Column

Born in Kjipuktuk (Halifax) and currently living in Tkaronto, traditional territory of the Mississaugas of the Credit, the Anishinaabeg, the Chippewa, the Haudenosaunee, and the Wendat peoples, Trish Salah is the author of the Lambda award-winning poetry collection _Wanting in Arabic_, and of _Lyric Sexology Vol. 1_. Her writing is widely published in journals and anthologies, and translations of her work have appeared in French, Greek, and Arabic. She has co-edited special issues of _TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly_, on cultural production, and of _Arc Poetry Magazine_, showcasing trans, Two-Spirit, and non-binary writers. She is also an Associate Professor of Gender Studies at Queen’s University, and Editor at the _Journal of Critical Race Inquiry_.

##### “Always a flower planted on this body made of layers of shadows”<br/>

> ##### —etel adnan [1]

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_Note: the print layout of this text is meaningful. To honour that, we've chosen to upload it as images. [Read or download the PDF.](https://strapi-uploads-c-mag-prod.s3.ca-central-1.amazonaws.com/C157_Salah_75ca3055b1.pdf)_

[^1]: Etel Adnan, _Night_ (New York: Nightboat Books, 2016), 20.

Writer

Kink gives us an opportunity to question the limits of convention as they meet with hierarchical systems. Taking kink as a shapeshifter—a conscious negotiation of desire and relations based on principles like consent—this issue embraces queerness, disobedience, disruption, and complex embodiment. Through artistic explorations of BDSM, impact play, subspace, fan fiction, eroticized debt, Indigenous-settler relations, and more, contributors dive into the fleshy and political consequences of desire as sites to reinvent our bonds to one another.

Kink

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Language

Memory

Politics

Trish Salah’s poem layers personal grief with current political violences to explore the paradox of a love that persists amidst brutality. 

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Composition: give up your own

Andrea Dávila is a researcher, writer, and museum professional interested in the cultural and disciplinary intersections within art history, focusing on the visual dialogues and continuities within contemporary Latin American art. She graduated from Barnard College, and has held curatorial internships at the Dallas Museum of Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art.

Within the series _Towards a Homoerotic Historiography_ (2013–2014) by Colombian-born artist Carlos Motta, #7 is not an artwork that immediately commands the viewer’s gaze. Often charged with erotic imagery, the series’ watercolour drawings and miniature gold-washed silver figurines are faithful recreations of pre-Columbian sculptures, ceramics, and reliefs depicting queer individuals, at times engaged in sexual relations. _Towards a Homoerotic Historiography_ reaffirms the pre-colonial presence of queer people in Latin America by addressing the role of “the body, desire, and pleasure” in pre-Columbian societies. [^1] In contrast to the more overtly sexual compositions in the series, the human-feline figure in #7 stands out for its distinctive anthropomorphic features and solitary presentation, proposing queer desire as an individual endeavour.

The inclusion of the lone #7 may seem misplaced in a series explicitly depicting acts of homoerotic sex. However, Motta’s interest in the figure may have been driven by explorations of the queer self and negotiations of desire instead of sexual engagement. The unique allure of #7 lies in the contrast between its human and feline elements, wherein its head and prominent male sexual organ are familiarly human, but its fanged mouth, whiskered face, and tail embody a feline quality. Subtle changes in tonality, made possible through the use of watercolour, soften and neutralize the impact of the figure’s expressions of aggression, giving the work an intriguingly unsettled peculiarity.

My interest in #7 grew when I found a corresponding ceramic sculpture made by Peruvian-born painter and sculptor Kukuli Velarde, another artist I was writing about at the time. Within their practices, both artists draw from fragments of material culture made by pre-Columbian societies throughout Latin America
—including the Maya, Moche, Tairona, and Tumaco-La Tolita. [^2] Although, to my knowledge, Motta and Velarde have never collaborated, I was drawn to their respective, nearly simultaneous, and independently developed inclinations to create artworks referencing the same pre-Columbian sculpture.

Considering that pre-Columbian art encompasses works from 10,000 BCE to the 15th century, damaged figures with missing limbs, chipped silhouettes, and faded pigments are a common sight within the field. Though devised with a different objective in mind, projects such as Motta’s watercolour drawings tend to provide slightly clearer images of some of these pre-Columbian works. [^3] The task of finding, documenting, and recreating these artworks requires Motta to assume the role of an anthropologist, historian, objective documentarian, and curator, guided by an interest in the work’s possible associations to queerness. As a result, Motta’s compositions feel clinical yet decidedly purposeful, as if they were visual translations of the referenced works, or pieces catalogued by an archivist—a feeling accentuated by titles that enumerate the series.

I do not claim to be an expert on pre-Columbian art, but after taking several courses in the field throughout my undergraduate career, I was surprised I had never come across works by the Tairona or Tumaco-La Tolita, pre-Columbian cultures that Motta and Velarde cite as creators of the human-feline figure. I have done significant research to find any trace of information on the referenced pre-Columbian work, but there is no record of it within a museum collection, academic publication, or exhibition. After exhausting my university’s academic resources, and scrolling through pages of Google image search results, I found a digital image of the sculpture presenting the feline figure in the exact same position as #7. [^4] In Motta’s version, two marks suggesting the figure’s furrowed brow disappear, and the work loses its marbled surface appearance, opting for a white, matte finish. The artist emphasizes a sixth finger on the figure’s right hand, and unifies the freestanding feline-whiskered cheeks above the upper lip.

Where many pre-Columbian works understandably display symptoms of their age, the human-feline sculpture referenced by Motta’s #7 seems to be amazingly intact. Further complicating the work’s pre-Columbian attribution is this image’s associations with questionable sources, such as decade-old Pinterest threads, a medical article about Paul of Aegina’s surgical methods for preternatural fingers, and a spiritual website called “The Libertarian,” which cites the work as a “Pre-Columbian reptilian being with six fingers and tail; of Tumaco, Colombia.” [^5] Although I originally intended to confirm the work’s pre-Columbian attribution, my thesis research became inconveniently unsettled by questions of authenticity and the unreliability of digital archives, all because of a charming humanoid sculpture. [^6]

For the time being, the pre-Columbian authenticity of the work that inspired #7 will remain unclear, but Motta’s objective to establish a pre-colonial queer history is real and genuine. Through _Towards a Homoerotic Historiography_, the artist asks us to consider Latin American queer desire as a historical reality by re-embedding pre-Columbian works into our art historical canon, and reconciling these figures with their homoerotic context. With enough resources and collected fragments, I hope to reveal more about the figures that inspired Motta’s series by continuing to unravel the provenance of the human-feline figure, and write art history from a perspective that accentuates queer narratives instead of hiding their existence.

[^1]: Carlos Motta, “Towards a Homoerotic Historiography (2014),” https://carlosmotta.com/project/towards-a-homoerotic-historiography-2014
[^2]: Carlos Motta, Joseph Mejía, and Rafael Garrido Álvarez, “Hacía una historia homoerótica,” _Íconos Revista de Ciencias Sociales_ 18, no. 49 (2014): 83–98, https://www.carlosmotta.com/writings/Iconos.pdf
[^3]: Motta’s work is aligned with that of pre-Columbian anthropologists and illustrators who provide sharply-detailed drawings of original artworks weathered by time. For example, the prominent American archaeologist Linda Schele created a body of Mesoamerican research and illustrations that were essential in deciphering Mayan hieroglyphs. High-quality scans of the entire Linda Schele Drawing Collection, digitized by LACMA, may be found here: http://www.ancientamericas.org/collection/browse/29
[^4]: See the image captioned “cultura de tumaco figura jaguar” here: https://www.pinterest.com.mx/pin/452611831299609294. Over the years, I have approached my pre-Columbian art professors, a curator at the Dallas Museum of Art, and the manager of a social media account that creates informative, humorous content based on pre-Columbian works from various Latin American societies, in the hopes that one of them would have encountered the feline figure referenced in Motta’s #7. None of them had ever seen it.
[^5]:  See Gregory Tsoucalas and Markos Sgantzos, “Paul of Aegina (ca 625–690 AD), and his orthopaedic surgical reconstruction of the preternatural fingers,” _International Orthopaedics_ 41 (2017): 211–216, https://doi.org/10.1007/s00264-016-3304-2; and the image captioned “Reptilian pre columbian being with six fingers of Tumaco, Colombia” at “More significant art,” El Libertario, https://el-libertar-io.webnode.es/en/mas-arte-significativo
[^6]: Within the art historical field, provenance and attribution tend to be considered among the most important features of an artwork. In the case of pre-Columbian art, however, these aspects are hard to rely on, as high demand for objects from the ”Ancient Americas” throughout the 20th century has sparked a slew of counterfeit works that made their way into the pre-Columbian canon through museum acquisitions and private collections. For additional information on forgeries in the pre-Columbian art field, please see: Catherine Sease, “Faking pre-Columbian artifacts,” _Objects Specialty Group Postprints_  14 (2007): 146–160.

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Drawing

Andrea Dávila probes the significance of Carlos Motta’s drawing _Towards a Homoerotic Historiography #7_ (2013–2014) in reaffirming the pre-colonial presence of queer folks in Latin America.

One Thing: Tracing Fragments of Queer Desire

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Editorial

Joy Xiang (she/her) is a writer and editor, born in Shanghai and based in Tkaronto/Toronto. Her work and life engages erotics, migration, material flows, and media nostalgia and futurity. She is currently Editor at _C Magazine_. 

