in community work. It reminds me of something Rozina Kazi (of LAL/Unit 2) said in the roundtable Vince Rozario orchestrated for this issue: “I used to think, ‘Do bigger things for community.’ Now my work looks like actually helping one or two people at a time, to really impact their lives, instead of trying to impact the whole sector. If we can start with one or two people at a time and then teach other people how to make care collectives, how to make art together, we can build a different world.”

Rozario’s “Imagination Tool for Institutional Operations” also includes Leonhard Bartolomeus, Farid Rakun, and Gesyada Siregar of Gudskul, Geneviève Wallen and Marsya Maharani of YTB, Ruben Esguerra of the Mobile Recording Studio, and curator Emelie Chhangur. Each of the individuals associated with collectives digs into the distinct but overlapping needs that their respective groups were founded to address, and reflects on what came about as a result of the shared projects they’ve been embroiled in for the past few years. Continuous with her practice of “in-reach” (as opposed to outreach)—an extended definition of which precedes the conversation—Chhangur, together with her colleagues Suzanne Carte and Michael Maranda at AGYU, decided to put the institution into residency with this group of collectives. While she’s “mostly interested in the self-organizing potential of relationality over choreographing outcomes,” consonant with Gudskul’s underscoring the worth of simply “hanging out” for creative work, the project resulted in a co-authored “knowledge-sharing and   
\-mapping module that addresses the complex concepts and tasks involved in creating sustainable collective platforms.”

The question of un/sustainability—of anthropocentric practices, of a precarious art sector, of an increasingly divided political left—crops up in Emily Dickson’s feature, too. Taking Emily Carr University’s social practice and community engagement (SPACE) program as a pedagogical case study, the scholar considers socially engaged art education’s (SEAE) tools for healthy, necessary shifts in the field—not only for artists, but for institutions and other systems. While many art schools engage community-oriented practices in some way, “the concerted institution of SEAE introduces an alternative lexicon to the institutional body,” challenging its very bedrock perhaps to such a degree that its relative scarcity in the nation’s art schools is worthy of closer examination. Dovetailing with sentiments in Fellini’s text, Aaniya Asrani, a recent instructor in the program, says, “It isn’t the language of fine art,” indicating, as Dickson extrapolates, “that as vocabulary develops, manifestly different routes of practice become visible, and available.” Acknowledging that social practice work is plagued by familiar critiques—“the legacy of the artist who works to ‘solve,’ the danger of participation proffering excess positivity in order to mask social ills, and the possibility of such work picking up where the state leaves off in a form of unpaid volunteerism”—Dickson sets up some interesting food for thought about art’s potential in the social sphere.

Emily Laurent Henderson homes in on a formidable example of artists who don’t distinguish between their sociopolitical community work and their artistic output. For many years, Isuma has been a major proponent of media accessibility across Nunavut, and in 2012, they initiated the Digital Indigenous Democracy Project. In “\_Aajiiqatigiingniq\_” (an Inuit method for consensus-based decision-making), the writer explores the film-making collective’s work creating awareness of the proposed Baffinland Mary River iron ore mine near the communities of Igloolik and Mittimatalik (Pond Inlet). They gathered testimonials of Inuit, called for community consultations, and made the Nunavut Impact Review Board’s public hearings accessible virtually. Though the mining development was built, Isuma’s work continues—most recently earlier this year, to support the airstrip protests against the mine’s proposed expansion, which would entail running hundreds of kilometres of railway through traditional hunting grounds.

In closing, we’re eager to announce that this issue pushed us to definitively outline an idea that’s been percolating for some time—a new column which will serve as a dedicated place to focus in on individual and organizational efforts being made in the name of equity within the arts community, acknowledging that this work is freckled with missteps, joys, failures, surprises, disappointments, and teachings. We’ll be looking for rundowns on specific initiatives, projects, and programs to see how they’re shaking out in the attempt to invite more complexity, sensitivity, and nuance to this crucial discourse. Consider it a place for deep, substantiated writing on specific case studies by folks supporting the development of more just infrastructures. Since it sets out to highlight the work that many features in this issue are engaged in, the column will launch in the next issue, “Maps” (December), and carry on from there.

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Activism

Collaboration

Editor Jac Renée Bruneau reflects on the issue’s theme: _Community._

Editorial: Community

Feature

Benjamin de Boer (b. 1995) is a poet, artist, bookseller, and community organizer. Their dear collaborator, Phát Lê (b. 1995), is a graduate of the John H. Daniels Faculty of Architecture. Both live and work in Tkaronto.

Amy Sillman was absolutely right in her assertion that the second question confronting artists is: "What would make it better?" [^1] This puzzle becomes even more apparent when the artist is offered an invitation, a grain of hospitality extended by an organization wishing to incubate an aspect of their work.

Due to this apprehension around what affective ambiguities would make “better art” in the face of an invitation to participate in modes of action concerning public space, my collaborator Phát Lê and I deconstructed every motive after we received an email from The Bentway last autumn. In it, they presented an opportunity to participate in their “Safe in Public Space” (SIPC) initiative, which seeks to acknowledge the role that public space is playing in systemic injustices, and the fact that—although public space may feel important to our collective recovery—not everyone feels safe and comfortable therein. Of course there are many nuanced reasons for those experiences, which SIPC is mandated to explore.

Turns out The Bentway had seen our YouTube video[^2] where we poured concrete on an uneven bench to flatten out its seating area so that someone could comfortably lie on it, countering Toronto’s efforts to make these benches uninhabitable. We had played this video on a loop on the TV in Albany Pizza, where we had also put out a set of binders filled with essays we wrote about changes in the city that we had witnessed through routines of performative psychogeography. We wanted to intervene in the City of Toronto’s subtle implementation of hostile architecture in public space. Our research into this phenomenon served to share the typology of strategies that those with power use to overdetermine the use of public space, thereby limiting the possibility of sidewalks, parks, and plazas to embolden the polymorphous desires relationally constructed by their inhabitants. In other words, the city doesn’t want anyone taking a nap, or hanging out with their friends for too long.

Our first thought was: “Wait, isn’t The Bentway the organization that rented out their park to host that graceless pod dinner?”[^3] 

And second: “What could they possibly want from us?”

The Bentway is a charity gone spatial, the functional trajectory of an investment piece disguised as a park for the adjacent inhabitants of waterfront condos. It’s a multimillion-dollar concrete rectangle, replete with a public bathroom, picnic tables, and power outlets slapped down on city land-in-limbo until the Gardiner Expressway inevitably gets torn down, at which point it will be promptly sold to a developer who will erect even more condos on top. Seemingly, the only explanation for this sudden ethical upswing was to save face following the pod dinners, slow its roll toward the heat death of neoliberal singularity.

Call us paranoid but we are iffy on the ways that non-profits work in general, wince at the bureaucratic hyper-maze whose serpentine loopholes are designed to reiterate expressions of the status quo. There are of course amazing exceptions, mutinied by brave teams ishing to reroute capital. Unfortunately, though, plenty of citybacked organizations are basically the Business Improvement Associations of the Cultural, moderated by boards investing in safe projects depicting Toronto as a cheery surface upon which to play the real-estate game. While Phát and I have a pretty solid grasp on  
the kinds of saccharine artwashing that developer-affiliated organizations conjure up, in response to the invite, we felt like children: supreme non-experts on the issues faced by multiple publics, unfit for this kind of undertaking. We could have said no to this invitation, but knew that if we did, someone could use the $10,000 grant attached to plop down a plaza turd.

Being dilettantes, we were down to explore the potential of acting through this feeling. So we decided that if we were to do anything with them, it would be in drag _as them_, administering their vision of career-based organizing. Like iodine contrast fluid, maybe we could help diagnose just how bad their capacity for mutual aid actually was. Perhaps dropping the art-object in favour of tactical programmatics would serve a critical function. If we could learn the organization’s tendencies toward power-to and power-over, as well as the ways these capacities were slipping, maybe there could be some kind of lasting change to the way this charity functions. We would also get the money meant for our personal budget out there and into the hands of networks with real know-how. 

Our proposal began with telling them our general feeling of apprehension, our concern that pilot projects are ineffectual when their effects are felt only during their temporary instantiation. Unsure of exactly what The Bentway expected, we figured we would start by indicating what we weren’t interested in and why. We didn’t want to dedicate money to putting up a temporary sculpture that could inadvertently get in the way of someone using that space for something else. And, especially considering the political nature of this initiative, we thought it non-negotiable to address and amend hostile elements. In this case, the presence of not simply spikes, bars, and other barriers—surface control features The Bentway has made sure to avoid—but also ideological and financial structures. In our proposal, we addressed their non-consensual planning of space and subsequent programming; corporate encroachment on city land; quiet support of profit-governed luxury housing developments nearby that result in policing, displacement, and the construction of inaccessible housing; and coercion of energy away from grassroots organizing by hoarding donor money within a non-profit industrial complex, for the production of facile public spectacles.[^4] To be clear, these kinds of organizations don’t strive for something “good” and then fail; they were designed to work in this feckless manner. Their philanthropic work is tightly controlled, with grants contingent on deliverables they define, obligatory community meetings deliberately scheduled at inconvenient times, and conversations with developers organized under the logic of capital. Such charitable conservancies have replaced grassroots collectives of people working together for goals that don’t rely on private or government agencies.[^5] 

This impulse must be replaced with solidarity, a behaviour that builds social relations that support the self-determination of marginalized people, and approaches public safety by way of harm reduction. To reduce the potential harm done by this money flowing in weird ways, we demanded the divestment of the $10,000 budget toward those impacted by profitdriven real estate. If The Bentway accepted our proposal, the existing staff members would join us in meeting with members of aid groups we felt The Bentway could learn from, and splitting the grant up between them.

This amounted to $2500 allotted for each aid group, to help meet the needs of the communities they support. They were to be compensated in funds, hard goods, or some combination thereof,  
delivered on their preferred schedules, whether lump sum or at regular intervals. We also offered the organizations an open line of communication with The Bentway to discuss how they could better support these smaller direct-action networks through advocacy, space sharing, and other partnership possibilities beyond funding—all if the groups in question wanted these elements, of course. The groups we were ultimately able to get money to were: the Encampment Support Network (ESN), the Jane-Finch Housing Coalition (JFHC), the Toronto Aboriginal Support Services Council (TASSC), and Friends of Chinatown Toronto (FOCT).

The Bentway accepted, and really embraced, this criticism as what they called “a helpful fuck you” in one of our meetings.

Some of ESN’s volunteers spoke with members of The Bentway’s staff, educating them about how to provide support and basic supplies to their unhoused neighbours. Resultantly, The Bentway took on some additional winter initiatives to support the community in tangible ways, such as producing and disseminating care kits. With the JFHC, we agreed that housing security is deeply tied to autonomy, and that extending consultation beyond the downtown core develops a more nuanced understanding of those experiencing housing insecurity. The JFHC used the funds to continue to support their network of residents, service providers, and community organizers. As for TASSC, we left it up to them to define how our relationship could be most beneficial. They pointed us in the direction of the 7th Generation Image Makers, where our reallocation of funds assisted their initiative to provide Indigenous youth of Toronto and the GTA with arts supplies and professional development programming. We set up a peer mentorship program where young image makers could meet with working artists to receive insight, criticism, and general information about pursuing a career in the arts. Finally, we had The Bentway extend our offer to FOCT, who have been exploring the implementation of a neighbourhood-improvement network as well as community land-trust models for Chinatown, which could include affordable housing, culturally competent community services, community gardens, and affordable commercial space for Chinatown’s immigrant-owned small businesses. 

This decentralization of resources let the recipients use them however they needed. As individuals concerned with exclusionary urban-planning practices who are just beginning to realize our  
place in ongoing direct-action strategies against them, we looked to the experts. Now we know what we suspected all along: our energy is better spent organizing within the communities we are a part of and stand with. We hope (hopefully not naively) that The Bentway can be continually steered through ongoing, coordinated communication with proximal groups that engage in direct action and commit to policy work to aid unhoused residents and advocate for the decommodification of housing. By doing so, these strategies support the lives of BIPOC, women, and LGBTQ2S\+ community members, as well as people with disabilities and members of other marginalized communities. This demand was the beginning of a larger call to unsettle the framework of this institution and transform its harms or potential harms into harm reduction, and other opportunities for community selfdetermination. As for Phát and me: will we focus on working within institutions to conduct the kind of work direct-action groups are already doing better? Probably not. 

[^1]: See Amy Sillman, "Shit Happens: Notes on Awkwardness," in _Faux Pas. Selected Writings and Drawings_ (Paris: After 8 Books, 2020), 145.
[^2]: www.alexusprojects.ca/meditation-in-concrete-ii
[^3]: Called Dinner With a View, diners could pay $149 to rent a life-sized terrarium at The Bentway. For an additional $99 per patron, guests get a dinner by Top Chef season 4 winner René Rodriguez. This event was held shortly after city crews demolished an encampment two kilometres away, under the Gardiner Expressway at Lake Shore Boulevard West and Lower Simcoe Street on March 13, 2019. For photos of the Dinner With a View 2019 event, see www.dinnerwithaview.ca/en/toronto-gallery
[^4]: The Bentway’s environmental assessment addressed “community use, resident impact, and the land,” and stated that “No interactions or impacts \[were\] expected” with Indigenous people during the project, thus invisibilizing their opinions and desires about land use, playing into the idea “that no one owned the land prior to European \[colonial\] assertion of sovereignty.” Without adequate Indigenous consultation, or any mention of groundwork to support the lives of the unhoused in the area, The Bentway operates as an extension of the capitalist and colonial presence developing Toronto’s waterfront area. From Urbanism For the People  [@tacticalurbanismftp](https://www.instagram.com/tacticalurbanismftp/?hl=en)   
[^5]: For further examples of the non-profit industrial complex’s trappings, see INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence, _The Revolution Will Not Be Funded: Beyond the Non-Profit Industrial Complex_ (Durham: Duke University Press, 2017).

issue-149-p18-22.pdf

Urban studies

Public art

Benjamin de Boer reflects on an invitation they and their collaborator Phát Lê received to create a public artwork on a condo-destined swath of land. Instead, they proposed that the $10,000 fee be split among select grassroots groups that the artists thought the organization could learn something from with regards to public space.