Our call for pitches for Kink included a question: “Could you fall in love (or lust) again [...] with this shivering world, in all its confrontations?” In the six months since we began working on this issue, this question has felt more piercing; I’ve also come to associate “kink” with a knot in my stomach and the perverse contrasts of living on a small slice of this earth amidst systems of dehumanization. Some of these contrasts are taken up in Trish Salah’s poem for Composition, which layers personal grief with present-day violence such as the recent bombings by Israel on the city of Rafah in Gaza. Yet, Salah’s roving layers manage (still, somehow) to exist alongside pinpricks of love’s existence. Motivated by kink’s imperfect definition as being against convention, this issue likewise asks what is considered acceptable. It makes me think of the past six months: a period where artists, organizers, and millions around the world took to the streets and fundamentally shifted narratives about Palestine in the eyes of larger publics—including art institutions and media platforms. In Aman Sandhu and Sahar Te’s co-written feature-in-verse, they write of “that delicious discrepancy ... when we come today and feel it yesterday, / polishing away the separation of what is happening over there and what is happening over here.” Connecting the political, erotic, and divine in broader ways, they propose, perhaps, the potential of a final union between co-conspirators. 

Another question that informed Kink also forges paths toward perverse contrasts: what can happen to the flesh? Consider, for example, how the names of many bathhouses or sex clubs are either utopic (_Oasis_) or hellish (_Torture Garden_), as if a camp shorthand for multiple realities. Similarly, it has been difficult for me to feel embodied amidst all these realities, where the everyday is subtended by global mechanisms of violence. Raven Davis and Cara Tierney’s conversation on Davis’s developing body of work, _Hard Limits, Soft Landing_, reminds us of the necessity of discomfort and pain tolerance in decolonial labour. Davis’s 
research—what Tierney calls a “critical kink practice”—looks at how precolonial impact practices were used in enlightenment and purification rituals, unveiling other ways of doing the difficult work of unpacking the oppressive structures of our shared histories and of sitting in unease, which is especially important for settlers. “With kink,” Davis writes, “we have an opportunity to deal with many kinds of pain, create different ways of pleasure, different ways of reciprocity.” eunice bélidor’s “What Is the Safe Word?” feels similarly critical in how she uses BDSM protocols of consent, boundaries, communication, negotiation, and accountability to explore how to safely navigate relationships with art institutions and each other. 

Within kink, might we find a place to continue challenging the sanctioning of some desires over others? Alexa Bunnell’s writing cruises through types of subspace—the altered, hormone-induced state a submissive might experience during a kink scene—and finds this disobedient realm as a place of formlessness, exceeding normative and extractive definitions of desire and the body. More on desire’s nefarious and external forces can be found in Erica N. Cardwell’s interview with Ja’Tovia Gary, whose film _Quiet As It’s Kept_ (2023) is a cinematic response to the sinister tensions of racial trauma and colonial pleasure in Toni Morrison’s novel _The Bluest Eye_ (1970). Gary reveals how these tensions are mediated in contemporary images and archetypes of Black womanhood, and how there is no societal accountability for anti-Blackness. Emma-Kate Guimond deftly covers Gui B.B’s baroquely staged performances, where the artist explores how debt is endured and resisted in her body—pointing to its link to eroticism. Recalling the kink practice of financial domination (where the debtor is the submissive and the collector is the Dom), Guimond incisively asks: “Is debt play helping to metabolize the violent conditions of debt dependency?” 

Meanwhile, Dana Buzzee’s practice gathers elements that suggest “subversive” sexual practices to challenge their hegemonic meanings, offering “site(s) for collective renegotiation,” as Adrien Crossman notes. Buzzee’s installations retool BDSM-associated symbols in a method akin to fan fiction and include references to queer archives, leatherdyke culture, hand-studded vinyl, leather strips that echo the forms of harnesses and swings, and fetish signs and aesthetics. In One Thing, Andrea Dávila probes the significance of Carlos Motta reaffirming the pre-colonial presence of queer folks in Latin America in his drawing _Towards a Homoerotic Historiography #7_ (2013–2014), even if its reference—a human-feline pre-Columbian sculpture—has uncertain authenticity. 

Opening the pages of Kink is Mo Glitch’s Artist Project, _proxy_. The evocative title conjures what these playful and, at times, messy dolls could be a proxy for: ourselves? Liliona Quarmyne writes tenderly of her and Mo’s connection, and how the dolls both enact and exceed human worlds: “Unwinding, enfolding, pulsing, gliding, rubbing, suctioning onto limb/curve/ flesh/plastic/colour/crack.” This tenderness feels like an earnest place to land. I think about the simultaneity of utopic and hellish realities as embodied in the seeming deviance of kink. In kink ethics, there is the practice of aftercare, which describes mutually negotiated acts of care after activities—especially ones that (re) enact hierarchical dynamics. With ideas of care in the art world now so ubiquitous that they have been coopted by neoliberal systems, we might do well to learn from the innate carnality of aftercare for our consensual and non-consensual acts toward each other (which both seem inevitable). How can we enact a kind of care that is felt like a lightning bolt through the body _and_ attuned to harm already done? Might the continued confrontation of discomfort help us feel more responsible for each other, as open vessels, even in forms of messy care and co-being? I return to the flesh. 

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Sexuality

Body

Editor Joy Xiang reflects on the issue’s theme: _Kink_.

Editorial: Kink

Feature

eunice bélidor is a curator, researcher, and writer born and based in Montreal. Her current curatorial research focuses on letter writing as creating affective archives; she is interested in the intersection of epistolary writing with care, feminism, anti-capitalism, and racial issues.

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Curatorial practice

Institutional critique

eunice bélidor uses BDSM protocols of consent, boundaries, communication, negotiation, and accountability to explore how to safely navigate relationships with art institutions and each other.

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What is the Safe Word?

Adrien Crossman is a queer and non-binary white settler artist and curator currently residing on the traditional territory of the Haudenosaunee and Anishinaabe in so-called Hamilton, ON. They are interested in the affective qualities of queerness: how queerness can be felt through specific aesthetics and sensibilities. Crossman cofounded and co-runs the online arts publication off centre and is an Assistant Professor in the School of the Arts at McMaster University.

“Treat me like a dog” is a phrase that has appeared with surprising frequency over the span of my personal and professional relationship with Dana Buzzee. The phrase—both humorous and perverse—comes from an exhibition Buzzee curated that featured me and Jane Trash, installed in the U-HALL gallery at TRUCK Contemporary Art in 2019. A collaboration between three Virgos, the show was titled “Show up for the Messiness of how you Feel so you can Better Create What you Need,” a verbose reference to a Virgoan horoscope sourced around the time of the project’s conception.

Our friendship has primarily taken place over significant geographical distance, with each reunion spurred by some form of creative collaboration. Most recently, I hosted Buzzee in my home for several days last fall, in which they laboured furiously over the intensive install leading up to their solo exhibition “a temple, a hospital, a dungeon” at Orchid Contemporary, a DIY gallery I run out of my garage in Hamilton. I’m in constant awe of Buzzee’s practice. From the meticulous work of hand-cutting and studding vinyl and leather, to the methodical considerations of materiality, to the nuanced and sophisticated exercise of elaborate and speculative world-building, Buzzee is in a realm of their own when it comes to their “philosophically pornographic” installations. These include strips of vinyl and leather that are studded and configured into the forms of harnesses and swings.

A queer artist, Buzzee relies heavily on the act of sourcing and gathering materials, both physical and ephemeral: signs, symbols, fetish aesthetics, the visual language of leatherdyke culture, objects and histories sourced from queer archives. They are concerned with the semiotics and mimetics of cultural artefacts, retooling them with the aim to resist/challenge hegemonic forms of power through catalyzing/provoking our often-unexplored desires. Buzzee’s installations act as propositions. Inspired by the architecture of sites of worship and imbued with a BDSM sensibility, these not-quite-functional apparatuses serve a fantasy purpose for their audience—objects begging to be animated through the mind rather than the body.

On a Sunday afternoon in late January, Buzzee and I had a video call to delve into the nuance and methodology behind their expansive studio practice.

__Dana Buzzee:__ Reflecting on kink in relation to my practice, I am excited about how the form of this feature is based in collaboration. It’s apt because both kink and collaboration often go hand in hand with a practice of consent. I’m interested in doing things that challenge hegemonic convention through my work and using aesthetics to cultivate a headspace that is separated from the mundane. How you decided you wanted to structure this piece, as part interview, part annotative writing, reflects the gathering-methodology within my work, but also is a collaboration of consent.

>__Adrien Crossman: You’ve told me you feel your practice is essentially engaging in fan fiction and extending that thought to all contemporary art. You’re deeply aware of the queer histories you’re in conversation with as well as your present queer community—I’m thinking about the potency of leatherdyke aesthetics, your work with lesbian/queer archives, and the exhibition text you created for your solo show “BRUISE ME SOFTLY” (2018) at Stride Gallery [Calgary, AB], in which you asked three people to write erotica. I think one was an ex…__

__DB:__ Yes, one was an ex. The catalogue was put together and designed by Areum Kim at Stride. Rather than having a single essay accompany the exhibition, we opted to reflect the form of an anthology, or an archive (which was very much where my research was at the time), and to invite three queer kin/close friends of mine to contribute.

>__AC: This process feels reflective of the ways you engage with community. With those things in mind, can you elaborate on how your studio practice engages with the broader concept of fan fiction?__

__DB:__ Yes! At the time, I didn’t see the catalogue through the lens of fan fiction, but perhaps it was a bit self-fulfilling. I really fell in love with fanfic during grad school, which in so many ways relates to the archival research I was doing into queer, feminist, and neopagan communities from the ’70s and ’80s. Fan fiction resists capitalism, and it is a labour of love to expand stories, characters, and ideas.

I love when I see someone’s art and I have no “in.” I just know it’s doing something aesthetically, and it’s engaging me, but I can’t figure out the motivations. I don’t know that any practice should be telling the viewer something conclusively; like it should be open-ended, right? I feel that good art is almost engaging in a work of fan fiction through a different modality than writing—you’re gathering these signs and symbols, and retooling them outside of the normal semiotic order to create new ideas and affects, and offering it as a site for collective renegotiation of meaning. So that’s what I meant when I was saying my work, or most work, is fan fiction.