Take Down, Spread Out

Steph Wong Ken is a writer currently based in Tkaronto, near a forest of black oak. [stephwongken.com](http://stephwongken.com)

issue-149-p22-31.pdf

Cities

Artist-run centres

Steph Wong Ken surveys five organizations working at the intersections of art, activism, and community building in Canada’s Chinatowns—integral hubs for generations of newcomers from China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Vietnam which continue to evolve in the face of racism, gentrification, and displacement. 

Community is Never Neutral: Placemaking in Chinatowns Across Canada

Over the past 20 years, artist, writer, and curator Emelie Chhangur has emerged as a leading voice for experimental curatorial practice and engaged institutional transformation in Canada through her influencial practice of in-reach. From 2004 to 2019, while curator at AGYU, she won 25 Ontario Association of Art Galleries (OAAG) awards in exhibition-making, education, public programming, and writing, including their inaugural Changemaker BIPOC Award. In 2020, she won the prestigious Hnatyshyn Foundation Award for Curatorial Excellence. She is currently Director and Curator of the Agnes Etherington Art Centre.

I am a biracial Torontonian who grew up in a small town as the only person of colour, and returned to Toronto to study. Toronto has been the subject of my work ever since.

My curatorial work for the past two decades can be simply summed up as a practice of negotiating the complexities of _how_ to belong with a place over time. It has questioned the social and civic role of art and its public institutions, conceiving of the curatorial as a means and methodology with which to engage and participate in the civic sphere by bringing artists, non-artists, and city structures into relation, and in doing so, giving shape to future visual culture grounded in multiplicity. I have approached this through: the adoption of artistic methodologies that stem from vernacular cultural traditions, the transformation of traditions through their mixing, and the constitution of new traditions formed through solidarity-building collaborations between individuals and groups with no “perceived natural affinity”—in particular, Indigenous and diasporic communities. Even though my projects have often culminated in large-scale public works that appropriate recognizable dramaturgical forms— recasting the protagonists of these social dramas with individuals and groups who do not generally find themselves at the civic centre of their city—the real work of these projects is in the invisibility of their longterm making. I think of this behind the-scenes work as rehearsals: for the creation of new social relations, on the one hand, and for new ways of participating in the civic and cultural life of a place, on the other. This backstage work has tremendous bearing on art-institutional practice, too. 

My approach to engaged institutional practice stems from my continuing collaboration with the Mississaugas of the Credit First Nation beginning in 2009 with _The Awakening/Giigozhkozimin_, which brought members of the nation together with parkour athletes from the Greater Toronto Area in “a civic ceremonial.”[^1] Giigozhkozimin meant radically rethinking the temporality of projects—including institutional decision-making practices. Following processes proposed by the project revealed to me the institution’s incommensurabilty to support non-Western sociocultural practices, behaviours, and values. Then and now, I insist that the institutions I work for[^2] bend to meet the methodological demands of the communities with whom I work and the projects we want to make.[^3] Doing this productively ensures something meaningful inside the work persists beyond the projects’ own temporality. I call this form of institutional transformation “in-reach”—in contradistinction to outreach—because the differing ecologies of knowledge that these kinds of projects produce change institutional practice from _within_ by introducing different social economies, cultural protocols, and perspectives in ways that the institution can neither suppress nor ignore if they wish to see the project through.[^4]

_Ring of Fire_ was a project with 150 core collaborators that resulted in a 300-person street procession in downtown Toronto.[^5] The project brought together disability dancers from Picasso PRO and Equal Grounds, the Mississaugas of the Credit, members of the Capoeira Angola community, and young spoken-word poets from Jane-Finch, Malvern, and Regent Park, simultaneously signed by Deaf and Hard of Hearing youth, in a two-year process that involved over 100 workshops in visual art, music, movement, and spoken word. I was interested in how using an appositional approach to curating could _transform_ traditions and simultaneously create new images of and for Toronto. 

It was at this time I began to rethink my own practice: from a socially engaged curatorial practice—as in _The Awakening_—to a curatorially-engaged social and civic approach to cultural work. If traditionally the work of curators is to bring artworks into dialogue, then curatorially-engaged cultural work would bring together elements of the civic and social spheres so that individuals and groups might create new arrangements with which to navigate the existing structures of their city and the cultural organizations that are supposed to represent them. This is where the curatorial might create a kind of slippage—a fabulation—making what is performed play a real role in the history of a place and making the history of a place a kind of fiction to be played with and upon. Even if it was just for one day, Queen’s Park, Toronto City Hall, and 52 Division of the Toronto Police worked for _us_.[^6]

Mobilizing the power of these dramaturgical forms and their capacity to enact new traditions, I more deeply understood what is at stake for curating and how to disestablish art institutional power. Through performance, we can transform visual culture in authentic ways by putting the art institution in the service of a changing social imaginary. While performance is often a mechanism of dominant culture— reiterating and reinforcing values that hold up exclusion as the driving force of its pedagogical function—it remains a powerful myth-making means with which a culture can picture itself. So, if _within_ the art institution you change the frame and the participants, then you can change what a culture sees of itself—and can start to change power structures outside the art institution as well. In other words, to speak truth to power from inside art institutions makes those institutions vehicles for changing public discourse. The art gallery is not a reflection; it refracts.

These projects are not about what diasporic practices do to places, or what places do to them. They ask us instead to consider what Toronto _will do_ with diasporic practices to new effect through their mixing: entangled with yet other traditions, movements, gestures, and rhythms to no known ends. How things are brought into relation is a political matter of curatorial concern. An assembler of difference—the diversifying difference of the yet-to-be—the curatorial in this way is a relation machine that brings new forms into the world and in doing so provides new foundational grounds from which to build the future we want to see, right now. I call this iterative way of working “curating on a continuum” in that, as a process of continual transformation and change, it collapses pasts, presents, and futures. It’s speculation in action. It’s anti-assimilationist. It’s turning the institution itself into a practice. It’s a belief in the transformative power of art to reimagine the world. 

One can face a lot of resistance and fear when manifesting energy toward the creation of a future no longer tethered to a baseline structure. While the Western museological frame needs to be dismantled, I think of my work as proposing otherwise. I operate with a general ethic that flows forward and I move with it—a kind of ex-centric curiosity—but last summer was a defining moment for me. I realized: _everything can change_. 

issue-149-p31-32.pdf

Curatorial practice

Emelie Chhangur reflects on her curatorial practice of “in-reach,” which insists “that the institutions I work for bend to meet the methodological demands of the communities with whom I work and the projects we want to make.” This human-centred approach decentres the idea of discrete deliverables, opting for transformations that live on in those involved.

In-reach and the Fabulatory Function of the Curatorial

Vince Rozario is an independent critic, curator, writer, arts administrator, and community organizer based in Tkaronto/Toronto. They have published writing in _C Magazine_ and _Momus_, and contributed to exhibition texts for Xpace, Whippersnapper Gallery, InterAccess, and Gallery 44\. They were the winner of the 2018 C New Critics Award and the 2021 Middlebrook Prize for Young Canadian Curators.

issue-149-p32-40.pdf

Collective

Vince Rozario facilitates a roundtable with members of Gudskul and a number of Toronto collectives to discuss “the transformative potential of being, sharing, and working together, and its importance at a time when the role of creative labour is rapidly shifting.” The participants dig into the distinct but overlapping needs that their respective groups were founded to address.

Imagination Tool for Institutional Operations: A Long Project Between Gudskul & 7 Toronto Collectives

Emily Dickson is an aspiring art critic interested in how art may compliment or confront contemporary politics. She is taking a year off between studies to focus on finding her niche as a writer.

Creative practices that take place outside the gallery, that think their impact beyond the aesthetic, and that frame their participants as other than hapless dupes have increased in visibility in Canada over the past 30 years. While socially engaged art, really an umbrella term for an agglomeration of diverse forms of creative work, is not new, its designation as a distinct practice has opened up the space to foster a new canon, and a new set of theoretical concerns. Although these practices do receive a share of attention in courses dealing with contemporary art histories, it is fairly surprising that only one academic institution in the country has a dedicated program for social and community engagement in practice. In thinking through not just social practice, but also its pedagogy, I cannot help but wonder whether the program’s anomalous presence may have something to do with the differential, at times even anti-institutional, sentiments that undergird the discipline. 

The social practice and community engagement (SPACE) program at Emily Carr University of Art + Design (ECUAD) was introduced by Susan Stewart in 2010, and foregrounds a combination of fieldwork, theory, and community and social engagement.[^1] Describing the Ethics of Representation course as the backbone of the program, Stewart differentiates SPACE from the typical art-school paradigm, noting that the “basic motivation is activist.” Put another way, she told me that she sees socially engaged art as starting and ending with social justice. The possibilities of this education and subsequent work become ever more urgent as the discourse around art and political engagement intensifies. 

While the ambiguity of contemporary art’s relationship to political action can be a tool in setting new parameters for discourse, or in resisting the status quo, it can also be usurped by an art market which increasingly feeds on art that stages itself as radical. Socially engaged art education (SEAE) reframes the position of art and artists altogether by posing alternative working methods; the syllabi for these classes look more like handbooks for radical activism than careful chronicles of aesthetic critique. SEAE asks what it means to do political action, starting from the assumption that the artist is a part of, and not distinct from, their communities, while carefully examining aesthetic intentions around community narrative, to which artists might give material form. Speaking not just of social, political, and environmental contexts, but also of the art institution itself, Stewart noted that “We don’t live in a sustainable society.” SEAE works productively _through_ this difficulty, while trying to create the world that we want to see.

At this point, critical commentaries of socially engaged art are well rehearsed: there’s the legacy of the artist who works to “solve,” the danger of participation proffering excess positivity in order to mask social ills, and the possibility of such work picking up where the state leaves off in a form of unpaid volunteerism. Although manifestations of these critiques do have their histories and still pose threats, what became clear in my discussions with Stewart, as well as with Natalie Doonan and Aaniya Asrani—two educators and socially engaged practitioners who have taught in the SPACE program—was the value in working with, through, and in spite of these challenges, limits, and feedback loops. Critically, the problems that socially engaged art faces as a discipline overlap with those of art institutions, increasingly fraught with neoliberalism and marketization. SEAE doesn’t just introduce emerging artists to a canon of community engagement and activist art that is often downplayed or outright excluded within typical studio programs; it also allows them to question how art education primes them for art’s relation to capital, the art market, and the wider social world. 

Learning to work in community has to do with learning how to listen in order to become humble—rather than in order to know. This substitution of the typical knowledge paradigm of the university points toward other substitutions as well: of judgement with curiosity,[^2] direct competition between students with collaboration, ownership with gifting, techniques with tactics, and the relative safety of the classroom with the stark reality of face-to-face encounters. Social practice asks students to check many of their own developing assumptions about themselves and their practice at the door, because it is not as easy to be only a painter or sculptor when responding to the complex needs of a given community. As Doonan expressed, “Training emerging artists to have a community focus is important,” even if those artists may not go on to work primarily in social practice, art activism, or related expanded spheres. Because grassroots and community organizations are already heavily populated with artists and creative workers, empowering students to develop these skills at an early stage frames possibility differently at individual and collective levels. 

Both Asrani and Doonan described the reality of a 12-week semester as one of the biggest hindrances to meaningful intervention. To try and address this head-on, ECUAD set up the Community Projects course, the “studio” component of the program, which presents students with the opportunity to coordinate with ongoing community initiatives. As Asrani put it, “The university and a given community group set the intention for the course—the purpose, the vision, how are we framing inclusion—and then we bring that intention to the students, who bring their own imagination, skills, interests, and inquiries to that framework.” Doonan led the course, in collaboration with Pivot Legal Society and Food Not Bombs, from 2010 to 2013\. Pivot works with people living in poverty in Vancouver, through a combination of public education and advocacy. Food Not Bombs serves free meals to those in need, often made from perfectly good surplus ingredients from grocery stores, millions of tonnes of which end up in the trash each year.[^3] As Doonan explained, this partnership strategy “addressed some of the ethical issues in the work, since \[these organizations are\] already embedded in the community, so students didn’t just parachute in and leave, but really collaborated in an ongoing process.” Some students continue relationships with the community they find, after the course is done. Acknowledging that community isn’t made in a day, Asrani mentioned that social practice must “move at the speed of trust.” At the same time, she expressed how the possibilities of this work today are not necessarily only in the long term or explicitly political, but also in the tangential, temporary, proximate, and ephemeral. 

The first iteration with Pivot, focused on the Red Tent campaign, asked students to engage with homelessness and the displacement of encampments in the lead-up to the 2010 Olympics. Critical in the discussion was Bill C-304 which claimed that affordable housing is a human right—because yes, even in 2010 that was still not a thing.[^4] One student’s project took this on in the form of a performance engagement centred around balloons that read “Bill C-304: Social Housing is a Right,” which were distributed on public transit and served as precursors for interaction, visual affirmations of solidarity, and signposts of social awareness. Doonan also highlighted the YIMBY (“Yes in my backyard!”) campaign where, working again with Pivot, students continued the conversation around housing, this time targeting so-called NIMBYs—people who are outspoken about ensuring that visible signs of oppression and government failure (like encampments) don’t exist in their neighbourhoods. One project involved designing and embedding inserts advertising free coffee in the _Vancouver Sun_, following which the students distributed coffees in cups with sleeves that provided information addressing the misconception that affordable housing decreases adjacent property value and invites crime. In the business district of downtown Vancouver, this act was a cheeky, effective lure as a pretext for holding dialogue. 