Part of what is so interesting about fan fiction is that it’s basically a worlding exercise. It’s this textual proof that if our imaginations are sensitized correctly, we can reimagine narratives into multitudes and different futurities and possibilities. Fanfic is also absolutely rife with kink, or subversive “deviance,” and things that maybe couldn’t happen in reality. Its purpose is total fantasy.

>__AC: That makes me think of the ways MFA students can tend to lose themselves in really specific reference points. As if everything about their practice is referencing the most nuanced thing that they’ve been inside of for two to three years. A kind of hyperfixation.__

__DB:__ You can get so myopic about your research that you start to take things for granted, including what someone else might know. But that can also make it interesting—I don’t want work that explains things to me. I don’t want something didactic—I want art to be mysterious. I want art to lead with feeling and an embodied reaction before a collective reimagining of meaning occurs between the work and the audience.

>__AC: I feel like you started to answer my next question, which is if you could distil the intended feeling/ reading/experience you would like an audience to have when engaging with your work, what would it be? How would you articulate it?__

__DB:__ Whenever I make an installation, I try to keep in mind that it’s futile to make work that will make everyone feel the same thing, or that will even be interesting to everyone. That inclination is something of a liberal fantasy [fanfic?]. But I do aim to cultivate a certain affect or feeling. I am often seeking to entice my audience into imagining themselves engaging in some fantastical bodily experience through the way my work references the body, but I don’t know that it always lands.

>__AC: As a queer artist whose practice is somewhat marginalized in relation to the content that you’re working with, who is your work for?__

__DB:__ Hmm, probably you.

>__AC: [laughs] Amazing, because you don’t want it to be for everyone. I feel like it’s actually not safe to make this work for everyone.__

__DB:__ I agree. It’s a weird thing to come to terms with as someone who is producing public installations fairly regularly. It’s like the conversation around whether some spaces should be closed to people outside of particular identities/experiences, and what might that mean? It’s nuanced.

>__AC: Totally. It makes me think of how it’s not necessarily exclusive to say, “This work is not for certain people.” Those that have a similar lived experience are going to have an access point to our practices where things are going to click. It can be for other people, but they’re going to have to do some work to meet the practice where it is. For me, it’s not that I’m keeping things from a general audience, but that it would require additional work on the part of an outside audience.__

__DB:__ I feel like it ties into the mimetics of it all. The way a meme functions is that you’re in on the joke. You understand what’s being signified. You’re sensitized to it already. If it has to be explained to you, nuance is often lost. A similar thing happens with visual art. It’s not necessarily purposefully exclusive, but it’s nodding toward a certain gathering of meaning.

>__AC: Yes, because the kinds of work that you and I produce and engage with ask something of their audience, while other media in general doesn’t.__

__DB:__ That is a much better way of wording it.

>__AC: And if we relate that to fan fiction, fan fiction in itself is this marginalized genre of media. And within it, there are these pairings, is that what we call them?__

__DB:__ Ships. [^1]

>__AC: Yes, ships. These hyper-specific references ask a certain investment and labour on the part of a reader to be attuned to their worlds. If you’re a novice versus being versed in how fan-fiction websites function, where to find stuff, and possess the inner knowledge of the worlds of these stories, you’ll have a much different experience in terms of richness and depth. Which relates to contemporary art in general. How being invested in someone’s practice, like I have been in yours, makes visible the lineage and connections between bodies of work. I know this makes my experience so much richer. There’s much more to pull from.__

__DB:__ Yeah, I often talk about a methodology of gathering to describe my practice. And part of it is letting go of discrete communication and being okay that a concise read of the work isn’t possible.

>__AC: In this way your work feels very erotically charged—in reference to Audre Lorde’s definition in “Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power.”__ [^2] __The ways these objects are situated within their material, political, and contextual histories of space and time. They make me feel bothered, in a good way. __

__DB:__ I love that we both accept that Lorde has the final word on the “erotic.”

>__AC: Obviously.__

__DB:__ I do see the erotic as part of the affective work of my practice. Whether that means feeling a little physically bothered or experiencing a bothering of the imagination. My work is abstract. It’s not actually very explicit—well, maybe some of my older photo works were somewhat explicit—but it generally offers that potential, yet requires the imagination of the viewer to activate it.
Leveraging materiality is one way I try to cultivate this. For a long time, I primarily worked with leather, and now I’m employing leathersmithing techniques with plastics, which have much different connotations within the contexts of fetish, in terms of consumerism as well as kink. I’m using forms that reference the visuals of BDSM, wearables as well as implements and tools. Although I don’t want these references to function fully. I try to place invitation and implication in tension when someone is confronted with my work, but also to confuse how that might play out: “I think I'm supposed to get into this harness, but I don’t understand how, the scale is off, it seems to be built for a not-totally-possible physicality, a fantasy body.”

>__AC: We’ve talked about the fantasy body before. I’m curious about why it’s important that these objects don’t function and what’s important about the fantasy/speculative-reality body.__

__DB:__ Yeah, um, chronic illness. I mean that on a personal scale. It’s a way to work out potentials that aren’t necessarily available to me anymore because of the limits of my current body. And maybe it pushes the objects into a space that isn’t functional for anyone. I think that’s such a rich site for fantasy—surpassing reality, or reimagining reality—and it becoming something other than what we think is available to us.

>__AC: I’m thinking about the speculative nature of the fantasy body and how you talked about your work being philosophically pornographic, which I can’t stop thinking about because that terminology is accurate, but also hilarious. I think about that phrase a lot. And about the way you were talking about speculative futures and alternatives in relation to chronic illness. I think the flip side is that these objects are basically propositions. They point to desire, projection, and morality. And I think that they do something…__

__DB:__ Perverted?

>__AC: Yes. And they provoke in a way, eliciting a certain reaction that points to someone’s internal desires, or thoughts that they might think are immoral, but that live inside of them. Objects of provocation. I mean—now I’m just thinking of Bette Porter’s “Provocations” exhibition__ [^3]__—in the ways they are philosophically pornographic, the audience brings the perversity to them. At the end of the day, it’s just vinyl and metal hanging off of rafters in a garage. Yet the way that it’s structured invites a certain kind of discourse, even though it’s just material. And so I wonder if you have any thoughts about the way your work functions in this current moment of moral panic.__

__DB:__ When there is a strong [moral] reaction to my art, I’m often struck by the irony of the situation, because its meaning is generally relegated to the propositional. Part of what’s on offer in my work is perversion and engagement with the taboo through the semiotics of kink, or subversive sexual practices, but without necessarily being explicit. My work engages with these themes: and how they intersect with desire, longing, and fantasy, and how they function as a community practice, a collective reimagining exercise.

[^1]: Derived from the word “relationship,” “ships” or “shipping” refers to the support or desire by fans for a romantic or sexual relationship to develop between characters.
[^2]: Audre Lorde, “Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power,” in _Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches_ (Trumansburg, NY: Crossing Press, 1984), 53–59.
[^3]: “Provocations” was an art exhibition featuring both IRL and fictional artwork, curated by protagonist Bette Porter in season 1 of the TV show _The L Word_ (2004).


Dana Buzzee is a visual artist and arts educator currently based on Treaty 7 land in southern Alberta. Rooted in queer hauntology and materialism, Buzzee’s interdisciplinary practice engages an exploration of consumer fetishism tied to extractive capitalist economies, serving as a narrative medium for deep-time storytelling and speculative futurity.

Speaker

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Fetish Aesthetics and Fan Fiction in Dana Buzzee's Philosophically Pornographic Practice


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.


The author Toni Morrison built a prolific literary legacy around the sinister dichotomy of racial trauma and colonial pleasure. Her masterpiece _The Bluest Eye_ (1970) elucidates this glaring split in the book’s protagonist, Pecola Breedlove, whose desire for acceptance through whiteness ultimately destroys her. My long-time friend, filmmaker Ja’Tovia Gary, revisited these tensions in her latest film, the unnerving, insurgent project _Quiet As It’s Kept_ (2023). By centring _The Bluest Eye_, Gary explores the contemporary effects of racial trauma particularly when Blackness is both an embodied experience and a mediated image.

The seeds for her project were planted in the terrifying early months of the COVID-19 pandemic, when Gary and I exchanged lengthy texts as life rafts—sporadic check-ins on how the other was staying afloat despite the isolation and public health emergency. These texts eventually turned into hours-long phone calls, from my kitchen to hers, ruminating on books, films, and visions for an imagined future. Gary revealed her preliminary plans for a deep meditation on Breedlove in _The Bluest Eye_, in connection to archetypes of Black womanhood in relation to white minstrelsy, spanning from TikTok to ’90s rapper Lil’ Kim. _Quiet As It’s Kept_ made its Canadian debut at the Toronto International Film Festival in 2023, and is now an award-winning addition to Gary’s oeuvre, aligning with her signature purpose of renegotiating her audience’s relationship to Black visual cultures. The interview that follows explores the kind of Black femme archetypal images that circulate in Gary’s film, with subtle references to our pandemic chats.

>__Erica Cardwell: In our conversations during fall 2020, you shared with me that you returned to _The Bluest Eye_ during early pandemic lockdowns. With this revisit, you listened to the audiobook in which Toni Morrison reads. How did your new film begin to take shape through these re-readings?__

__Ja’Tovia Gary:__ This work germinated from conversations with critic and curator Hilton Als. He encouraged me to think through Morrison’s oeuvre cinematically. Before this, I definitely had fantasies of perhaps adapting Morrison, but have since cooled on the idea of a traditional adaptation. Morrison’s prose is so densely poetic. Her work is so well-known, and I don’t relish the idea of carrying that level of responsibility for translating the work so closely. With _Quiet As It’s Kept_, I am very clear that this is not an adaptation; it is a cinematic response to the source material. I am considering the major themes of the novel, its characters, their behaviours and motivations. I am also offering a contemporary filmic rejoinder. The production and post-production phases of the film occurred throughout late 2020 to 2022, much of it during the acutely distressing period of COVID-19 lockdowns. I started by revisiting the novel, choosing this time to have Morrison read the novel to me via audiobook. This is something I strongly recommend to folks. If you’ve got plans to start a Morrison novel that has an audiobook option, try that. Let her read it to you. She has a background in theatre performance and has one of the most soothing yet arresting voices of all time.

>__EC: The colour blue, in the pockets of animation appearing in the film, engages with the sinister subtext of blue eyes, elevating what I consider to be a secondary consciousness at play—also prevalent in the footage of Black women and Black children “speaking in tongues” and Holy Ghost scenes. How would you describe these elements and how they refer to Morrison’s _The Bluest Eye_?__

__JG:__ A playful consciousness feels like a great entry point to describe the blue direct-animation technique that recurs throughout the film. I see this element as the fascia that holds the disparate parts of the work together. It is a muscle, or a connective tissue, tightening and loosening depending on where it is placed. This is 16 mm film stock that has been hand-painted. The animation alternately takes the shape of an eye, invoking the nazar or protection against the evil eye associated with Islamic and many ancient Eastern cultures, and an abstract wave pattern—calling upon the fundamental transformative power of water. Operating both as a formal and conceptual device, its recurrence grounds the work and provides the viewer with a guide-post or familiarizing visual. As a filmmaker, I am able to spiral deep into associative clips, interviews, archival moments, etc., and this blue motif holds us together. It is part of the choral refrain that organizes the improvisation. Conceptually, it highlights or makes plain a space that might need healing or attention. The blue also serves as a shield to block or hide the eyes, refusing the gaze while calling attention to it.

>__EC: Lil’ Kim is presented as an archetype in the film—a dark-skinned Black woman with long blonde hair and blue eyes—caught between the two proxies of the white gaze. Assimilated yet still cast off, her subjectivity is rarely engaged with. You include interview footage that displays her more vulnerable side. At what point did Lil’ Kim arrive to you as a reference point, perhaps even prior to making the film?__

__JG:__ Kimberly Jones was among the first figures that I engaged with when I began conceptualizing the piece. Her, Shirley Temple, and Morrison herself. Kim for me is emblematic of so much, the ferocity and tenderness of Black womanhood encapsulated in such a small package. She is iconic and a major creative forerunner that I often feel is forgotten about. Kim also illustrates some of the more disconcerting points of discourse around what we call “colourism.” And let me be clear, neither the film nor my comments here are an attack on Kim. In fact, I see the film as very much an argument in defence of Kimberly Jones. I find that she has often been scapegoated whenever we want to discuss internalized anti-Blackness or self-hatred. On social media folks are quick to comment on how she was once so beautiful. They ask, “Why did she do that to herself?” or “Why doesn’t she love herself?” This suspends any and all critical thought around collective responsibility and how anti-Blackness permeates literally every aspect of our lives, most especially the entertainment industry. They remove the responsibility of the community and society writ large in the destruction of Black women and girls’ self-esteem.

Kim didn’t just wake up one morning and decide she was going to completely restructure her face. What conversations, encounters, and experiences in her home, neighbourhood, romantic and business relationships brought her to that point? These questions made me think of Pecola, the central character in Morrison’s early text. Morrison asked herself what would make a young Black girl decide that she needed blue eyes. What do blue eyes represent for her? Morrison provides the answer over the course of the story by carefully revealing the hurt and harm present in Pecola’s family life and the culpability of the individuals that make up the community in which she belongs: “But since why is difficult to handle, one must take refuge in how.” [^1] We begin to approach an understanding of the how by examining the community, and the folks around Pecola who made her feel unlovable and ugly. Those who worked to obliterate her soul and body. The onus does not simply rest on the little Black girl. We must examine the family, the school, the “Black community,” the white folks who have access to her, and all those who handle her recklessly and without care. For me, Kim represents a communal call for us to think deeper, more critically and compassionately, about power and collective accountability. It’s easy for us to simply say, “Oh she hates herself.” It’s much more difficult for us to ask, “Why?”

>__EC: I want to touch upon the image of the marigold in your mouth in _Quiet As It’s Kept_, and how you’ve begun placing yourself within your works. Could you describe this journey? Why was it important for viewers to engage with your image?__

__JG:__ It has always been really important for me not only to include my own body and likeness in the work, but also to “show my hand.” This might include: a style of editing that draws attention to itself and moves against the Hollywood style of continuity editing, the use of my voice, and other stylistic and aesthetic choices that point to an actual maker behind the camera. Doing so allows me to subvert the preponderance of so-called objective filmmaking by asserting a clear point of view and literally pointing to the manipulation inherent in filmmaking.

I’ve been including my body in my work since my undergraduate experiments in film. In 2011, I made a short work called _Deconstructing Your Mother_, which is the point of departure for my current memoir work. I am featured in that film via interview and early archival footage. With my later works like _The Giverny Document_ (2019) and _Quiet As It’s Kept_, performance and staging come into practice, as I use these tools within an autoethnographic context. I am attempting to draw connections between my lived experiences and the concepts and ideas articulated in the works. For _Quiet As It’s Kept_, that includes notions around beauty, colourism, madness, duality, artistic process, innocence, and intimacy. How does my body lend credence or perhaps invoke dubiety in conjunction with the arguments presented, bringing both a tension and a sense of corroboration? My image is important in the work because I am the vessel through which the ideas are filtered. These are subjective films shaped by my voice and life as a contemporary Black woman in America and all that entails. I am not attempting to present myself as a neutral party, removed from what I am observing. There are moments where I pull back on editorializing to let the audience come to their own conclusions. But make no mistake about it, my works are quite literally meanderings through my mind. These are dreamscapes and internal conversations made manifest for the viewing public. My body, just like all of the components of the film—be they archival, interview, or performance footage—is operating on multiple registers. The moment with the marigold is multipronged in meaning.

The marigold is one of the central image motifs in my film and Morrison’s book. In the novel, the lack of the marigolds’ growth is attributed to the horrific defilement of Pecola. In the film, I answer this with a surplus of marigolds. I am seen luxuriating with a lone bloom. I run it over my face softly, I stuff it into my mouth, I push it back into the dirt. The gestures run the spectrum between tenderness and a kind of veiled abjection. Additionally, the marigolds make an appearance whenever we see Morrison. I am quite literally giving her her flowers. Marigolds have been used in rituals to honour the dead, as offerings for ancestors. The flower has also been used for its protective and healing properties. Calendula, or the pot marigold, is used in salves; it is a regenerative and restorative flower.

>__EC: The minstrelsy footage you use from TikTok videos introduces the chilling dynamics of _The Bluest Eye_ in the contemporary sense. It was jarring to watch several of these videos in a row— the hairstyles and tones of voice. Dr. Kokahvah Zauditu-Selassie, African American literature scholar and African spiritualist, also states in an interview clip, “You have to kill out the part to you rooted in reality where you’ll never be anything.” Could you share insights on the consequences upon our double consciousness today?__

__JG:__ The kind of contemporary minstrelsy those TikTok videos represent is really insidious in my mind. I think if you are a young person and you lack the proper historical context and understanding, it might be easy for you to dismiss this type of performance as something harmless or even flattering. But I see these performances that pervade social media as flattened tropes and examples of erasure. It’s a kind of body-snatching that renders Blackness a costume, something that can be put on or taken off at will depending on what the wearer has to gain from the mask at any given moment. For Black people that brings questions and definitions around authenticity to the fore. What does it mean to be Black now that the algorithm is so powerfully at play? Is it your lack of access or affected speech patterns? Is it the curve, colour, and length of your acrylic nails, or your recipe for gumbo? With so many unseasonable invitations to this fictitious cookout being handed out at random in the comment sections, I wonder if it is well past time to begin thinking about the boundaries and contours of Blackness, and how it seems to be so incredibly permeable to outside influence.

There are Black folks, both “conservative” and “progressive,” who think acts of gatekeeping Blackness don’t serve us. I would argue neither does our status as open and available flesh, cultures, practices, traditions, and creative outputs literally free for the taking for everyone to capitalize off of. There are no boundaries around Blackness, except for the ones implemented by whiteness; the one-drop rule comes to mind. Conversely, you know what else is heavily policed, scrutinized, and rigorously gatekept? Well, whiteness, of course. Not everyone can jump that fence. Questions around Black culture make me think of Hortense Spillers and her assertion that Black culture is a critical culture. That it, and we, exist in opposition to the dominant culture that aims to expropriate, exploit, and erase. If we lose sight of that criticality in favour of recognition and incorporation, well then, we are in a dangerous place now, aren’t we?

[^1]: Toni Morrison, _The Bluest Eye_ (New York: Knopf, 1994), 3.

Ja’Tovia Gary is a filmmaker and multidisciplinary artist working across documentary, avant-garde video art, sculpture, and installation. She is deeply concerned with re-memory and employs a rigorous interrogation and apprehension of the archive in much of her work. Gary seeks to trouble notions of objectivity and neutrality in non-fiction storytelling by asserting a Black feminist subjectivity, and applies what scholar and cultural critic bell hooks terms “an oppositional gaze” as both maker and critical spectator of moving image works. Her films and installations serve as reparative gestures for the distorted histories through which Black life is often viewed. Gary has exhibited at the Hammer Museum, The Museum of Modern Art, The Whitney Museum, MoMA PS1, Dallas Museum of Art, Centre Pompidou, and more; and has received fellowships from the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Creative Capital, Field of Vision, and Guggenheim. She is represented by Paula Cooper Gallery in New York City, Galerie Frank Elbaz in Paris, and WME for Film & Television.

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Race

Mass media

Erica N. Cardwell interviews filmmaker Ja’Tovia Gary about her 2023 film _Quiet As It’s Kept_. Their conversation explores the film as a cinematic response to the dual tensions of racial trauma and colonial pleasure in Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye (1970), and how these tensions are mediated in contemporary images and archetypes of Black womanhood.


Sinister Pleasure: Interview with Ja'Tovia Gary

Aman Sandhu is an artist and writer working between Montreal and Glasgow. His installations often include drawing, moving image, sculpture, and text. He considers them as ensembles of objects that come into view through improvisation.