Asrani taught the Community Projects course in Autumn 2020, and invited students to pair with posAbilities—a community network that provides services and opportunities to people with developmental disabilities—but also welcomed them to craft individual work targeting their own communities.[^5] Asrani described the challenges of the last year as a unique opportunity to engage in a “hyperlocalism,” where emerging artists could look at their own micro-social spaces in newly intensified ways. One work by Annika Dixon-Reusz involved the solicitation of damaged clothing from a local Facebook “Buy Nothing Group,” where the items were creatively mended and returned to their owners, in gestures of care that used craft as a social glue within a regifting economy. Another work by Tess Snaden involved crocheting personal, whimsical invitations to her neighbours to do body mapping—the practice of filling the drawn line of one’s own silhouette with affective traces of how one feels through colour, line, texture, and text. Snaden then turned these maps into books made of felt, which she distributed to the participants. Not only was this a cathartic experience for her neighbours in isolation, but Snaden also described feeling less alienated after approaching her own proximate community in this intensely intimate way. Asrani discussed the mood of the semester as rich in possibility; unlike entering a social context distant from your own, in the case of working with your neighbours, “You cannot remove yourself from the work.”

As the SPACE program enters a new decade, the question remains as to whether other Canadian institutions will take up this work. Although many art institutions do engage community in myriad ways—and many student practitioners are drawn to community praxis organically—Stewart, Doonan, and Asrani all expressed how the concerted institution of SEAE introduces an alternative lexicon to the institutional body. “It isn’t the language of fine art,” Asrani voiced, indicating that as vocabulary develops, manifestly different routes of practice become visible, and available. This education also asks us to rethink what change looks like—for example, when impact is registered affectively from the inside of community, without needing to legitimate itself to an outside art audience.

As Stewart expressed to me, teaching socially engaged art is also a boon to educators. She highlighted striking similarities between teaching SEAE and doing social-practice work, both of which hinge on models of decentred authorship. “All innovation comes from the faculty,” Stewart indicated. As social practice evolves, its interests become modulated in the face of intensified challenges—around racial injustice, climate disaster, and affordable housing, to name a few pressing examples. When I asked Doonan what she thought SEAE’s priorities should be, she offered an interesting contrast to Asrani’s hyperlocality: “The kinds of systems \[in which\] we live put us into relation with people far away from us. We need to find ways to understand connections in everything we do \[…\] We need to change perception and make manifest social relationships that are not easy to see.” She discussed how in her own work, she is questioning what it means to think about community from the perspective of other-than-human ecology, incorporating rocks, waterways, and invasive species into a social dialogue that can help us think through human and other than-human codependency, as well as the social in an expanded sense. Opening up how we think through social justice via artistic means continues to be critical as the discipline questions itself and pushes its limits. Yet Asrani also lent a point of caution: that the naming and framing of a social conglomerate _as_ a community can intensify the way we structure social division, when not approached with appropriate care. 

While the takeaways from these conversations were many, I was particularly struck by how different the teaching of social practice looks from standard art-educational pedagogy. SEAE looks to form emerging artists first and foremost from the perspective of radical care, interpersonal ethics, and mutual aid. In this sense, it stands directly against the competition fostered not just within the art institution but in the art world writ large. As Asrani expressed, “This work has a larger purpose than just the ego and the self. This is also where there can be a tension with the institution, since the institution looks at work through the lens of critique.” If I were to imagine why SPACE’s success has not inspired other Canadian institutions to follow suit, it would be for exactly this reason: art schools are founded on a model that is exclusive, exclusionary, and individualist—and therefore fundamentally capitalist—a stark reality which has become even more evident in the past few months, in the severe cuts of faculty and long-term staff across Canada. Stewart reflected that institutions become more conservative in times of strife, to which Asrani added, “I think institutions overall value academic resources over embodied knowledge.” We need actors within art institutions who can leverage their position to remake arts education, not just to the benefit of the students of today, but also for the future sustainability of the arts educational institution as a whole. 

Don’t get me wrong. So long as people are using money, artists need to make it—and gallery representation, working alone in the studio, and discovering self-identity are critical steps in becoming an artist. But the inclusion of this alternative paradigm within Canadian art institutions is long overdue. Stewart was proud of the fact that the program she built was a non-major program—meaning students were drawn to the significance of the work and not the legitimacy of its framing—and yet she expressed hope for SPACE to evolve into a master’s stream in the future. While it is clear that the traditions of artists lending creative mutual aid, communicating community value through narrative, and imagining badass radical solutions in a world of dramatic inequality are all alive and well—it is also immensely evident that SEAE points to a transformation on the part of the art institution, too. If socially engaged art has matured into a plethora of forms today which teach us not just how to service people’s needs, but how to articulate our collective aspirations, fears, and desires, SEAE presents an opportunity to foster the development of ethical art workers who lead the way in this future imagining. At a time when art universities in Canada face a wave of lay-offs, course cuts, and other neoliberal developments, SEAE presents the opportunity for us to rearticulate our pedagogical ambitions and to rethink what art education can look like, from the institutional inside out.

[^1]: Emily Carr Institute of Art + Design—initially Vancouver School of Decorative and Applied Arts, founded 1925—gained status as Emily Carr University in 2008\. Susan Stuart helped found the culture and community faculty at that time, where she served as associate dean. It was within the new faculty that SPACE was founded in 2010—a prime example of good timing and institutional leverage in action.
[^2]: Aesthetic judgement can play a smaller role, for example, but also practically individual critiques are substituted for thinking as a group. 
[^3]: According to the National Zero Waste Council, 2.2 million tonnes of edible household food is wasted in Canada each year, while approximately 58 percent of food produced in Canada is wasted. See [lovefoodhatewaste.ca/about/food-waste/](https://lovefoodhatewaste.ca/about/food-waste/) 
[^4]: The bill took until 2017 to be passed—just one of the many failings of the federal government to provide basic support for those who cannot access affordable housing.
[^5]: Asrani is also posAbilities’ first “community artist-in residence,” where she works in an ongoing capacity.

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issue-149-p40-45.pdf

Education

Taking Emily Carr University’s Social Practice + Community Engagement program as a pedagogical case study—having interviewed Susan Stewart, Aaniya Asrani, and Natalie Doonan—Emily Dickson considers socially engaged art education’s contribution to necessary shifts in the field, not only for artists, but for art institutions and other capitalist systems.

Moving at the Speed of Trust: On Teaching Social Practice

Dallas Fellini is a writer, curator, and artist living and working in Tkaronto.

About a year ago, I attended an artist talk hosted by an arts organization dedicated specifically to serving queer artists. After relishing a rich conversation between featured artists of many different identities, one attendee expressed that they couldn’t help but notice a heavy absence of trans women in the artist talk and in the room more generally, and inquired about the organization’s history of engaging trans women artists. While the critique was warranted, it felt overly simplistic to attribute this failure to one artist talk or one arts organization; at that moment, there were no trans artists being shown at the Toronto galleries that I frequented, many of which had programming histories that didn’t include trans women artists at all.

In recent years, I’ve read job postings that explicitly encourage applications from trans people, received emails from cisgender gallery staff with their pronouns in their email signatures, and read exhibition statements that use some variation of the term “women and femmes” to supposedly signal inclusivity of diverse gender identities. While many trans artists have achievements worth celebrating, this institutional inclusivity rarely goes beyond linguistics and appearance-focused actions. We are still in an arts landscape that is desolate in terms of actual trans people being given presentation opportunities—whether in larger institutions, commercial galleries, or even artist-run centres. When trans people _are_ granted access, it’s important to consider which factions are prioritized, how and why they’re supported (or not supported), and the potential of other models of inclusion based in self-determination.

I spoke with three trans women artists who have contributed to the Canadian arts scene over the past decade—Luis De Filippis, Kama La Mackerel, and Kim Ninkuru—each of whom generously shared with me their experiences. We discussed the ways that the arts have failed to include and support trans women, the structural changes that need to be enacted in order to facilitate their inclusion, and the role that community plays in each of their practices. An array of common threads ran through each of our conversations, revealing shared perspectives between a group of artists working in different media, living at different intersections of identity, and practicing in different cities in different stages of their careers.

While the mandates and equity statements of arts organizations communicate a desire to exhibit more marginalized artists, their structures convey another message, only allowing entry to artists who have university degrees, stacked CVs, and the financial security to work for small honoraria and exhibition fees that are far from a living wage. While this reality poses barriers for many marginalized folks, it’s worth mentioning that trans women are disproportionately faced with poverty and barriers to accessing employment, medical care, and education,[^1] leaving many unable to yield to the demands of this system. At the end of the day, basic survival prevails as a priority.

The artists that I spoke with explained this. De Filippis, a Toronto-based filmmaker celebrated for her recent work _For Nonna Anna_, a short film exploring a trans woman’s relationship with her grandmother, offered: “Trans women are just too busy surviving. They’re too busy trying to get through their everyday. It’s really hard to make art when your existence isn’t even being validated \[in terms of identity and basic needs\]—where do you go from there?” If arts institutions have a sincere desire for an improved presence of trans women artists within their programming, they need to rethink conventional approaches. La Mackerel, a Mauritian, Montreal-based artist whose practice spans performance, poetry, and textiles, as well as education and community-focused work, gave an anecdote: “It’s necessary to go beyond tokenism and think of ways in which you can actually empower marginalized communities in the long term. What can you offer, beyond just a show, that can actually be transformative for a career? I think of my relationship to the MAI \[Montréal, arts interculturels\], for example, which is where I’ve been developing my show _ZOM\-FAM_ for the past couple years. They gave me a one-year mentorship program and money that I could use to get whatever training I needed \[in order to produce my show and further my career more generally\]. They actually gave me resources to allow me to empower myself to learn new skills, to grow as an artist. We need more of that kind of engagement. Instead of asking: what will this artist do for us? we should ask: what can we do for the artist? What can the impact be, beyond just a symbolic impact? How can we support this artist long term? How do we create visibility for them? How do we take a chance on them?”

De Filippis mentioned an initiative of their own that is similarly proactive: “On my next project, I’m actively working on a paid trans mentorship that focuses on bringing trans youth who are interested in pursuing a film career onto set. They would be paid for their time, their accommodation, their food. To me, that’s how you make change. You kind of have to make it yourself. Because people don’t often take into account how difficult it is to get on-set experience as a trans person when blindly walking onto any given film set is often not a fun or safe experience. At this point, I only work on the film sets of people who I know and trust. What I’m trying to do with this mentorship is give trans people an opportunity to be on a set that will hopefully be safer for them so that they can go off and continue making their own work, because I want to make sure that my films are not the only trans stories being told.”

In the cases where trans women artists do have the time, energy, and financial stability to make art, they are faced with exclusionary modes of entry and ways of working. Over the past few years, and exponentially in the last year, arts institutions have hastily rushed into long-overdue diversity endeavours, always failing to enact any real change because their focus is fixed on optics rather than self-examination and systemic transformation. Inevitably, the trans people who benefit most often are those who least threaten the predominantly white, cisgender positionality of the institution.[^2] I think of this as trans palatability, a force that has sanctioned the warping of “trans inclusivity” into a somewhat meaningless term, now more accurately representing the selective inclusion of white trans-masculine people and non-binary people who don’t face transmisogyny. La Mackerel offered insight: “While there is more space for trans people in the arts now than there was five years ago, I still question who gets access. The odd trans artists that I’ve seen being given representation are typically white, but also cater to a cis audience and still fall into tropes and narratives that nurture the fantasy of what transness is for this audience. A lot of the art that I’ve seen being given representation is very sensational. There’s still a lot of focus on the body and the transition.”

While works focused on the physiological aspects of transness are often meaningful for trans artists and trans viewers alike, when this is the only type of trans representation offered, it normalizes an institutional expectation that pigeonholes artists into performing their identity and trauma. De Filippis spoke to what factors might be perpetuating this phenomenon: “There just aren’t trans people in gatekeeping positions. And if there is a trans person then… it’s just one person, and one person cannot decide what the trans experience is. If you’re really interested in getting the trans perspective or talking to the trans community, make sure you’re talking to more than one person, make sure you’re getting more than one experience.” 

As a trans-masculine non-binary person, I also feel confident that there is a gender-essentialist rhetoric implicated in space-making efforts for trans people who are exempt from transmisogyny—who are covertly seen as less threatening to cisnormativity than trans women and trans-feminine people. Illustratively, I’ve found myself invited to events in the arts meant specifically for women, when “woman” is an identity that I explicitly identify outside of. Meanwhile, I’ve found that trans women are almost always glaringly absent from these “women-centred” events, programs, and exhibitions, leading me to ask: what is it that makes cisgender people assume that I belong at these events more than my trans women peers? My invitation to these events (which I always decline) is somehow defended as inclusive feminism, when in reality it represents biological-essentialist perspectives and thinly veiled transmisogyny that runs rampant in supposedly progressive arts spaces.

These kinds of biases—however un/conscious—bring to mind the discrimination and hostility that trans women face on an interpersonal level. It’s worth mentioning that such experiences vary greatly from person to person, and that factors like race and the politics of gender presentation have a large influence on how these experiences unfold and who they affect most. Interpersonal discrimination creates barriers that often aren’t properly factored into policy-driven inclusion and diversity initiatives. To many cis-centric organizations, once a trans person is offered an exhibition, invited to be a panelist, or given virtually any other opportunity, the work of the organization is done. The artists I spoke with recounted upsetting but unsurprising experiences of interpersonal transphobia and hostility encountered at all levels of arts organizations.