Sahar Te is an artist and writer whose practice exists at the intersection of text, installation, and time-based media. Her interest in media, politics, literature, theatre, and acoustics inform her work. Te’s engagements span language and poetics, aesthetics and semiotics, social dynamics and inter-species, and oral histories.

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_Note: the print layout of this text is meaningful. To honour that, we've chosen to upload it as images. [Read or download the PDF.](https://strapi-uploads-c-mag-prod.s3.ca-central-1.amazonaws.com/C157_Sandhu_Te_6ca56a40e2.pdf)_

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Sensory

Aman Sandhu and Sahar Te’s co-written experimental feature connects the political, erotic, and divine to reflect on the physicality of protest. 


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Our Third Sun

Raven Davis is an Anishinaabe, 2-Spirit artist and educator, born in Michi Saagiig Territory, Toronto, ON. Davis investigates land-based and archival research, with calls to action, healing, and works authenticized by lived and intergenerational experience. Davis utilizes movement, visuals, and sound/media in their practice. For over 30 years, Davis has advocated for equitable, IBPOGM art and liberated futures.

Cara Tierney (they/them) is a transdisciplinary artist and educator who lives/works on unceded Anishinaabe Algonquin land. A settler of Scottish-Irish-Italian descent, their work investigates the way meaning is structured in, around, and through the body. They are oriented toward building more equitable and sustainable futures.

#####This conversation began in the summer of 2023 when we intentionally started meeting to discuss and co-write about Raven’s research and work. Though the piece takes the shape of a traditional interview, it is the result of an involved and lengthy dialogic exchange including recorded video meetings, conversations, and a lot of collaborative writing and editing.

Raven Davis’s practice has a long-standing critical engagement with power writ large—at the level of the state, and at the level of the individual—in the context of the historic and ongoing Canadian colonial project. With a desire to reimagine kink spaces through a critical lens, Davis’s new interdisciplinary work in development, _Hard Limits, Soft Landing_, harnesses the power dynamics of queer kink in an attempt to reveal the colonial history of kink culture, and recruit its varying dynamics in the service of social transformation. Simultaneously a critique and an opportunity for dialogic exchange and pleasure, Davis’s work draws from the power structures of kink practices to deliver us into visceral and socially reciprocal interactions—which can be meaningful tools for decolonial and restorative practices.

>__Cara Tierney: Your creative practice and interest in kink reach pretty far back. In the interest of situating us, can you offer an example of the way these interests started to dovetail for you?__

__Raven Davis:__ In 2022, I made a series of photographs that are really the culmination of a longer process of conversations and relationships I’d been exploring. The piece is titled _Ondaadizi_, which translates to _“They Are Born”_ in Anishinaabemowin, and is a word that Alan Corbiere, a remarkable language teacher, shared with me in 2023. A few years previously, I sat down with artist Brandon Hoax to discuss our work and we quickly found out there were a lot of similarities in how we were exploring cultural materials and kink: he was working with ribbon and I had been working with deer-hide and maanomin. He offered to collaborate on a ribbon harness for me to activate. And it was this really beautiful moment, because in sharing these stories, we built trust and connection, which ultimately led to the creation of _Ondaadizi_.

The original plan for the harness grew out of a performance I conceptualized for Nocturne 2021, wherein I’d activate the harness within a large sculptural ribbon work Brandon had made, set to an ambient, transcendental soundscape composed by Nicholas Murray—an incredible musician and dear friend based out of Toronto. In the end, I used photo and video to document a carefully performed movement of waking up the harness within Brandon’s work.

>__CT: _Hard Limits, Soft Landing_ picks up on this creative investigation of kink and brings it into yet another of your practices: anti-oppression work…__

__RD:__ Yes! As someone who has spoken on a number of human rights issues, and also has a practice of delivering professional EDI (equity, diversity, and inclusion) training, one day I was thinking, “This work is so hard. It’s so painful, and so much harm is even done in it.” You know? In terms of how people receive the information, and how the information is processed within them. Some people cry, some feel guilty, or get angry; some people turn their heads, and some react punitively by ostracizing me from future opportunities. And I realized that the work to unpack a lot of these difficult moments of addressing our shared histories requires a level of stamina, and a level of unease, and unfortunately, pain tolerance.

So, understanding that discomfort and pain tolerance are actually necessary components of this labour led me to wonder what contexts might lend themselves to ways we can talk about power that’s also pleasurable. And I immediately thought about the potentials inherent in kink practices.

But we can’t do this work in a kink context without first being critical and acknowledging that kink, in a generalized sense, does not have a great track record. The terminology itself is absurdly outdated. And like sports team mascots and team names that have to be changed, the whole terminology for BDSM kink culture would benefit from some critical revisions, which I hope to create.

>__CT: So a critical kink practice…?__

__RD:__ Absolutely! You know, flogging wasn’t always done for punishment. Often it was practiced for enlightenment. It was used for purification, for ritual, for sacrifice, for honouring non-human and celestial beings. At a certain point the specific cultural understandings of these practices were eclipsed by the dominant culture. And for some, they were codified as penance and punishment while being simultaneously incorporated into programs of colonial expansion, during the multiple slave trades, and alongside the dispossession of Indigenous peoples globally.

So I am interested in exploring kink history, spaces, and practices, to open, outward, the conversations on identity, power, and domination that elicit reactions of emotional constriction. What I mean is that while we’ve become more outspoken and nuanced in our ability to name and describe the systems of domination and their attendant mechanisms of oppression, it often feels even more taboo to do so—just as the discourse on justice has been amplified, so too have the consequential stakes of taking such a stance, and the silencing mechanisms have become more aggressive. My research shows that flagellation was also a method for opening oneself, to be able to receive information. Though I’m still heavily steeped in a research phase, I’m ultimately looking for ways to create these openings in a creative contemporary context, where we might reach back to harness how those gestures, rituals, sounds, and physical impact practices— historically understood as mechanisms for spiritual enlightenment—might allow us to access knowledge and strength to continue to do this difficult work.

>__CT: From what you’ve shared with me, you’ve been approaching this from a number of perspectives. Can you briefly describe some of the ways that you are studying kink practices?__

__RD:__ I’m essentially visiting kink hubs like San Francisco and Berlin to study queer kink culture scenes and archives. I’m watching technique. I’m watching protocol. I am looking at how kink furniture has been created, what materials have been used, the ergonomics, and how, in some cases, the human body itself has been used as furniture. I’m applying that to my own designs for _Hard Limits, Soft Landing_, and I am considering everything from lighting and flooring to sound, outfits, and tools. Although I began drafting designs of this furniture in 2015, I will have a few prototypes to test by the end of this spring. Methodology is pivotal to this work.

I am researching through a lens of trying to understand power dynamics like: what are the demographics? Who is taking a more dominant or submissive role? Who’s in the room, and who isn’t? How do people experience the space? And what does consent look like in these spaces? So one tangible example of how I anticipate the project enacting its critical stance is to overturn normative kink practices that fetishize certain kinds of bodies while erasing others—specifically racialized and disabled people.

>__CT: When you allude to archival research, is there a particular historical thread you are following?__

__RD:__ Well I’m currently researching a lot about the way post-WWII leather subculture was initiated by soldiers in Germany. I’m keen to understand not only the way contemporary kink practices and aesthetics retain both the markers and ideologies of the “old guard” military, but the way this history is tied to state control of homosexuality and the way Canada’s gay purges share a historic lineage with contemporary kink practices. The most visible through lines from WWII to the Canadian purges, and even present in the mid-/late-20th century gay rights movements, is the deliberate targeting of gender nonconformity, felt most intensely by Indigenous, Black, and People of the Global Majority (IBPOGM).

I’m seeking to untangle the practices that have become kink affiliated, such as flagellation, which was originally a part of ritual: to gain enlightenment, access healing, express penance, and receive spiritual teaching or direction. What would it mean for kink to be spiritually informed, and oriented toward intentional social transformation? What would it mean to cultivate pleasure within the difficult conversations our contemporary moment is calling us to have?

>__CT: Can you give us a sense of how this research is informing the development of _Hard Limits, Soft Landing_?__

__RD:__ I’ve designed sculptural installation pieces such as flogging benches, poles, frames, and a series of instruments and “reconciliation” tools. I’m focusing on the texture of experience—smell, touch, and sound. For example, if a person is bent over a flogging bench, I’m exploring the affective outcomes of using sound at certain frequencies to support healing and restoration of the relationship between myself and the person being flogged. This lends to my desire to embrace kink as a modality of healing, reciprocity, and connection.

I want to call back some of these ways we used impact to create openings in our hearts. Rebuilding the trust, through consent, and fostering spaces to encounter taboo ultimately is an equalizing gesture in our society. Instead of “dungeons,” these spaces would be portals of embodied practices of safe and reciprocal pleasure, sensation, healing, and yes, at times, a bit of pain. Hahaha!

But I’m also strategically targeting the somatic benefits of impact play, and sensation play, and the way our bodies receive physiological benefits from stimulation in certain areas, like activating the vagus nerve and sympathetic nervous systems. And I’m keenly aware of the very specific kind of interplay between touch and perception that occurs in kink spaces. Flogging and impact isn’t always applied with full force—and the interplay of varying forces, in relation to cognitive processing, becomes a rich site for an embodied understanding of power. What I am pointing to is a complex choreography between the force (or gentleness) with which someone experiences impact, and the psychological experience of receiving that impact or not, and the internal negotiation of expectation, fear, pleasure, and limits.