Ninkuru, a Toronto-based performance artist, creates work that explores Afrofuturism, her relationship to femininity as a Black trans woman, and her positionality within spaces both physical and virtual. She shared: “I think that it takes people by surprise when I’m assertive about what I want, what I need, what I will not do, and what I need done. Sometimes people respond to my assertiveness well and I appreciate that. But other times, people will respond to me as if they believe I should be thankful that they’re even giving me an opportunity, and I’m just not that girl. I’m not the girl who is thankful because you gave her a little bit of the food off of your plate. You didn’t give me a plate to go to the buffet and serve myself. I won’t kneel down, kiss your feet, and bow to you to thank you. When people don’t receive that kind of reverence from me it shocks them, and they retaliate by being snappy, mean, and snarky. A lot of people have these misconceptions about how Black trans women specifically should move in the world and how grateful we should be just to draw a breath. It’s very interesting, especially right now in the art world, because trans people are included really performatively, just to fill a quota or gain good publicity from that association. I’ve had experiences where cis women have invited me into a space but didn’t do any of the prior work necessary for that space to be safe for me. When I actually enter \[it\], I end up being the target of microaggressions because they haven’t asked questions about the cis people who they keep around them. They aren’t making sure that those spaces are safe because it doesn’t impact them. They don’t even consider it until I am already in the space, and then it’s too late. They should have done that work a year ago, and that would have left enough time to make mistakes and amend them and learn from those mistakes. But now they have to cram all of those experiences and knowledge into the one time that they invited me to be in the space.”

As many marginalized communities do, trans women artists have moved to create their own spaces within their communities. Many of trans women’s contributions to the arts happen outside of galleries; for example, La Mackerel performs at grassroots, underground venues, Ninkuru shares and archives her performances online, and many of the other Canadian trans women or trans-feminine artists I admire—like Nina Arsenault, Mirha-Soleil Ross, Ravyn Wngz, Sybil Lamb, James Knott—have created performance works that do not necessarily cater to gallery formats. Arts practices that are more community-oriented, which are often dubbed “outsider art” by the contemporary art world and largely considered unsaleable, are less likely to be welcomed into the gallery. Institutions are deeply tied up in classist, exclusionist frameworks of valuing artwork, and yet feign shock when marginalized communities are unable to access the material resources, formal education, and thus theory-speak and elitist aesthetics necessary to achieve conventional ideas of success. Whether or not an artwork conforms to these norms dictates in large part who benefits from inclusion efforts. What the artwork looks like, how it operates, and how its intelligence is understood become conditions of participation. Marginalized artists who make work that doesn’t fit into these bourgeois confines are only considered if they are willing to perform their trauma, by putting forward work that is excessively biographical or that mines emotionally difficult experiences. It is no surprise that some trans women artists have turned away from striving to gain institutional recognition and instead focused their energy into community care. 

In our conversation, Ninkuru expanded on how a community-oriented practice serves her as an artist: “I feel very tender and soft when I share my art with my community, compared to how guarded I feel when I share my work on a stage in an institution for people who aren’t my community. That’s why I slowly started transitioning more into video performance and away from live onstage performance, because there are boundaries that I did not want the audience to cross. It didn’t feel good anymore, so I felt that I had to add the extra layer of protection of being on video. It gives me a level of separation from the audience that makes it a lot safer for me. Institutions just don’t make me feel safe, which has made for a very interesting shift in my artistic expression. Creating video performances is very fun for me, but it wouldn’t have happened had I not started feeling a little bit unsafe or uncomfortable onstage in an institution.”

La Mackerel also spoke to this experience of creating solace and safety in community: “I did not start in the institutions—I think that is an important part of my history and my practice. I emerged in the Montreal art scene from 2012, 2013 onward. I remember moving to Montreal and looking for grassroots queer spaces that would be more radical, but then realizing that all of them were predominantly white and cis. For the first few years, my practice took place in spaces that I created myself, or that I created with other queer trans people of color; GENDER B(L)ENDER, a queer open mic \[for all forms of performance art, from spoken word to drag\] that I ran in Montreal for five years, became the safe space. It was _the_ only space in Montreal where you would walk in and see a Black trans woman running the show. My practice really emerged as a grassroots, DIY practice, because that was the only way to actually create a space that felt safe for me, as a Black trans-feminine person in particular. And then once I created that space for myself, I couldn’t be the only one who’s performing, so it became about creating that space for other people like me, because if I needed it that means that we all feel that need. I’m a self-taught artist who didn’t have a lot of mentorship or support and there’s just so much that I had to figure out on my own, being a trans racialized immigrant. I want to be able to give that back and to be able to create a space of safety and to just bear witness and hold somebody else’s story, because I think that can be so transformative. In our community there are a lot of mental-health issues, a lot of grief, a lot of dying. I really want to be able to bring more than that to our communities, because we deserve better.”

Community-oriented spaces built by trans women, like GENDER B(L)ENDER, hold a profound capacity to nurture and prioritize trans artistic practices in all their multiplicity, a capacity that is still not being fulfilled elsewhere. De Filippis, La Mackerel, and Ninkuru shared insights and experiences with me that offer lots of context to the critique that was indirectly communicated by an attendee at the artist talk I attended a year ago: that there is a profound lack of presentation opportunities being afforded to trans women artists. This critique has an obvious rebuttal: perhaps there simply aren’t any, or enough, artists within this identity category to be programmed. While this rebuttal might absolve an institution of culpability for their exclusion of trans women artists, it’s plainly untrue—there are practicing trans women artists in every major Canadian city.[^3] Such an alibi points to a failure on an institutional level, wherein organizations are either not monitoring the absences in their programming and/or not actively seeking out trans women artists, and/or when seeking these artists out, doing so in the wrong places. While community-oriented spaces where trans women artists can thrive continue to emerge, community arts and outsider arts are systematically devalued as undeserving of inclusion in the contemporary art gallery, perpetuating a pattern of trans women artists being treated as invisible. In actuality, these artists have been consequential contributors and leaders in Canadian arts communities for decades, and continue to shape the course of contemporary art today. 

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Gender

Critique

Having interviewed the artists Luis De Filippis, Kama La Mackerel, and Kim Ninkuru, Dallas Fellini writes about the relative absence of trans women in the Canadian art world, speculating about the reasons behind it (despite moves towards equity), and going on to highlight some of the spaces trans folk have made for themselves.

Ongoing Legacies of Transmisogyny


Erica N. Cardwell is a writer, critic, and educator currently based in Toronto. She is the recipient of a 2021 Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant. Her writing has appeared in _ARTS.BLACK_, _Art in America_, _Frieze_, _BOMB_, _The Believer_, _The Brooklyn Rail_, _C Magazine_, _Studio Magazine_, and other publications. She is Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Toronto Scarborough and a Terra Foundation Research Fellow for _Threewalls_, a Chicago-based arts organization. Her book, _Wrong Is Not My Name: Notes on (Black) Art_ will be published by _The Feminist Press_ in March 2024.


From her home studio, visual artist and fellow Natalie Wood clearly recalls the palpable tone of the Wildseed Black Arts Fellowship’s first virtual gathering. “We looked at all the little squares,” she says, noting the now-ubiquitous gallery view of Zoom meetings. “Everyone was Black. It was a visceral moment. I felt that. I know a number of the other artists felt the same way. It \[is\] absolutely rare where you’re seeing yourself reflected.”

While the desire for community—a sense of collective belonging—involves the universal need to feel and be seen, meaningful connection is often rooted in the simplistic beauty of seeing one’s own likeness. The fellowship fulfils this complex yearning with tremendous intent. Following its inaugural 2019 installment, which saw artists Kara Springer, Kosisochukwu Nnebe, and Kim Ninkuru working together at the Wildseed Centre, this recent iteration represents a significant expansion. Over 20 months, 13 Black Canadian artists from a wide range of disciplines undertake seven distinct residencies led by an array of visual artists, writers, and other practitioners—including but not limited to Curtis Talwst Santiago and co-founder of the Movement for Black Lives, author and activist, Patrisse Cullors. Each residency will touch upon specific areas of creative practice and inquiry, such as drawing sessions and writing workshops, as well as fundamental lectures on how visual art is integral to social justice movement work. For example, Black Arts Fellowship coordinator, Mila Natasha Mendez, describes a recent session wherein Deaf advocate and educator Ashlea Hayes led the fellows in a practice of embodied storytelling where they reinterpreted a Black folk tale without words, using the space and props around them. Additionally, disabled poet and community activist Leroy Moore provided powerful lectures on Black disabled ancestors, art history, and movements worldwide.

At the heart of this program are the values and imperatives of Black Lives Matter (BLM) – Toronto which upholds art and visual culture as a crucial means for engaging communities around anti-racist resistance and systemic reform. The Wildseed Centre was formed out of these efforts and officially opened in 2020, just before the Toronto lockdown, as an artist-run centre for Black creatives to work alongside one another. Rooted in principles of immortality and transformation found in Octavia Butler’s 1980 novel _Wild Seed_, the centre was founded “to be fertile ground for \[B\]lack creativity and organizing.” Around late 2019, the board of prominent “artivists” who co-founded BLM – Toronto—including Syrus Marcus Ware, Rodney Diverlus, Ravyn Ariah Wngz, and others—started to brainstorm ways to make their space available for the Black Canadian arts community. In a virtual interview, Ware also cited the public lynching of George Floyd and subsequent uprisings as intensifying the charge for what would become the fellowship. “The summer uprisings fuelled our fire to do this work \[…\] It grew out of this desire to bring together artists who are interested in creative practice and activism \[…\] to build the network of care and support that could fuel future collaborations and innovations.” In other words, the passion and inertia from this global moment defined a shift in the board’s thinking about their physical space to a more conceptual—and eventually virtual—one. During the pandemic, community engagement has become an untenable prospect somewhat relegated to the unforeseeable future. Despite this, the Black Arts Fellowship has managed an impressive switch to virtual space, all while upholding their mission.

The function of political art is a perpetual question within the art world. In both name and principle, it often signals to the viewer that in order to see value in the work, they necessarily have to forsake aesthetic considerations, thus reducing it down to intention. Quite inevitably, Black artists have been historically tasked to make meaning amid an onslaught of racist, violent, and disparaging attacks to our civil and human rights. Our responses are often distilled and reproduced as blueprints for macro-level movement building despite scant professional opportunities or critical engagement throughout entire careers. The fellowship counters this colonial vestige by arranging regular opportunities for dialogue, encouraging each artist to use the program for visioning, self-study, and consciousness-raising. Me Time considers this to be one of the radical approaches of the fellowship: that the concept of “political art” is positioned as a fundamental framework for the artists, rather than as a scrim through which audiences must filter their work. “Very early on, we realized that just us being together was the work.” 

When I interviewed the DJ and producer from her home, Me Time candidly described the “identity crisis” the pandemic has inflicted upon her life. It has been over a year since her last in-person event. Given that the energy and controlled chaos of interactive in-person events is central to her creative process, Me Time has had to completely reshape her practice. She found Wildseed to radically address this crisis with a conscientious and liberating solution: no deliverables. Their primary objective, as she understood it, was focused on cultivating and preserving the collective imagination of the fellows. Currently Me Time is working on a “pre-COVID” commission called _R.A.V.E. (Real Audio-Visual Experience)_, an immersive theatre performance that encourages audience interaction with the environment, props, and actors. In a bit of foreshadowing, Me Time developed the premise for _R.A.V.E._ as “a world with no dance floors, and \[…\] ultimate isolation.” The performance was intended to take place in a large public venue, but she’s planning for alternative presentations as lockdown measures persist. 

According to the Wildseed fellows, the program’s inclusive framework is all-encompassing, including the application process. Me Time made a video for her application, rather than writing a lengthy artist statement or proposal essay, seeing the organization’s openness to this as an example of “meeting us where we are at.” Any problematic and misguided skepticism or doubt about the volume of talent amongst BIPOC creatives (often flippantly dismissed as mere “identity politics”) is swiftly curtailed by the fact that there were more than 75 applications. Based on this demand, and after making their final selections for the 13 funded fellows, the board created five free “enrichment sessions” led by Wildseed board members for the top 26 applicants, holding fast to their intention of inspiring and extending the network of emerging Black artists. In thinking about the competitive, high-stakes structures of most fellowship programs, this model signals a radically new and refreshing departure in general, but especially for Black artists who are typically vying for the same positions within the margins. Muralist and painter Elicser Elliott perceives the fellowship as “levelling the playing field.”

In a groundbreaking move, the program is also teaching Black ASL to the fellows; as one of the two Deaf artists in the fellowship, Natasha “Courage” Bacchus considers the weekly classes to be proof of a sincere dedication toward inclusion. In my virtual interview with the actress, conducted with the support of ASL interpreter Marcia Adolphe, Courage shared the cultural disconnects that Deaf people often face. “I use a visual language. I always wanted to connect with the Caribbean Black community, but because of the bullying and the marginalization, \[I was\] not able to communicate and have access. I always felt that I wasn’t a part of the Caribbean Black community.” It’s another example of how the program has been successful in identifying factors that keep Black folks alienated from _each other_.

Children’s book author Janine Carrington continues to marvel at the feelings of centrality this fellowship has created within her. “Number one: it’s definitely a platform for us, a space where you feel important \[and\] you’re a main contributor, one of the stars of this show. That is not normal for Black Canadian artists—you are usually on the fringe.” In her current book project, an illustrated YA novel called _Tropicahlia_ centred on climate justice, two sisters who live close to the equator set out on “an epic journey to stop the destruction of their land, culture, and people” and, in turn, discover their true power. The manuscript is on track to be finished by the end of the year, and Carrington hopes that the story will one day be made into a movie. 

As for Wood, she opened her solo show “Exordium” at Paul Petro Contemporary Art in Toronto earlier this year, which includes encaustic paintings, wearable performance pieces, and a series of works on Mylar. One stand-out image is _Packed in Blue_, from the series _Accounting_ (2020), which depicts the Blue Devil archetype from Caribbean folklore, which inspires you to “tear up the social contract.” This framework for resistance is at the heart of her Blue Devil Posse, a QTBIPOC political performance group whose mandate is to tap into “different imaginations for the Black body in the world.” Prior to the pandemic, they performed as a group at Pride, Caribana, and other public events. Her research on Caribbean archetypes will continue during the fellowship with the support of a Canada Council grant. Wood is also hoping to use the studio at Wildseed Centre—which is being made available to one artist at a time—to return to her encaustic practice for the first time in more than a decade. As she mused about the future, the artist spoke with both passion and urgency. “I feel like I’ve been activated, and it feels like my ancestors have been activated, too, like \[asking me\] ‘What are you doing with your time?’ I’ve got to respond to the now.” Elliott agrees: “I’ve been really feeling the pressure of making it my duty to do work—if it’s on the streets or in a \[museum\]—to educate and inform.” Given that he lives in his studio, the pandemic hasn’t affected his creative practice on that level of access. However, like many of his peers, the community connection has been a much-needed source of inspiration. Along with experimentation with digital prints, Elliott is preparing a body of work for the City of Toronto’s “Year of Public Art.” 

Considering the already groundbreaking impact of this program, which is only a few months in, the Black Arts Fellowship has mostly flown under the radar. As a way to embed community in institutions, its framework should be replicated and innovated upon. At the time of writing, we are nearing the anniversary of the global protests against state-sanctioned violence; what remains to be seen is if the organizations who “committed to making a shift” had a serious commitment toward marked change. This will require a decentralization of whiteness and its cultural framings, tipping the scales in favor of rarely recognized Black creatives.

What remains timeless is the work being done from within communities. The Wildseed Black Arts Fellowship has modelled a dynamic program that is sensitive to each fellow’s needs and intent on world-building, proving that if the dominant culture will not make space, we have always been exceptionally good at building our own.

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Residencies

Erica Cardwell writes about The Wildseed Black Arts Fellowship, an interdisciplinary, 20-month long journey spearheaded by Black Lives Matter – Toronto. Having spoken with a number of the program’s participants and administrators, she unearths its intentions and impacts—inspiring ideas about how to design more thoughtful, holistic frameworks.

Wildseed: A Fellowship Model by and for Black Creatives

Emily Laurent Henderson is a Kalaaleq (Greenlandic) and settler writer based in Toronto who currently serves as the Executive Assistant for the Indigenous Curatorial Collective.

The first place I encountered a fraction of the goliath that is the Digital Indigenous Democracy (DID) project from Igloolik-based media collective Isuma Productions was in Venice in 2019\. It seems counter-intuitive that my first glimpse into an ongoing digital intervention into mining development on Inuit homelands would be so far away from those homelands, especially as an Inuk myself. While representing Canada at the Biennale that year, one of the things they screened was _My Father’s Land (Ataatama Nunanga)_ (2012), which comprises footage of the surrounding lands of filmmaker and Isuma co-founder Zacharias Kunuk’s home community of Igloolik from 1995 onward, interspersed with his testimony at the Nunavut Impact Review Board (NIRB) in 2012\. Developed as a response to the proposed Baffinland Mary River iron ore mine, the film is just one component of a sprawling community-focused media archive regarding the development of the mine near the communities of Igloolik and Mittimatalik (Pond Inlet) which Isuma has been striving to make as accessible as possible to Inuit living in the region.

Community consultations with Indigenous communities regarding extractive developments that will affect the health of the surrounding populations have been fraught across the country, with communities and corporations having differing ideas on what constitutes adequate consultation. Resource extraction on Indigenous land is always led with tactics of colonial entitlement that lack respect and consideration for those who live on and take care of the land. Indigenous peoples have continually adapted their responses to this experience.

It is in the spirit of independent media distribution that Isuma has been able to shape community involvement in the mine’s development and recent proposed expansion. NIRB took on the community and environmental impact review process and consultations, and Isuma founded the DID project to share relevant information and content as broadly as possible, beginning first with Inuktitut-language radio broadcasts in 2012\. During the early days of the NIRB consultations, Isuma combined their work and content to create a multimedia human rights impact assessment that included radio, film, social media, and television and contracted the help of human rights lawyer Lloyd Lipsett to represent the interests of Inuit during the hearings. It was intentionally designed to be reflective of \_aajiiqatigiingniq\_—an Inuit method for consensus-based decision making, which in this case invited as many Inuit voices as possible through whichever medium was most accessible to them. Over time, the DID project expanded to include video testimonials from Inuit, which could be conducted entirely in Inuktitut, and provided participants the option to self-tape and upload their own videos. The collective has also focused on making Inuit-specific media available to northerners, including through the installation of media players across the territory of Nunavut to address the lack of access to high-speed internet.

Isuma broadcasted the NIRB hearings for the current proposed expansion of the Mary River Mine on Uvagut TV, Canada’s first Inuktut channel, from January 25 to February 6\. This development would double iron ore output from 6 million to 12 million tonnes per year, and build a 100-km railway to cart the product to sea. The railway has proven especially controversial, with Inuit hunters asserting it will scare away the caribou herds they rely on. It was not until hunters blockaded the airstrip to access the Mary River Mine site in early February 2021—signalling the culmination of frustrations with the NIRB processes in which Inuit stating their concerns had not been adequately heard—that I and many who make up the southern Inuit diaspora began to grasp the full extent of the situation and the role the DID has played throughout. Isuma documents and shares this process not only to impel community involvement, but also to communicate Inuit perspectives and values to outsiders. Petitions and images of iron ore dust that had polluted sea ice, fishing, and hunting sites circulated on social media, particularly from the Facebook page “Respect Inuit or Leave.” Also at this time, Isuma shared testimonials on the radio and through their website. Watching from Toronto using the internet, I participated and observed as my community members and friends rallied against the Baffinland expansion, while my own family responded to parallel developments on our homelands of west Greenland.

Near the community of Narsaq, Greenland, Inuit have been responding in similar ways to land being made available to a uranium mine that poses the risk of radioactive contamination. At the time of writing this article in spring 2021, community consultation has effectively failed and Inuit have been forced to take initiative against the mine in a remarkably similar way to Isuma’s. Artist and traditional tattooist Paninnguaq Lind Jensen spent the early spring of 2021 travelling the southwest coast of Greenland collecting testimonies and stories from Inuit that would be affected by the mining, all to be included in the upcoming documentary _White Paper_ (2021). Much like Inuit in Canada, the sense of frustration about and silencing from the extractive industry has been overwhelming, and community-produced media has been born out of necessity to address these uneven power dynamics.

Isuma’s multifaceted practice, the DID project, and films such as _White Paper_ represent more than protest—they are assertions of sovereignty. Across the globe, Indigenous communities are responding to extractivist development on their lands in ways that reflect their own values and ways of knowing, rather than remaining confined to corporate or federal reviews or impact reports—like the Tseil-Waututh Nation did in 2016 by releasing their own independent environmental impact review of the Trans Mountain Pipeline expansion. The DID project centres not only Inuktut, but also an Inuit worldview, relationships to the land, knowledge of place, and the values that have upheld Inuit life and society for generations.

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Indigenous

Mass media

Environment

Emily Laurent Henderson explores how, alongside their filmmaking practice, Isuma has been a major proponent of media accessibility across Nunavut, most recently through their Digital Indigenous Democracy project which has created awareness of and facilitated responses to the Baffinland Mary River iron ore mine near Igloolik and Mittimatalik.

Aajiiqatigiingniq: Isuma’s Digital Indigenous Democracy Project

Kite is an Oglala Lakota performance artist, visual artist, and composer, concerned with contemporary Lakota ontologies through research-creation, computational media, and performance practice.

Alisha B. Wormsley is an interdisciplinary artist and cultural producer. Her work is about collective memory and the synchronicity of time, specifically through the stories of women of colour. 

##### Recently, we have seen uprisings, movements that form in the virtual space and flow over into the real world. We witnessed a global reckoning on misogynistic politics and white supremacy. We saw people unite and ideas formed. But how can we even imagine a future without taking the time to collectively dream?

In 2020, the two of us began a project to bring Black and Indigenous artists together through a practice of collective dreaming and healing work—as an artistic and activist practice, to strengthen communities, and as a revolutionary act. In October 2020, we gathered with 18 Black and Indigenous artists for a whole day over the internet to nap and dream. We met with good intentions, arranging beforehand for dreaming herbs to be sent to each participant, as well as providing funds for a long-distance shared meal. We began with offerings, groundings, and prayers. We watched Skawennati’s film _She Falls for Ages_ (2017),[^1] which emerges out of her own Indigenous futuring practice. We made our teas and spent a good long time introducing ourselves, our work, and our ancestors. We had the honour of being led into rest by The Nap Bishop, Tricia Hersey.[^2] We began to imagine a future where our needs were met and our communities’ needs were met.

Participant Aline Baiana told us, “We were in this beautiful group of people, some of them never talked to each other before, never seen each other before. We connected in this wave and we were sharing all these feelings and this vibration of this potential of a future \[…\] we just survive most of the time, and struggle, and find out how to answer things at this moment, and never have time to project into the future.”[^3]

In an attempt to mirror the non-linear logic of dreaming, the following isn’t intended to be read as a dialogue, but rather a collage of thinking, becoming, speaking, and dreaming—not across from but next to and with each other. You are invited to read this piece lying down, imagine these voices next to you, and use this conversation as a starting point for the dreaming exercise that follows.

---

**KITE**: We reflected aloud on abundance—a value I am reminded about from my Hawai‘ian colleagues—and imagined future worlds as abundant and giving.[^4] When I see a herd of bison, I am reminded that the abundance already exists, but that it is the way in which we distribute resources that creates starvation. 

I do not want to imagine the future from a place of scarcity because it is so easy to be full of terror: scarcity in resources, scarcity in funding, scarcity in rest. It is difficult for many people in my community and in my family to dream or to rest because they do not have basic human rights. It is difficult to allow myself to dream of the future when I feel it is unfair to those who cannot.

**ALISHA B. WORMSLEY**: I want to say, “There are Black people in the future.” I give that language to other people and I ask them to replicate it and keep it going. So now there are Black people in the future; we can relax a little bit and think about what that future is going to be. Creating spaces where Black and Brown women can dream, think, speak collectively, and remember our ancestral technology is the aim of my work.

**K**: Since 2017, I have worked with the Initiative for Indigenous Futures as a research assistant and more recently as a global coordinator for the position paper on “Indigenous Protocols and Artificial Intelligence Position Paper.” Through this work, I have learned an Indigenous-led practice of futuring, where we imagine the future at least seven generations forward, and have come to deepen my understanding of the necessity to centre the non-human. Lakota ontologies teach us that humans are not as intelligent or as wise as our non-human kin. We can look toward beings such as the bison that feed us and clothe us, and stones which have guided and will guide us for millennia. Much of my artwork and research now concerns artificial intelligence ethics, machine learning, and the possibilities of listening with, through, and beyond materials such as stones and wearable computers— devices which are currently made of arrangements of melted stones. Lakota ontologies include the understanding that some stones have volition and animacy, choosing to communicate with humans. A state of dreaming is a place where I can begin to move knowledge from the non-human to the human realm.

**ABW**: A mentor told me: the universe does not judge. Part of the oppressor’s plan to take away and limit our languages and ways of seeing things was to limit what needs to be manifested. A tool of the oppressor is for us not to be planning, not to be dreaming. In this current labour force, in this slave model, we are not sleeping and not dreaming. In the first workshop I did with The Nap Ministry, Hersey explained that her dad told her to think about all the ways we are oppressed, all the ways we were meant to be oppressed, and then do the opposite. We are not supposed to dream, so there must be extreme power there. 

Baiana reflected to us, “This dreaming workshop is \[…\] not in relation to whiteness, not responding to whiteness. It is Indigenous and Black folks thinking of our future together. We need the community to survive.” 

**K**: It is my responsibility to do what I can with the dreams and the materials that I have been given. When I dream vividly, I understand it as a story, which I then retell myself constantly. Each dream is a little vision I have been gifted, which I can stretch out over the course of my entire life, revisiting it again and again. That mechanism is the technology. Technology is so old. Just as our languages are linguistic technology, our dreams help us create vortexes to communicate with the other side. 

We can move past mining materials to build physical computing devices which store artificial intelligences. Instead, we are going to have AI elders that reflect our Indigenous diversity: biocomputers, which use DNA and proteins to create digital computation.[^5] All our Indigenous ontologies will have the capacity to make these new technologies so every community can decide what it values, what data they want to keep, and who is compensated. It is going to happen, and that is the most optimistic I can be about the future—that we are going to emerge from this era of geological extraction for computational materials and use Indigenous relationships with human and non-human beings to develop ethical biocomputing. 

Our relationships are our technologies and they are already with us. Lakota prophet Black Elk speaks of the future: “I see the sacred hoop of my people, it is one of many hoops which make one circle.”

**ABW**: It is a white supremacist myth that Black and Indigenous people did not maintain advanced technology before Western colonialism. As you’re saying, we do not have to evolve toward new technologies but rather remember traditional technologies, of which dreaming is just one. 

In the workshop, we spent a lot of time talking about grief. Hersey told us that we had to grieve first. We were hand in hand with the ancestors, asking them to guide our dreaming, but the first step was to grieve them and the trauma that we had all experienced. Ancestral memory, glossed over by many who think it’s a myth, is a reality. 

**K**: In Lakota thought, a _Kapemni_, or twisting vortex, represents our connection to the other world, the stars, and the people in the stars. Our teachings tell us that tipi are a microcosm of our ceremonial relationship with the universe. Every time we do a ceremony creating this twisting vortex, I hope those on the other side are mirroring our exact ceremony. I imagine, when we collec – tively dream together, that up in the stars the same number of our ancestors gather above us to dream with us, rest with us, because as hard as we are working, they are working harder. Perhaps our ancestors need a rest too. 