>__CT: It sounds like part of the work that grows out of this research recognizes the mutability of sexual practices not only to untangle but to create new possibilities for healing… to move the viewer to reflect on consent, and complicity, with regard to settler colonialism, and ultimately reconciliation.__

__RD:__ Indeed, the performance space becomes an arena where we can hold the complexities of our collective histories, address questions of power, dominance, and consent, and unpack the stakes of witnessing a subject that is seen as taboo in mainstream culture. Bringing kink power relations into a gallery setting, where the frame is designed to reference Indigenous-settler relationships, reveals some of the mechanisms of the way colonial structures sustain themselves through passive complicity. Where an initial reaction to witnessing somebody being flogged, or paddled, or slapped in a gallery might be jarring, it can prompt a productive internal questioning. In fostering these kinds of inner ruptures, where colonial violence and its attendant modalities of complicity are laid bare, this can be a place of healing.

>__CT: I appreciate that your understanding of the performance space doesn’t just include the experience of the person who is performing with you, but the experiences of the people witnessing the action.__

__RD:__ Yes, I ultimately hope that people walk away with not only a different understanding of how kink can be used, but perhaps a more nuanced relationship to power and settler responsibilities. If anything, I’m being extremely cautious in the process and lead-up about how I invite volunteers and witnesses to be in that position.

>__CT: Yes, you’ve mentioned consent a few times. What is the lead-up and what shapes the relationship with the participants you invite into the performance space with you?__

__RD:__ Consent constitutes a large part of my research. I’m studying many different kinds of consent forms for sex parties, spas/bath houses, and BDSM spaces. I am exploring things like word choice, the contractual duration of consent, and the safeguards that preserve agency and give people the option to modify consent at any moment.

And I’m approaching it from the context of what’s happened here in Canada. There was no consent in the ceding of Indigenous land, or when Indigenous children were, and continue to be, taken away. There was no consent to physically move whole communities of Indigenous people into segregated reserves. There was no consent when they forcibly displaced Africville or Membertou. You know, consent has failed in so many ways within our histories. So I’m framing it in relation to self-determination. We’ve recently learned that when the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP) was being crafted, Canada worked with Australia to weaken the draft and make self-determination conditional. [^1] The colonial state unilaterally advocating to minimize the rights of Indigenous people at a global legislative level sustains the original power imbalance and violation of consent of the original treaties.

My approach to consent forms is to develop them in collaboration, and founded on reciprocity. And I’m considering what it would mean to have the consent form projected into the performance space, on a large scale, to exist as a part of the spatial experience.

This conversation around consent in a kink practice is really important, and the act of visually blowing up the consent form destabilizes an oversimplified read of the interpersonal power dynamics being played out in front of you. The people who are participating can stop me at any point, and just shut the whole thing down. So in order to survive and exist, the entire performance not only requires an ongoing attunement to consent, but a heightened degree of trust.

>__CT: Yes—trust is essential in allowing us to be vulnerable with one another—particularly given the discomfort so many feel when trying to open themselves up for these cross-community dialogues. Can you perhaps speak about the way you propose to use kink to activate physical sensations of “discomfort” to deal with social discomfort?__

__RD:__ Well, moving that pain to pleasure, to joy, to satisfaction, to compassion is a way we can hold complicated conversations by shifting the balance away from language. Experiencing pain doesn’t mean you don’t also feel pleasure. In this context, that impact, or that sensation play, can be pleasurable for the person receiving it. This situation invites and recognizes discomfort differently, and becomes a structure that acknowledges discomfort in a way that perhaps makes it more liveable, or gives that reaction a frame to help it make sense—this can move us closer to connection and rebuilding trust.

With kink, we have an opportunity to deal with many kinds of pain, create different ways of pleasure, different ways of reciprocity. To strike different power dynamics. When we have conversations about settler responsibility, self-determination, the TRC, and MMIWG2S, it is going to take a lot of time, and it’s going to require a lot of discomfort. And so, I’m replicating that, within these spaces, where people may feel discomfort and/ or pleasure, and leave with a deeper personal reflection of how power plays out in their lives.

[^1]: Brett Forester, “Canada led efforts to weaken original UN Indigenous rights declaration,” CBC News, January 15, 2024, https://www.cbc.ca/news/indigenous/canada-australia-un-indigenous-rights-declaration-1.7080734

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Colonialism

Raven Davis and Cara Tierney discuss Davis’s titular developing body of work. Through what Tierney calls a “critical kink practice,” the two discuss how Davis’s research on pre-colonial impact practices unpacks the oppressive structures of shared colonial histories.

Hard Limits, Soft Landing

Alexa Bunnell is an emerging artist, writer, and fermenter based in Mohkinstsís.

I lie there shivering, open mouth breathing heavily. It’s a full moon and the light pours onto my bed from my east-facing window; the white highlights contrast with the deep blue shadows that show the contours of your chest. You place a hand over my mouth, pinching my nose. My core tenses in a series of pulsations; I shudder, and you, in response, smile. My skin under your grasp is a thousand things, a good animal on wet sheets, a shivering tongue held out, ready for you, a yearner immobile. Heart pulsing, held between two still lungs, I wait for the right moment to disobey you, to break your hold. You take your hand away and I gasp. Words evade my throat and I let my tongue dangle to welcome you in, drool dripping from my chin. Inwardly, everything is still. Like sitting in the dark with a single candle for light, the darkness around us motionless and reticent.

Subspace is slippery to convey (slippery like between my legs). Within kink communities, subspace is the altered headspace that a submissive can experience during a scene, a floating, trance-like feeling induced by a flood of adrenaline, cortisol, and endorphins. In mathematics, it is a space wholly contained in another space, or whose points are all held within another. In reality, subspace is difficult to illustrate when not completely in its grasp. After all, like art, subspace is meant to exceed words. _Shoving my face into a pillow, trying to fantasize about myself as simultaneously an object and a succubus, an eater of pleasure and something to be acted upon_. In those moments, trying to heave my thoughts to the front of my brain is nearly impossible. I’ve typed out hundreds of words in an effort to evoke those experiences, only to realize that every sentence sounds cheesy as fuck. (I send you a text while writing this: “i can sit in the unknown.”)

And yet I continue to try new words. When I’m floating, my attachment to the finite is only grounded by your touches, a whip running down a thigh, fingers pressing down my tongue. I try words from Maddie Alexander’s writing for Dana Buzzee’s exhibition “BRUISE ME SOFTLY” (2018): “Tap. Two breaths. Hit. Another breath. The second my circulation cuts off. Two seconds. I’m not in my body anymore, this room.” [^1] My copy of the publication is covered in terracotta clay from my old studio and sweat stains.

Subspace creates and presents to me the ways my queer, non-binary, mentally ill desires can exist as outside, as other, as wholly within another place. Subspace weaves together desireful interoception with unruly yearning. I love feeling like I exceed the inherent conditions of my body (breasts, hip dips, genetic preconditions to madness, substance abuse, and cancer). When I no longer have a name, a gender, a corporeal form. As an animal, as a dreamer, as un-human, my desire is unwieldy now, bratty, and defiant. The disobedience of subspace becomes a place through which desire might be considered outside of colonial, extractive, and capitalist designations. Artworks and practices that do the same might also create their own subspace.

In Han Kang’s novel _The Vegetarian_ (2007), the main character Yeong-hye stops eating meat in an attempt to end a series of violent, bloody dreams. Ridiculed and persecuted for her choice through various patriarchal systems, her progression into a vegetal state becomes a form of resistance to the violence inflicted upon her. Her transformation is at times unnerving, at times ecstatic. Yeong-hye slowly stops eating altogether, whispering to her sister with a smile that she no longer needs to eat, and only has to gather light through photosynthesis. She transforms into a tree, attempting to root her hands deep in the earth and grow flowers from her splayed legs. Yeong-hye’s retreat inside of herself is a denial of the historical, able-bodied search for embodiment and resistance. Her increasingly tree-like existence perturbs and shifts her family’s modes of oppression (and thus their violence). Her transformation brings into question her role as a woman and more expansively: a human—she’s removed from the expected (outward) aliveness needed to exploit her.

The red paperback cover of _The Vegetarian_ lies splayed out on my desk, the spine arched between the front and back cover. Brightness, blinding compared to the darkness that had enveloped us: a sunny (hot, too hot) day. I sit patiently in front of my laptop, knees held up to my chest, answering questions about how I lack the desire to sleep and find that everything feels a little raw right now. That my body feels like a machine, that I no longer need to eat to sustain myself, _just have to keep moving_. Two psychiatrists look out at me in small boxes on my screen, bending their heads to take notes as I answer each question.

Of the same name as Han’s novel, TJ Shin’s exhibition “The Vegetarian” at The Bows (2022) featured a musky, heady scentscape. Shin transfected their DNA into an invasive species of mugwort. Due to its Western designation as invasive (and for fear that this new strain of mugwort could invade the very walls of the lab), Shin was instructed by the lab to kill the plants. The artist ground the dead mugwort and worked it into incense, along with cinchona, oak, and sandalwood. _Untitled (100 days of solemnity)_ (2022) was a wooden box filled with white earth in the centre of the gallery. Shin used incense to trace the shape of a human nervous system into the earth. Every day of the exhibition, a nerve bundle of incense was burned, filling the small space with a woody and earthy scent. In this burning, the transfection was reanimated, swirling in visitors’ lungs, carrying itself outside the gallery walls, clinging to my hair, clothing, and fingernails. The scent has haunted me since, evidently, as I continue to write for over a year now about its unruliness that clung to my hair.

You press down on my throat with two palms on either side, thumbs cradling my jaw. Pause. I hold breath within me, air that has passed through your mouth, through the mouths of hundreds of other kin. Stillness overcomes me as my lungs sit immobile. To withhold my breath is to withhold the centre of my existence—a function so critical to the body that it is housed near the brainstem. Perhaps you don’t deserve my breathing. Perhaps I’m sitting still to show you the value of my air. Perhaps it’s a reminder to feel, to sit in darkness. Perhaps it’s an attempt to get closer to becoming unbodied, exceeded again. (Remember, you have to _eat_.)