The _Kapemni_ always reminds me of Minkowski’s light cone, a mathematical model mapping the distance a flash of light can travel in the universe. The possibilities of our current model of knowability limit us. I want to step out of the light cone, into the darkness.

**ABW**: The darkness, the void: there, it’s possible to speak or rest with the ancestors. In the ’20s and ’30s, Zora Neale Hurston recorded mostly Black women in the rural South speaking in tongues in spiritual churches, home churches, field churches. While some people may say it is gibberish, speaking in tongues is a heightened spiritual state. In those recordings—taken 400 years after the first enslaved Africans were brought into the US and forced not to speak their language—she found traces of African dialects. Many generations had passed with the languages still in the consciousness, still with a connection to Africa, to the motherland. The ancestors are here. Speaking to us in their own tongues. And in this void, this darkness, we can hear them without limitations of language or other codes. 

I saw that the inheritance of language from generations past was real within my people, and that’s where time collapsed. I started thinking about overlaps. I travelled a lot as a young person—to the Caribbean and South America—to paint murals, and I would see collapsing time. I would see many similarities between the women there and my grandmothers: the herbs they used, the way they cleaned their houses, the way they nurtured their families, the way they took care of their altars. Even though both my grandmothers are Christians, they still had ancestral altars in their houses. They didn’t have altars to saints with crosses for Eucharist; they had altars to their dead relatives and Black angels. They fed them offerings of the things they loved in this realm. They honoured them with representations of their accomplishments and struggles. They still practice this sacred way, with that consciousness still there.

We have so much power. If you can tap into a language that was taken away from you and your ancestors for 400 years, then what else could you do? You are limitless. If you could get beyond the limitations imposed by white men, then what could you do? How can you communicate beyond? 

As Black and Brown women, we are fighting for our own liberation and we are fighting for everyone else’s liberation and that is incredible. As an artist, I try to create situations where people can relax, meditate, be without limitations. Our collective consciousness can change worlds. We can time travel collectively, speak telepathically. We, ourselves, are the most advanced technology. Many of my artworks are concerned with memory, trying to tap into the technology that is our bodies. During our dreaming, I felt that different source of power.

**K**: This workshop is an artwork. Perhaps akin to composing music, we composed this performative, collective, existential dream world. We gave gifts to each other, where the act of giving was enough.[^6] Dreaming is difficult, complex, and generative. Dreaming values the unknowable over the knowable. Dreaming makes new knowledge. Dreaming is the act of making art.[^7] Art is the translation of dreams. Collective dreaming is the concentration of our dreams, enhancing their power. When we as a collective make something this sacred, dreaming feels like a form of resistance.

**Resting at Home: Beginning to Dream**

We want to share this activity with you. You can think about it, or you can write it. 

How do we begin to dream? What is in your space? How can you access a safe space? How do you find ways to actually rest? While we have a lot of things to move through in terms of our relationships with each other as cultures, as races, as people, we want to step beyond that, just to try to dream first. What brings you joy? We’ll use that joy to time travel. Maybe joy is not always accessible. Mourning can also be a transcendent state, wherein joy and pain link through grieving, wherein the separation between this world and beyond is thin. Perhaps you need to time travel far in the future. Go as far you need to. No matter how many millennia it takes, we will go there.

_Let’s begin. Let’s take a deep breath in, let’s fill our body up with all this beautiful energy around us and let’s exhale all of the tension and stress in your body and inhale the love and compassion that surrounds you and exhale all the fear and doubt that limits you. And one last time, we’re going to inhale love and courage, strength, and exhale love, exhale all that beautiful energy back out into the universe. Inhale and exhale, you go even deeper. You are just surrounded by beautiful blackness and now in the beautiful blackness, you are now floating. You are no longer in the waters, but you are now in the universe, the beautiful place we call space, surrounded by all this wonderful darkness. You’re home, you are in a safe place and as you float, you get closer, you realize this is the star Sirius, the centre of our universe. And as you get closer, you feel a rhythm before you hear it. You can feel the sound vibration moving through your body, as if it’s healing every single part of you._

_That is Drexciya[^8] calling you, calling you home._

_You are searching for the great cosmic mother._ 

_You are the mother._ [^9] 

[^1]: Skawennati describes her machinima _She Falls for Ages_ (2017) as a “sci-fi retelling of the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) creation story [that] reimagines Sky World as a futuristic, utopic space and Sky Woman as a brave astronaut and world-builder.” See www.skawennati.com/SheFallsForAges/
[^2]: Tricia Hersey refers to herself as The Nap Bishop and advocates for the importance of rest as a racial- and social-justice issue.
[^3]: Aline Baiana, Alisha B. Wormsley, and Kite were in discussion on October 31, 2020, during the roundtable and workshop “Afro-Indigenous Futures – Reflections on (post-) colonial pasts, presents and futures” through the Goethe-Institut.
[^4]: Kamuela Enos, “Working collectively to restore ancestral abundance,” TEDxManoa, October 28, 2013, YouTube video, 16 min, www.youtube.com/watch?v=w8iou8Rchqc
[^5]: See The Indigenous Protocol and Artificial Intelligence (A.I.) Working Group, “Indigenous Protocol and Artificial Intelligence,” Position Paper, Honolulu, Hawaiʻi, January 2020, https://spectrum.library.concordia.ca/986506/7/Indigenous_Protocol_and_AI_2020.pdf
[^6]:This thinking draws from Nadia Myre’s “The Scar Project” on the ethics of collaborative art-making.
[^7]: A concept in many cultures, but seen in the Double Woman Cult in Lakota culture.
[^8]: Drexciya is an underwater world, similar to Atlantis, created by pregnant women who were thrown off of slave ships. It was conceived by an electronic music duo from Detroit that also calls itself Drexciya.
[^9]: Written by Ingrid LaFleur, collaborator on Children of NAN: Mothership (2019).


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Technology

Medicine

In this collaboratively written feature which attempts to mirror the non-linear logics of dreaming, artists Kite and Alisha B. Wormsley reflect on the importance of rest, acknowledging that “in this current labour force \[…\] we are not sleeping and not dreaming,” concluding that “there must be extreme power there.” 

An Invitation for Black and Indigenous Artists to Dream

Letter

Rosemary Flutur is a writer living in Tio’tià:ke/Mooniyang/Montreal. 

Karina Roman Justo is an emerging writer, researcher, and educator whose practice focuses on decolonial theories. She is currently an MA Art History candidate at Concordia University.

##### Dear C,

My mind’s been on one lately, layering and repeating thoughts like a polyphonic refrain of obsession. Thankfully good writing is a mitigator: countering the feverish chorus of opinions and observations, it can quiet down what’s inside me. Good writing gains my attention without raising its voice at all. It doesn’t prevaricate, is radical without toil and trenchant without pretense. The Greeks already have a word for what I’m trying to describe, by the way: _parrhesia_, which means to speak freely, frankly, and without fear. It’s also what characterizes Johanna Hedva’s potent “Soft Blues,” which is one of the best essays I’ve read in a while. Where other writers might withhold personal detail, or generalize enough to reach an abstract truth so everyone (men) can understand, Hedva splays themself out. It’s inspiring and galvanizing to read. For example, the same day I read it I considered not abetting my depression and maybe writing, which was something I hadn’t done in forever and which is woefully mandatory for my sanity; the longer I don’t write, the more choked I get. As I did, driven by Hedva’s words, I evinced personal details from my recesses: that over the years, there have been many men whose touches I have encouraged, and how most of those embraces left me feeling more alone than if I hadn’t been touched at all. That in the last year, breaking the cycle of cis male partnership and embracing my latent queerness, I’ve had to redefine who it is that I want to touch me. That I spent years swirling in and about multiple pathologies, guided and blighted by them, until the ritual breakdown. Madness is insurrectionary, indeed. It broke my world for me to reformulate it. I needed the reminder, which Hedva imparted: one of potential, of possibility. All of my breakdowns led me to here, now, where I no longer trust the society I live in but instead trust the beauty and desperation of the people that inhabit the same fucked up world. Enmeshed and interdependent, like Hedva writes, in a world that tries to claim we’re not. Hedva’s essay is an affirmation and also a prompt: to keep breaking the world. We’re never alone in doing it.

##### Rosemary Flutur

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##### Dear C Mag,

During the past year I have been concerned about how notions of touch(ing) would mutate, wondering how being confined to the boundaries of our own bodies during the pandemic will affect our modes of _touching the world_. Your issue 148 offered body language as a grounded alternative to stay in touch with our realities and relationships. Alex Quicho’s essay is enticing in the sense that it presents porousness as a sensibility that must be embraced, a state for remaining open to others. Quicho explains Anicka Yi’s smelly sculptures that somehow invade the audience through their invisible compounds (cannot avoid the virus reference), only to dig deeper into the complexities of permeability.

She reminds us of boundaries as borders, cleverly bringing up Yi’s _Immigrant Caucus_ (2017) to extend the porous from the individual body to those of nations. As a migrant, I can see myself as that which filters through, but in the current context, I also fear being invaded by a malady carried through that which I cannot see. Porousness is ambivalent and informs how each of us approaches what lays beyond our borders.

I wish for porous art spaces where the creators, the artwork, the visitors, and the systems that sustain them would dare to navigate the pores and all that emerges from them—even when the sight is not pretty and forces us to smell the stink. Would the skin of these places be as the one shown in the cover of your past issue? A sensuous flesh, “a porous layer upon which much can happen,” as Theodore (ted) Kerr described. In the meantime, Quicho’s words keep chanting in my head: “more care, more porousness, more interdependence,” not as a mantra but as a latent demand.

##### Karina Roman Justo

P.S. As I am writing this letter, I am holding my newborn niece in one arm. Her slight weight makes me feel the index of a vaccine running through my body. I have never felt more porous in my life! Letting both do their thing on me.

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##### Hi C Mag,

I’m writing this from my bed. Sick from inoculation, overtaken by a fatigue that feels like being sucked into the earth. A cheap price to pay for immunity against the spectral disease that has engulfed “Our Lives,” as I speak modestly for the collective body––that grandiose “we” that always fails and falters. The “Body Language” issue felt like a gift to read this spring as I reflect on how life in the pandemic has altered my perception of my bodily limitations.

I was grateful to read Johanna Hedva’s essay “Soft Blues” in the issue. It takes a hacksaw to the institutionalized illusion that sickness is an individual issue. Hedva channels the voices of chauvinists, psychiatrists, and their own language in sickness to conjure and critique “genius” and the immunity granted to the cis-white-hetero males of the art world. Hedva’s engagement with mania, masculinity, lawful delusion, grief, and gender dysphoria is a barometer for the unwritten ableist norms that legislate who is “sane.” Mental illness, in the framework of this essay, is a self-destructive response to the vague, obfuscated, miasmic forces of violence that condition our psychological weather. Being sensitive to the currents of tyrannical power and oppression is a kind of talent or torturous gift in men, and a threat in women and queer people. Being involuntarily hospitalized in a psych ward, for someone who’s both marginalized and mentally ill, can end up in the most tragic cases as a kind of prison sentence. Or, at the very least, an intense round of 24/7 securitized scrutiny that ends in medication, pathologization, and disciplinary regulation, which marks one’s sense of self as somehow intrinsically “sick,” rather than traumatized, oppressed, or psychologically vulnerable.

Bipolar disorder teaches—in its painful, sadistic way—those who live with it that reality is putty, shaping and being shaped by voices and energies that both are and are not the “self,” as you know it. As someone with a diagnosis of bipolar disorder, I’m not used to reading work that both validates the need for serious healing and care and that also acknowledges complicated relationships to mania; yes, hypomania can be pleasurable, euphoric, and “productive,” but untreated bipolar has taken and continues to take lives. How do we disentangle law, ableism, institutionalized treatment, and gender from the lived experience of illness? This is a question I’m always grappling with, and I’m relieved to see that C Magazine is as well.

##### Emily Amos-Wood

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Letters reflecting on Issue 149 “Community.”

Letters

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Designer

Editor

Maya Wilson-Sanchez is a curator and writer based in Toronto.

Associate Editor

Publisher

Artist Project

Victoria Redsun is a two-spirit Dënësųłinë́ land defender, poet, visual artist, and film-maker. They use nonlinear forms of storytelling in their work, which is deeply ingrained in the land, ceremony, and ancestral connection.

Artist

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Collage

Identity

Victoria Redsun emphasizes the "interconnectedness of ancestral knowledge, land, and relational networks in their activism and artwork," calling on Leanne Betasamosake Simpson’s "Indigenous queer normativity" and collage to mix representations thereof. Accompanying text by guest curator Mariana Muñoz Gomez

Seghąxole, my clan

The ongoing pandemic has highlighted the way that our sense of togetherness can be interrupted, taken away, and challenged on a global scale. Yet, Victoria Redsun’s work as an artist, poet, and land defender shows us that when we hold our relationships close, expressions of community that might not be easy to see can reveal themselves in times of grief and distress. In this collage series, they engage with personal relationships and expand them into connections that stretch across time and space. Redsun positions themselves in relation to their family and simultaneously positions their family within broader communities—the Dënësųłinë, cross-cultural networks, non-human kin, known ancestors, ancestors who lived long before the artist was born, and a community of Indigenous artists and activists.

As Redsun began making this work while grieving deceased family members, it includes photographs from their family’s archive: images of their greataunt and -uncle, grandparents, greatgreat grandmother, some of the relationships that give the artist strength. The series also includes depictions of Redsun’s non human-kin such as a nighthawk, strawberries, the Red Willow plant, caribou, the Labrador plant, the Tansy plant, a gray wolf, and a blue jay, all of whom have acted as teachers, providers, and protectors.

I am reminded of Leanne Betasamosake Simpson’s book _As We Have Always Done_ (2017), where she writes about Nishnaabeg spiritual connections between living beings, ancestors, ceremony, practices, and land. While her writing is based in Nishnaabeg culture and theory, Simpson also engages in cross-cultural citation with other Indigenous artists, writers, scholars, and teachers, showing how generative it can be to learn with and from each other. Working from Glen Coulthard’s term “grounded normativity,” a process of creating ethical frameworks that come from placebased practices and are in continual relationship with the land, Simpson discusses Indigenous queer normativity as an embodiment of queerness therein. I was struck by how she articulates that her relationship with the spirit world—within which Indigenous queer normativity exists—makes it possible for this normativity to be expressed in her material world. Simpson states that Indigenous queer normativity makes room for a multiplicity of relationship structures, specifying that this queerness is non-hierarchical, anti-discriminatory, and not simply about sexual orientation or gender. In other words, the author explains that relational structures that are not valued or known within colonial heteropatriarchy are tangible through Indigenous queer normativity.

_Seghąxole, my clan_ enacts this, composed as it is of layers of relation, rendered with a variety of media. A mix of analogue image fragments initially imagined for intimate exchange between family and friends are set in relation to crisp digital elements, reflecting the seamless interrelation of the old with the new, the passed with the living. The composition opposite includes ancient pictographs from the Reindeer Lake region which portray ancient water creators who once walked with the Dënësųłinë́, connecting Redsun, their family, and their knowledge to ancestors from thousands of years ago. The softly underlaid Red Willow plant is a medicine that one offers to their ancestors. When commemorating their great-great-grandmother, Marie Dettanikaeze, pictured on the right side of the image depicting three women among caribou, Redsun also acknowledges the Dene people’s relationship with the caribou who have kept their communities fed and healthy for thousands of years. None of these entities exist in isolation; “from the ancestors to the caribou, and each plant of our lands, we are all connected and have a responsibility to protect and retain our traditional knowledge,” Redsun says. Positioned within stars in the dark sky, another collage memorializes their great-aunt Sophie Merasty, an artist and activist who continues to protect her connections while in the spirit world. “The impact aunties have in our community can only be shown through how we now carry our lives from their teachings.”

In an artist statement, Redsun notes that “amid a global pandemic, environmental destruction, colonialism, and endless warfare, we’re still here.” Their process with _Seghąxole, my clan_ demonstrates that looking inward, engaging with an array of materials, and approaching creative expression as a modality for mourning—for reaching—can prompt an unfolding of something greater than oneself. 

Mariana Muñoz Gomez is a Latinx artist, writer, curator, and settler of colour based on Treaty 1 Territory in Winnipeg. Their interests lie in the potentiality of art and language in (re)envisioning temporality, relation, and place.

Curator

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In this accompanying text, Mariana Muñoz Gomez explores how Victoria Redsun emphasizes Victoria Redsun emphasizes "the interconnectedness of ancestral knowledge, land, and relational networks in their activism and artwork," calling on Leanne Betasamosake Simpson’s "Indigenous queer normativity" and collage to mix representations thereof.

Seghąxole, my clan by Victoria Redsun: Text

Review

April Thompson is a writer and curator currently based in Vancouver. Her practice is guided by critical investigations of photography and the moving image, spatial politics and new media.

Stepping into the exhibition “The Neighbour’s Plate” feels like stepping into a sensory still-life painting of 2020\. Masked and sanitized on entry, you are greeted by the scent of cured meat: cloves, allspice, black pepper, and paprika on duck. Alone in the space, you feel the presence of others in the central display—a low circular wooden table dressed with food, mementos, and the vessels of consumer packaging. Derya Akay, Amna Elnour, and Dana Qaddah have set their table with traces that are both personal and mass-produced— Akay’s hand-painted silk pillow and Qaddah’s wooden inlay box, with contents shut out of view, are accompanied by impersonal items like a yoga block and an industrial meat slicer. Even reading these objects can be misleading. The meat slicer and takeaway containers are not newly store-bought but come from a local restaurant owned by Qaddah’s cousin. In these ways, the table is richly layered with the artists’ roots and lived experience, indexing Syria, Palestine, Lebanon, Turkey, Sudan, and North America.

Circling the table, you take in the scent of the meat that hangs above in suspended brown twine. Elnour has encrusted two cuts of duck with hickory, rose petal, and smoked salt, spicing it to make a variation on basturma, before airing it in the gallery. When you observe the spread on the table, it is tempting to make sense of it by reaching for allegorical readings. A photograph of a slaughtered lamb. A copy of the Quran. These are placed alongside a flattened Persian chewing-gum box, a Purell wipe, and a pack of three-ply face masks. At the sight of a glass jar filled with weed and filters, a pre-rolled joint neatly on top, you realize that this spread does not slice a binary between religion and modernity, but situates inherited cultures in these artists’ present moment. You are asked to sit and as you do, legs crossed atop a prayer rug on the floor, you enter a new agreement: no longer an observer, you are now a participant.

There is something almost forbidden in this indulgence. The shallow dishes around you overflow with the clawed rinds of clementines, sunflower seeds, cast-off onion shells, and chestnut husks. You are reminded of why this feels so freeing: not long ago we wiped down groceries unsure of how the virus spread. Now, you sit among the remnants of others’ touch.

Akay, Elnour, and Qaddah have collaborated to provide a full-bodied menu: tahini molasses, ma’amoul, baskot wa raha, duck carbonara, candied chestnut. The words are written in a loose scrawl on a sheet tacked above a rectangular window in the gallery. Over the course of the exhibition’s run, the menu shifts to include daily specials, with food prepared by the artists beforehand and the option for visitors to sit and consume in the gallery space or take the food to go. Your meal will be passed through a window that peeps back into the studio space and kitchen.

Waiting for my complimentary meal—a zesty onion salad special of the day—I take in the walls around me. On one side of the gallery, a shelf runs the entire length of the wall. Like the exposed spine of a pantry, it holds the vertebrae of a meal: dried hibiscus, a jar of white sugar cubes, an untouched pomegranate, a Pepsi can. Shelved high, these are the bookends to culinary rituals that have passed, or are yet to be. The arrangement feels familiar and primes your appetite, lending the same intimacy as looking around someone’s kitchen. This works to close the gap of being alone in the gallery, of being “socially distanced” in public places.

The other side of the gallery displays _Itinerant Sentiments_ (2020) by Qaddah—a series of 11 small works, each hung delicately by two nails. The square arrangements hold together collage-like excerpts: dried-flower tea, crushed pistachio shells, Damascene fabric cuttings, flattened tissue boxes with floral patterns. Here, Qaddah plays with the vernacular of packaged goods, as well as the painterly ghosts of still life, giving us a new visual language that summons both, yet definitively resembles neither.

In _Land of Olive Trees_ (_Itinerant Sentiments_ series) (2020) a crocheted Palestinian-style embroidered coaster is peppered with olive leaves. Next to it is a cardboard cutting from an olive-oil box which, when translated from the original Arabic, reads, “from the tree to the stone, always retaining the flavour of nature.” In Qaddah’s flattening of these objects she effectively reduces material hierarchy; the handmade sits with the mass-produced, dotted with the organic—and all of it sandwiched between non-biodegradable plastic, preserved and out of reach.

Qaddah’s work speaks to the broader achievement of the exhibition: a reordering of the usual transactions and hierarchies sanctioned by commercialization. In the context of a commercial gallery, this is refreshing. Not only have the artists collaborated in increasingly fluid ways—it is difficult to discern where one hand ends and another begins—but the exhibition itself reorders consumption. These granulated settings and personal traces are not consumable in a market sense. It’s hard to imagine a collector walking in to purchase the pre-rolled joint with provenance. Instead, here is a space where the viewer alone can consume, through presence and literal eating, the _conditions_ rather than the _conclusions_ of the art. This conjures community on a cellular level.

When you eat the desert dish _Atomic Salad_, ripe persimmon, walnut, and honey hum on your tongue, bitter and sweet. As you split the flatbread, you think about the hands that made it. And not in a pandemic hygiene “did they wash them for twenty seconds” kind of way, but with a deep sense of connection and gratitude. Gratitude for the recipe, for the knowledge passed through other hands and skin, and the memory enfolded in touch and taste.

Leaving the spiced warm air of the gallery, you step back onto West Fourth Avenue. Walking up the street, you pass an old friend who is headed to their timed visit. You fight the urge to bury them in a tight hug, and instead stand awkwardly at a distance, exchanging words muffled by your mask. And then you walk away, briskly, taking comfort in the thought that soon their belly will be full too.

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Food

Sensory

Reviewing the group exhibition “The Neighbour’s Plate” at Unit 17 (28 November 2020 to 17 January 2021), April Thompson writes that the installation’s central kitchen table closes “the gap of being alone in the gallery, of being ‘socially distanced’ in public places.”

“The Neighbour’s Plate” — Derya Akay, Amna Elnour, Dana Qaddah

Eleonor Botoman is a critic and poet based in Brooklyn, NY, whose work has appeared in _Artforum, The Sunlight Press, Interiors, BUST Magazine, The Mantle,_ and more. She currently works as a sketchbook librarian at Brooklyn Art Library and publishes her newsletter, _Screenshot Reliquary_, every month. 

Ants infected by the spores of _Ophiocordyceps unilateralis_ lose all control of their bodies and minds, wandering until the parasitic fungus living in their musculature splits their exoskeletons open with a bloom of fruiting bodies hungry for their next host. One can’t help but wonder if the ants know what’s happening. Do they try to fight against this exploitative physical and mental death, or do they feel contaminated bliss—a little less lonely with something else sharing their body? 

S F Ho’s debut novel _George, the Parasite_ (2020), the first title from curator Danielle St-Amour’s pandemic-born publishing project SPEC/FIC, is one such psychic infection. An unnamed alien flees a planet so ravaged by pollution that its greatest commodity is the oxygen it squeezes out of the lungs of enslaved miners, through collars puncturing their necks. The alien finds an earthly vessel in George, who is haunted by the spectres of his own loneliness. As an immersive film of a planet in ecological disarray projects into a darkened theater, George greets this strange entity, only to find his skull cracked open and the alien slipping into his consciousness. “The border of your unconscious mind wanted to be violated, you just didn’t know it yet,” the alien notes in a harsh observation of George’s tendency to end up in situations where everyone else’s fantasies, memories, and desires eat away at his bodily autonomy. 

A successful parasite does not just live long enough to finish off its host; it must spread and build its contagion. George, newly emboldened by telepathic abilities given to him by his parasitic invader, searches for more people to join his network of psychic bonds as his world and the alien’s spill into each other. I’m reminded of Laura Hyunjhee Kim’s book _Entering the Blobosphere: A Musing on Blobs_ (2019), where she writes: “A blob is a cerebral shared ride. A blob is a repetition of a familiar form(ula).” Like Kim’s blob, Ho’s mutating patchwork of realities across people and dimensions grows and collapses like dreams within dreams, a glitched mitosis of storytelling as George and his infected companions wander through apocalyptic cityscapes and industrialized toxicity. Each hallucinatory narrative cycles back into itself until, like a combusting film reel, George’s body and mind dissolve into an interconnected entropy. In one instance, \[SPOILER ALERT to end of paragraph\] George washes up on the shore of his alien’s decaying planet after escaping forces out to destroy him. Here, George is revived and sent down to deep-sea mines where his lungs are squeezed of their clean oxygen for the ruling class, and he quickly deteriorates. 

_George, the Parasite_ begins and ends in a movie theatre, one of those peculiar liminal spaces where you can simultaneously experience communality while also escaping into the solitary corners of your mind. Centred on the invasion of non-human beings, Ho’s text contains many nods to a branch of science fiction cinema concerned with biopolitical control: _Alien_ (1979), _The Matrix_ (1999), and _A Clockwork Orange_ (1971), to name a few. These films have been discussed as metaphors for queer embodiment, sexual violence, colonization, ecological destruction, and capitalist exploitation. Yet, Ho’s exploration goes beyond Hollywood heroics, sculpted as it is by the corporeal pressures of love, loneliness, and the porous, unconscious borders between body and mind. George, in his queerness, and the alien, in its otherness, are empathically entwined in their struggle to survive in violent systems of power designed to subjugate them. 

What is perhaps most striking is Ho’s use of sound throughout this text. Their alien being acts like a living tuning fork, communicating not through words but through harmonious frequencies of emotionality transmitted between entities. Right after his transformation into a host, and with senses sharpened on love, George becomes aware of an unconscious “promise of eternity” moving like an arrow through the raucous, commodifying sounds of romantic pop music blaring on a busy street. Each breath George and these beings share syncs together body and mind, allowing these entities to unite in a living network of mutual survival. Messages are also transmitted through unspoken psychic links, unconscious memories, ancient patterns in unravelling DNA, and humus mixtures of bone, dirt, and ash. Defiantly unknowable, George’s parasite refuses to be represented in traditional forms of human speech.

This mycelial network of sound exists in direct resistance to the destructive militarized forces that exploit the natural resources of the alien’s home world. Yet, Ho avoids an eco pessimistic view of such violent colonial actions, challenging the reader instead to consider how those most vulnerable may find ways to survive within complex systems of power, exploitation, and abuse. Ho’s artistic practice considers these very dynamics through ecosystems of sound and collaborative storytelling. Their performances _Palabras_ (2017) and _Mehdateyshuns_ (2010) produce musical compositions through organic, communal acts of vocal harmony and reactive engagements of involuntary bodily noises like heartbeats and breath, with actors observing and improvising from each other’s gestures in a form of biofeedback. For Ho the human body is a complex medium embedded with emotional and sociohistorical resonances that shape our relationships to one another.