Shin’s transfection of mugwort is an echo of Yeonghye’s transformation into a tree, a transing that questions the boundaries of humanity and, as such, the limitations of such definitions of humanness. Later, I’ll read curator and writer Danni Shen’s words on the show, about how this transformation is the “[annihilation of] the possessive self, a gateway into other ways of living and being.” [^2] As Shin and the mugwort’s DNA burned, it formed into smoke, into a scent that could not be controlled by designations created by the lab, Western science, or even the gallery. The scent floated with me afterward, continuing this defiance, and forming a subspace around my body. (Or was it _inside the body_, whirling in my lungs?) The incense smoke is bratty, refusing not to be shared (or taken?), reminding me of the disobedient gasps of air I take between your squeezing hands.

A head lies down on a table, clear tubing running from the nose, wrapping around the ears and down, away and out of sight of the camera shot. The face of performance artist Bob Flanagan is slightly distorted from lying down, his cheeks flattened and pushed upward toward his eyes, his skin distended. An excerpt from the documentary _Sick: The Life and Death of Bob Flanagan, Supermasochist_ (1997), _Death Monologue_ (date unknown) [^3] features Flanagan speaking about his sadomasochist practice. His monologue is peppered with dry humour and heaving breath, his inevitable death a punchline. The audience laughs in the background. Standing close together in front of the projection, I lean over to my friend, place my cheek on her shoulder, and whisper: “I feel like everyone in that room loves him.” Every so often, he sits up to cough, his face disappearing from the frame. With each cough, phlegm rattles from his lungs to his mouth, and his face returns to the screen redder than before.

Flanagan’s submissive masochism is a defiant, desireful subspace created within his chronic illness. At the time of filming, he was the oldest living person with cystic fibrosis, a condition characterized by chronic inflammation of the lungs, leading to a build-up of phlegm and mucus. In Flanagan’s performances, he often recited poetry or sang playful songs while carrying out sadomasochistic acts (which famously included nailing his penis to a board while singing Leonard Nimoy’s version of “If I Had a Hammer” in the 1989 piece _Nailed_). Flanagan’s eroticism revises a multitude of expectations. Within his subspace, there is autonomy. His self-objectification of his disabled body—thin, scarred, and often hooked up to oxygen—rejects the view of the disabled body as without pleasure and desire. Flanagan is seen as an object in the installation _Visiting Hours_ (1994), hoisted above a hospital bed, feet in the air. His dominant Sheree Rose describes his objecthood in an interview: “When Bob goes up in the air, he goes motionless and quiet, and so does the room. He’s a real person, but at the same time he’s also this object hanging there, and playing with that concept makes people really uncomfortable.” [^4] I am reminded of scholar Eunjung Kim’s words in “Unbecoming Human: An Ethics of Objects”: “The moments of object-becoming yield an opportunity—one that is perhaps counterintuitive yet potentially generative—to fashion an ethics of nonpurposive existence.” [^5] Flanagan’s object-becoming is manifested through his submissive actions. When confronted with this manifestation, the audience’s expectations are troubled in a multitude of ways, for instance by challenging ableist assumptions of sickness and illness, presenting Flanagan’s embodied wilfulness as stillness and objecthood, and refusing patriarchal presentations of masculinity through licentious play.

Another refusal that emerges is Dayna Danger’s _Kinship Masks_ (2016–ongoing), a series of beaded fetish masks. Soft, dark leather is covered in black matte beads that trace the curves of the head. Each mask features a different emblem or pattern created in collaboration with the intended wearer. Some masks cover the wearer’s eyes, while others allow eye contact between layers of beading. The leather pouts out around the mouth, revealing a place to moan, laugh, gasp, and lick. The masks are designated as the personal belongings of the wearer, as opposed to art objects. They are community objects, each requiring intensive labour, made in reciprocity with Danger’s Two-Spirit kin and community.

I love these masks. I think of Maggie Nelson writing about A.L. Steiner’s installation _Puppies & Babies_ (2012), delighting in queer family-making that makes messy the erotic experience coupled with child-rearing. [^6] I wrote in the margins of my copy of Nelson’s _The Argonauts_, “Could baby fever be queer?” Similarly, Danger’s masks posit that community-making and reciprocal exchange can be created through BDSM, kink, and subspace. They reject fetishization through Two-Spirit self-representation, dissolving historical colonial representations with consent and (after)care at the project’s centre. _Shoving a hot pink dildo down my throat to shut me up feels best when you ask me to ask for it_. They transgress the notion that BDSM exists only in the bedroom, offering up kink as a useful tool for relation-building and healing; for future-making.

I often dwell on the “desire” entry in “A Glossary of Haunting” (2013) by Eve Tuck and C. Ree: “Desire licks its own fingers, bites its own nails, swallows its own fist. Desire makes itself its own ghost, creates itself from its own remnants. Desire, in its making and remaking, bounds into the past as it stretches into the future. It is productive, it makes itself, and in making itself, it makes reality.” [^7] When, in moments of withholding, I eat myself, I consume the parts that aren’t pertinent to my desire (breasts, hip dips, genetic preconditions to madness, substance abuse, and cancer)—making new, productive, unrecognizable desires that subvert the expectations placed upon my form.

Yeong-hye’s tree-like existence slips out from under the grasp of patriarchal expectations, evading sweaty hands that contort desire (true desire, like true love as defined by bell hooks [^8]) into abuse. Shin’s transfection is a slippery disobedience, refusing to be contained within the walls of the institution and of humanness. Flanagan’s eroticism is pain, and pleasure in the face of pain: “because I had time to hold my penis; because I had awful stomach aches and holding my penis made it feel better.” [^9] Danger’s _Kinship Masks_ hold a world for Two-Spirit care and erotic multiplicities. My skin under your grasp is a thousand things, a good animal on wet sheets, a shivering tongue held out, ready, a yearner immobile.

[^1]: Maddie Alexander, “1-3,” in _BRUISE ME SOFTLY_ (Calgary: Stride Gallery and Dana Buzzee, 2018), 5.
[^2]: Danni Shen, “Becoming Mugwort: Death and De-Humanization,” _The Vegetarian: TJ Shin_ (Calgary: The Bows, 2022), exhibition brochure, <https://assets-global.website-files.com/5eb05daa51fe3460417cdfb3/6303c027691bf069219d29a4_vegetarian%20brochure-web.pdf>
[^3]: Bob Flanagan and Sheree Rose, _Death Monologue_ (date unknown), in _Sick: The Life and Death of Bob Flanagan, Supermasochist_, directed by Kirby Dick (Santa Monica, CA: Lionsgate Films, 1997), digitized VHS tape. _Death Monologue_ was exhibited as a part of “Resistance and Respiration,” curated by Amanda Cachia, Contemporary Calgary, 30 November, 2023, to 14 April 2024.
[^4]: Deborah Drier, Bob Flanagan, and Sheree Rose, “RACK TALK,” _Artforum_, April 1996, https://www.artforum.com/features/rack-talk-202166
[^5]: Eunjung Kim, “Unbecoming Human: An Ethics of Objects,” _GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies_ 21, no. 2–3 (2015): 298.
[^6]: Maggie Nelson, The Argonauts (Minneapolis: Graywolf Press, 2015), 70–73.
[^7]: Eve Tuck and C. Ree, “A Glossary of Haunting,” in _Handbook of Autoethnography_, ed. Stacy Holman Jones, Tony E. Adams, and Carolyn Ellis (Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press, 2013), 639–65.
[^8]: bell hooks, _All About Love: New Visions_ (New York: William Morrow, 2000).
[^9]: Bob Flanagan, “WHY,” poem, in _Sick: The Life and Death of Bob Flanagan, Supermasochist_.

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Disability

Through a discussion of works by novelist Han Kang and artists TJ Shin and Bob Flanagan, Alexa Bunnell explores subspace—the altered, hormone-induced state a submissive might experience during a kink scene—as a place of formlessness, exceeding normative and extractive definitions of desire and the body.

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A Good Animal on Wet Sheets: Disobedient Gasps in Subspace

Emma-Kate Guimond is a performance artist and writer based in Tiohtià:ke/Montreal. She has published essays in _Espace art actuel_ (2023) and _Inter, art actuel_ (2024), and works as a creative ally for the theatre company Joe Jack et John. Her recent exhibition and short film _The Plot_ (2024) was presented at Centre CLARK in Montreal.

Gui B.B is a performance artist whose baroque _transfictions_ involve laboriously assembling appendages out of latex, nylon, bagged fluids, and ornamental commodities. A hungry monster, she hoards, fastening cheap finds to her body. Hunched and heavy, her ready-made limbs splay, orifices opening. She sings, gurgles, breathes hard—or barely at all. Edging, nothing comes to completion before decaying into the next form of itself. In _I Have Such a Horrible Voice_ (2023), [^1] Gui B.B worms across the darkness and sits up wearing a baby mask with a knife sticking out of the top of the bald head. She pulls out a piece of white bread and stabs it onto the knife as though a bill has been paid. This bread-as-income metaphor is so cliché that it’s pleasurable. [^2]

The reference to income and economy is intentional. The baby mask is a bank-robber disguise. In another scene, she pulls a purse out of a fish tank and it is sopping, liquidating. Later on, embodying a TV-commercial hype man, she scribbles dollar signs on the wall, hollering “Sold out liquidation... Tout doit partir... You’re gonna be empty before the end.”[^3]

Over the last few years, Gui B.B has explored how her debt is endured and resisted in her body. Through performance, she conjures the precarity of indebted living, converting it into life force, enabling her to grieve, to claim, to be herself—or selves. She also wonders how to use debt to get horny, and how to use horniness to perform. Gui B.B recounts a collector coming to her house. Not knowing what to do, she hid under the bed. She also describes her debt-induced chronic lying and broken friendships, and how debt distracts her from choices related to her transition. [^4] Through this string of immobilizing conditions, she gives a stealth display of ignoring and refusal, invoking a rugged undulance of choice and abandon. To these performances and experiences, she ascribes the erotics of debt. After all, isn’t subsistence essentially sensual?