There’s this one line I can’t get out of my head: Ho writes, through the voice of their alien, “In a world without choice there is no such thing as consent.” Navigating complex emotional conflicts of desire and being desired by others, and eventually, a machine-like tool for economic exploitation, George seeks relief from his own emotional alienation in a society where he has no self-determination. Perhaps it is no surprise, then, that he opens up to the destructive psychic cohabitation of an alien and begins to find purpose through the people he subsumes. We might do anything to be loved by others, Ho suggests—we may even destroy ourselves. As George’s parasitic alien lover notes, “It’s been the end of the world for a long time.” Yet, Ho’s text asks us, what comes after these systems collapse? What is creation if not the continued transference and transformation of energy, of knowledge, of resilience, of stories, from one being to another? 

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Supernatural

Eleonor Botoman reviews the inaugural title from SPEC/FIC, published in 2020, finding within it a deep consideration of “how those most vulnerable may find ways to survive within complex systems of power, exploitation, and abuse.”

George the Parasite — SF Ho

Lillian O’Brien Davis is a curator and writer currently based in Toronto, ON, after having lived and worked in Regina, SK, Treaty 4 Territory, for the past two years. Her writing has appeared in _Canadian Art, BlackFlash, The Brooklyn Rail,_ and _Peripheral Review._ 

White-tailed jackrabbits change colour in the winter; their dull-brown fur shifting to a wintry white to better camouflage them within the frozen expanse of the prairie. They surprise me on my walks to work, jumping away from me, appearing out of seemingly nowhere; they notice me ages before I notice them. Familiar characters in a prairie landscape, they fight, scavenge, and occasionally end up as roadkill in and around the city. I try to nod at them when I lumber past dressed in my snow gear hoping to establish some kind of kinship. “Morning,” I am tempted to say to each of them as I walk past.

Current human-animal relationships in Western society are loaded, often one-sided, with people projecting their own foibles onto the pets and the animals they interact with. Vancouver-born, London-based artist Zadie Xa’s immersive installation at the Remai Modern engages visitors as protagonists on a journey where they venture through different dimensions representing air, land, city, and sea to find the cure to “save the planet.” Organized spatially in a circle, each dimension is delineated by a particular colour of floor covering as well as suspended robes designed by Xa and her collaborator, Benito Mayor Vallejo. The robes are representative of a Conch Shell, Cabbage, Fox, and Orca, respectively—associated by the artist with each dimension. A fifth creature, Seagull, surveys the entire exhibition and each dimension in the form of a _sotdae_, a tall wooden pillar with a carved seagull perched on top; _sotdae_ are often positioned at the entrance of Korean villages to ward off evil spirits. The robes, while not activated by any human beings throughout the duration of the exhibition, invite the audience to imagine themselves in each of the dimensions articulated by the narrator. For instance, Cabbage, who is the representative of the earth dimension, is rendered on a robe by a cabbage-leaf pattern on green fabric and rough seams to reference the layered leaves of a cabbage. The exhibition invites audience members through several dimensions in order to reflect back on their own positionality as humans. The journey is based loosely on the Korean shamanic tale of Barigongju, in which Princess Bari travels to the underworld looking for life-saving water for her dying parents, while encountering many hardships and obstacles.

The progression of the journey is represented through timed lighting that illuminates different portions of the exhibition as the narration shifts perspective across each creature. A gathering space is situated in the middle of the installation with seating to invite the audience to stay still and listen to the progression of the 55-minute audio. Although many visitors may enter the gallery at once, the narration is directed toward a single protagonist, inviting introspection as each audience member is addressed directly. The narration is done by one gentle-toned voice which speaks from each creature’s perspective while voicing concerns related to their particular dimension. At the beginning of the journey, Conch Shell welcomes the protagonist, saying, “This is a story about how we could save the planet, how we might liberate all creatures. It’s a bold statement and even as these words leave my body, I lack confidence, but now is not the time for fear.”

Instead of exploring the agency of each of the creatures, Xa dives into the human inclination toward anthropocentrism through the use of familiar folklore tropes, projecting human thoughts and feelings onto animals she has personal association with in order to communicate a lesson relevant to the audience’s circumstance. For instance, the fox is a scavenging animal seen frequently around Xa’s home and studio locations in London, England—a circumstance that is the direct result of the fox’s territory being consumed by the city’s continually expanding footprint. Fox, in the exhibition, speaks to the protagonist: “Becoming small, smaller, thin, thinnest. A waif. Find me scurrying across roads, slinking into gardens, cemeteries and trash. Trespasser. Intruder.” In truth, it is impossible to know what a fox is thinking, and Xa underscores this impossibility by choosing to have the creatures narrated by the same voice speaking to the audience, mediating each through the lens of the human. Cabbage says, “Because of you I am alive. And because I exist, I think you love me. And because of this, I hope you care.” 

The foundation for the exhibition is personal rather than scientific. Xa’s selections reflect creatures the artist has previously engaged with, such as seagulls, a familiar urban and coastal animal, and cabbage, the main ingredient in kimchi. And whereas the creatures—all of whom are deeply impacted by the human toll on their environments—are implicated as the subjects of the exhibition, the suspended robes and the directed narration are designed with a human body in mind, thus reaffirming the true subject of the exhibition: humans and our own circumstances within an environment that we’ve irrevocably damaged. It’s humbling to imagine the anger of animals. The Seagull says to the protagonist, “The smell of burnt plastic and chemicals linger, sticky residue clings to mouth but still we breathe.” I have no sense of a jackrabbit’s thoughts, but I am conscious of my own presence as more of a threat to them than a comfort. Xa’s exploration of what these creatures _might_ say or _might_ do if we could hear them does not shift the blame for our circumstances away from us, but instead reaffirms how intricately bound up we are within our own subjectivities.

issue-149-p73-74.pdf

Animals

Nature

Lillian O’Brien Davis examines how Zadie Xa’s exhibition at Remai Modern (28 October 2020 to 21 February 2021) “invites audience members through several dimensions in order to reflect back on their own positionality as humans.” 

“Moon Poetics 4 Courageous Earth Critters and Dangerous Day Dreamers” — Zadie Xa

Jaleh Mansoor is Associate Professor of Art History at UBC whose areas of teaching and research include Modernism and the Avant-gardes, European art since 1945, Marxism and Frankfurt School Theory, and Marxist Formalism. She has also acted as chair of UBC’s Critical Curatorial Studies program.

Curator Amy Kazymerchyk’s exhibition “Thought, outside” takes an opaque, poetic, and political problem—theorist Maurice Blanchot’s _Thought of/from The Outside_—to elaborate a conceptually rigorous yet affectively embracing love letter to Vancouver in which the historically distant echoes of the city’s bestknown contribution to Conceptual Art, the Vancouver School, gently yields and opens onto peripheral yet constitutive voices. The pleasure afforded by this spatially contained yet effervescent jewel of a show is the realization as if for the first time that, as ever, any understanding of an inside is but a complex if disavowed relationship to that which falls out. Kazymerchyk allows this illumination to emerge through a rigorous negation of any subjective interiority. That this seemingly stern methodology should generate original and intimately resonant results is astonishing, irreducible in the last instance to anything but Kazymerchyk’s own curatorial “imprint.”

Blanchot’s “outside,” the content of which is an exteriority graspable through negative capacity, takes numerous forms in thought and sociality. In the most basic terms, Blanchot’s outside is anything that falls outside an immediate normative framework. Anonymity might touch on this outside; the dynamic of negative space in cubist collage might describe it. For philosopher Étienne Balibar, Blanchot’s outside is a form of “fearless speech” where transgression opens onto real politics. This fearlessness is not the result of charismatic individuality but, to the contrary, an unbound dynamic in the social field.

Kazymerchyk accomplishes a probe into this outside through the kind of experiment a scientist might organize, isolating a variable by holding firm to a set of constants. All the work in the show is lens-based, serial, and achromatic. The curator does this in order to circumscribe the problem and to draw the viewer to content. Draining any remnant of spectacle, selfexpression, or immediate visual pleasure from the visual horizon of the exhibition, the negative capacity of the seemingly opaque and mercurial about this outside is probed. 

What constitutes the outside circumscribed by Kazymerchyk’s restrained methodology? It presents itself as inherently plural, evading any static or homogenizing identity yet touching on forms of sexual, political, and economic transgression. Canadian multimedia artist and organizer Craig Berggold’s photographic essay documents labour struggles in British Columbia’s agriculture sector. A series of black and-white photographs, _A Time to Change_ (1984) frames what he says eloquently in a subsequent podcast interview with the curator: that representation as such won’t resonate in the visual field unless it is willing to look at the point of production and circulation itself. Berggold’s project reminds me of Marx’s statement about the “hidden abode of production,” the “point of production” which is obscured in the commodity as it is presented on the market and which marks the aporia of labour value within a bourgeois matrix of the visible, sayable, and knowable. For instance, Berggold notes that discourses of nutritional health, green sustainability, and “buying local” have yet to acknowledge the precarious working and living conditions of migrant workers who pick and process our local food—a circuit that relies on the Seasonal Agricultural Worker Program and labourers from mostly Mexico and the Caribbean whose immigration status in Canada is dependent on this work and tied to a specific employer. 

Caribbean-Canadian artist Melinda Mollineaux shows work that explores the African diaspora through the black-and-white serial photoessay _Cadboro Bay: Index to an Incomplete History_ (1998/2020), sharing a polyvalent, nuanced history of colonialism which Kazymerchyk restored for “Thought, outside.” In 1862, Cadboro Bay in Victoria, BC, was the site of a Haida encampment where people were recovering from a smallpox imported by colonizers. This community was then violently and forcibly relocated to Haida Gwaii by settler ships operating in the name of the Canadian state. Black people escaping the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, designed to forcibly return those formerly enslaved to American plantations, also set up a community in Cadboro Bay. It was a site of multiple struggles for autonomy in waves of mobility, migration, encounter, and violence. These tides of struggle connect to the notion of tidalectics that Mollineaux picks up. Qualifying the long history of the Middle Passage, Mollineaux takes the term from Wayde Compton, a poet and fellow in the Black Pacific Project, who in turn gets it from Kamau Brathwaite’s tidalectic which summons dialectics in a fluid and cyclical register. Shores, coastlines, and beaches are read by Mollineaux in a subsequent podcast that reflects on the exhibition as a “break from the past \[…\] and a connection to the past; a break and a communion with the past.”

_African Notes_ (1982) by Laiwan, an artist born in Apartheid-era Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe, of Chinese parents, offers the exhibition’s sole interruption of the curator’s effort to maintain formal consistency across projects. Laiwan’s _African Notes_ stands apart by virtue of a three-dimensional component that comes off the wall and into the ambient space of the room. It comprises a slide projector, a tool of colonial knowledge that projected black-and-white images of colonized subjects. Many of the slides in this work feature snapshots and family photographs of the artist’s former life in Zimbabwe. The cycle of images includes a voiceover that reflects on Zimbabwe through the framework of various official discourses—travel, medical, and juridical. Laiwan summons this aural exteriority—an “outside” projected onto the peripheralized colony by hegemonic discourses of the colonial metropole. This projected “outside-ness” writes over Indigenous cultures, to deliver its putative and desired “identity” in the interests of “technological productive forces of the market,” as Laiwan says in the podcast discussion with the curator. 

Finally, Kazymerchyk borrows a now familiar scene: the “aesthetics of administration,” a term used by Benjamin H.D. Buchloh to describe conceptual and lens-based art’s seeming fetishization of the archive. Kazymerchyk’s borrowing turns this familiar administrative scene inside _out_ to create a deeply thoughtful reflection expressed in the intimate register of a love letter to Vancouver, through its multiple outsides. 

Jaleh Mansoor explores how “Thought, outside,” curated by Amy Kazymerchyk at Western Front (12 November 2020 to 30 January 2021), activates an opaque, poetic, and political problem by Maurice Blanchot: Thought of/from The Outside, which is “inherently plural, evading any static or homogenizing identity yet touching on forms of sexual, political, and economic transgression.”

Header

C Mag

Issue 149

Community

Credits

Letters

Letters

Editorial

Editorial: Community

Explore Issue by Images

Features

Take Down, Spread Out

Community is Never Neutral: Placemaking in Chinatowns Across Canada

In-reach and the Fabulatory Function of the Curatorial

Imagination Tool for Institutional Operations: A Long Project Between Gudskul & 7 Toronto Collectives

Moving at the Speed of Trust: On Teaching Social Practice

Ongoing Legacies of Transmisogyny

Wildseed: A Fellowship Model by and for Black Creatives

Aajiiqatigiingniq: Isuma’s Digital Indigenous Democracy Project

An Invitation for Black and Indigenous Artists to Dream

Artist Projects

Seghąxole, my clan

Seghąxole, my clan by Victoria Redsun: Text

Columns

One Thing: Gay Day 1971

Reviews

“The Neighbour’s Plate” — Derya Akay, Amna Elnour, Dana Qaddah

George the Parasite — SF Ho

“Moon Poetics 4 Courageous Earth Critters and Dangerous Day Dreamers” — Zadie Xa

“Thought, outside” — Craig Berggold, Marlene Creates, Kiss & Tell, Roy Kiyooka, Laiwan, Ken Lum, Melinda Mollineaux

My Meteorite Or, Without the Random There Can Be No New Thing — Harry Dodge

“Inaction” — Brendan Fernandes

1—130 — Nour Bishouty

Grass Drama — Julian Yi-Zhong Hou

“Black Gold” — Ts̱ēmā

“A Thread That Never Breaks” — Angel Aubichon, Joi T. Arcand, Leanna Marshall, Caroline Monnet, Jaad Kuujus (Meghann O’Brien), Olivia Whetung, The Pacific Sisters

“Queer Correspondence” — Alex Margo Arden and Caspar Heinemann, Beatriz Cortez and Kang Seung Lee, Ezra Green and Martin Hansen, rafa esparza, Gelare Khoshgozaran, David Lindert, Atiéna