Eros, the root of the word erotic, is understood broadly as love, a sensual drive to satiate the self through forms of beauty and pleasure. In Plato’s _Symposium_, Eros is discussed as a will to _possess_ (acquire or own) the object of desire. Relaying the prophetess Diotima’s teachings in _Symposium_, Aristotle also recounts that Love’s mother was Poverty, who, desperate, lay with Love’s father Contrivance while he was passed out in the garden on Aphrodite’s birthday... All this to say that economics and Eros are bound in more ways than one.

Georges Bataille places eroticism within a “continuous realm,” where individual selves transgress and become indistinct from one another. This realm is governed by expenditure: a perpetual consumption and waste of energies with belligerent disregard for the governance of utility. Instead of accumulating and augmenting, the erotic is a pure loss of the self as it pours into another. [^5] Like liquidation, there is no payback: spending is not invested. Perhaps in Fred Moten and Stefano Harney terms, this describes a kind of bad debt that refuses the so-called freedom of credit. [^6] In the “discontinuous realm,” the self is by contrast “preserved” in a “restrained economy,” and like a responsible citizen, is “autonomous.” [^7] Forms are distinct and separated. Work tames passion in favour of seriousness.

Less sinister but not altogether different, Audre Lorde’s erotic is what happens between the self and the chaos of our desires when we do not look away from our pleasure, as well as the co-empowerment that comes from deep sharing with another. [^8]

Movement, shapelessness, pleasure—these different expressions of erotics also characterize the ambience of Gui B.B’s performances. Bataille’s expenditure, in particular, recalls the way, in her performances, she moves through stock, exhausting her inventory, eroding value in favour of sensuality. Literally and psychically, she is stripping, also leading to an empowered moment of vulnerability that she describes as letting the audience penetrate her. [^9] Together, they are choosing not to look away.

Meanwhile, a quick search of “erotics of debt” on the internet will bring up an abundance of short stories involving debt, where someone pays off debt through sexual deeds to a lender and is aroused in doing so. In BDSM terms, the debtor is the submissive and the collector is the Dom. What kind of kink is this? What psychological conditions have tied debt to sexual pleasure? Is debt play helping to metabolize the violent conditions of debt dependency? Could debt and credit be a kind of impact play? What can be said for the shift from real-life conditions, that is, from debt to erotic fantasy? Whereas BDSM practitioners _play roles_ within _scenes_, the body is doing it for _real_. In BDSM, subspace describes a somatic “floaty” or “out of body” feeling. Experienced by submissives, it’s thought to be triggered by the hormones released when the nervous system goes into a fight-or-flight mode as a result of submissive acts, like being spanked. [^10] Though consensual and practiced within safe contexts, such acts also play out in embodied ways. In Gui B.B’s case, could performance be a subspace set off by the dominance of debt?

Another question: how do safety and consent in performance compare to BDSM practices? If performance also expands to its real-life conditions—where it happens, who’s watching, what is offered to artists—what are the conditions that enable the erotic moment in performance? Is there aftercare? Not really.

Gui B.B recognizes that the drive to be an artist is, however, a choice she has made (for now) and so such precarious conditions, and ultimately, the repercussive debt, are in a sense consensual. [^11] This choice, to create, is perhaps the most erotic part of it all, even if and especially if that choice is tied to a debt—in itself made erotic.

With popstar glamour, Gui B.B sings: I'm running away with my own money Shlang shlang: I’m the villain
the empty space self-neglected always Imagining that I’m the victim of bad men My body at night speak the thrut. [^12]

[^1]: Gui B.B, _I Have Such a Horrible Voice_, 2023; performance with sound and music by Jad Mroue, VIVA! Art Action 2023, Union Française de Montréal.
[^2]: Gui B.B, personal conversation with author, December 27, 2023.
[^3]: Gui B.B, script for _I Have Such a Horrible Voice_, 2023.
[^4]: Gui B.B, personal conversation.
[^5]: Thomas Minguy, “Erotic Exuberance: Bataille’s Notion of Eroticism,” _PhænEx_ 12, no. 1 (2017): 34–52, https://doi.org/10.22329/p.v12i1.4736
[^6]: Fred Moten and Stefano Harney, “Debt and Study,” _e-flux_, March 2020, https://www.e-flux.com/journal/14/61305/debt-and-study
[^7]: Minguy.
[^8]: Audre Lorde, “Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power,” in _Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches_ (Trumansburg, NY: Crossing Press, 1984), 53–59.
[^9]: Gui B.B, personal conversation.
[^10]: Adriana, “BDSM Subspace: The Good, The Dangers & Aftercare,” Bad Girls Bible, November 17, 2020, https://badgirlsbible.com/subspace
[^11]: Gui B.B, personal conversation.
[^12]: Phonetic spelling of French Quebecois pronunciation. Gui B.B, script.

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Emma-Kate Guimond highlights artist Gui B.B’s exploration of how debt is endured and resisted in her body. Through Gui B.B’s performance practice, which links eroticism to debt, Guimond incisively asks: “Is debt play helping to metabolize the violent conditions of debt dependency?”

Gui B.B’s Performances and the Erotics of Debt

Letter

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.

##### Dear _C_, 

Time is money; time waits for no one; we kill time; we save time; time is simultaneously our most precious possession and the thing we waste most. Is there a “high quality” way to “waste time,” and if so, does that time spent represent a valuable experience? 

I think I may have already warped the threads of my idea, please let me begin again...

I was excited to discover Anni Araújo Spadafora’s article on weaving (with editorial contributions by D St-Amour) in the issue on Craft. I was initially interested in reading “Marking Time Spent Absurdly” because I am working on a book about women weavers and their historical and mythical relationships to power in society. However, what resonated most profoundly for me from Spadafora’s article was her repeated reference to the concepts of community, celebration, and rhythm—all of which are present in the practice of weaving. In “_regarding_ GRATITUDE” (2016), a text accompanying American visual artist Ann Hamilton’s 2016 “habitus” exhibition at Philadelphia’s Fabric Workshop and Museum, Hamilton states, “A project is made as much from conversation as it is from materials, from space, and from time, and it contains the energy and many influences of these exchanges.” I love the idea that a weaving can _contain_ such things, or literally _hold_ a community and its celebrations within it.

Near the end of her article, Spadafora notes that “Cloth is the material of home and of the body. It’s what we are born into and later die in.” We are all always weaving; we weave stories, hopes, lies, and plans among many other things. I applaud the author’s pattern, weaving her article in such a way as to remind us of the value in acknowledging the omnipresence of weaving in our absurdly brief lives. 

This was an issue of _C Magazine_ that I spent an absurd amount of time rereading. ;) 

##### Thanks, as always, 
##### Danielle Hogan 

●●

##### Dear _C_, 

I appreciate how the title of Javier Fuentes Martinez’s article, “Mercado de Artesanías: Crafting Latinx Identity,” succinctly connects the influence of globalization, tourism, economies, and relational dynamics to the formation and flux of identity. The essay gives shape to this feeling Javier and I have talked about: seeing rich visual culture traditions all around us when we visit our respective countries of Guatemala and Mexico—there is art all around us. We talk about how this context feels different from the “art world” in Canada. Some of what we find in the mercados de artesanías are made for accessible everyday use, even though they carry a high production value and technical skill. This quality, in a different context, could lend a carefulness to these items’ usage, or an exclusive inaccessibility due to that high value. I’m thinking about the higher dollar value that a person may, for instance, sell a handdyed and handwoven tablecloth in Canada compared to in Mexico. Of course, boutiques with expensive handmade things also exist in Mexico. But at the mercado, it is usually the case that I buy handmade items directly from the maker, their family, or their community. I also think about Mexican bazaars and events where makers sell their wares at prices more comparable to prices I would see in Canada. The reality is that the market, art, and identity are entwined with each other in these contexts. The understanding of the mercado de artesanías, spoken or unspoken, is that it’s the place to go to buy items at accessible prices from Indigenous artisans. As well, speaking from my experience, these artesanías colour the idea of Mexican identity for many. This is all related to what Javier writes about when describing how context, identity, and the market impact presentations of, and opportunities afforded to, artists like Vivian Suter and Manuel Chavajay in the “Global North.”

There is a lot more to say on these topics! But I’ll sign off for now. 

##### Mariana Muñoz Gomez 

●●

##### Dear _C_, 

I was struck by Akash Inbakumar and Anni Araújo Spadafora’s descriptions of sonic interactions with their textiles. I was particularly struck by how listening figures in Inbakumar’s physical relationship with their materials, and how “listening to what the textile had to say” impacts them. The communication between Inbakumar and their materials highlighted the intimacy afforded by active listening, as an act that is not exclusively heard but also felt. Turning the page, I read Spadafora in conversation with Inbakumar, for Spadafora continued to introduce new relations between sounds and materials. The rhythm Spadafora observes in the repetitive weaving of threads expresses how a weaver’s movements are translated into a unique material signature with patterning that resembles the rhythms of a musical phrase. The sonic traces she maps in the weaving process amplify rhythmic resonances in tactile encounters that presented me with a way to experience music without sound. 

While reading the Craft issue, I was also reminded of Serpentine Gallery’s _Intimacies_ podcast episode “Fear” (2023) with Tomás Saraceno. In this episode Gaylene Gould speaks to Saraceno about the artist’s _Web(s) of Life_ (2023) project, where he collaborates with spiders to address sustainable models for cohabitation. During this discussion, Saraceno explains that the spider’s web is an extension of their body. Since spiders do not have ears, they sense via the vibrations of the web. Considering Inbakumar and Spadafora’s weaving practices in relation to those of spiders illustrated the physical connection between creator and material as a channel for multisensory processing and communication. It is no wonder to me that spiders make one web at a time to establish such integrated attention. As both a spinner of theoretical webs and a being intertwined in the webs of others, I am interested in attuning to these channels of communication to maybe feel something I could not previously hear. 

##### Thank you,
##### Kathleen Foran-Spragge 

●●

##### Dear _C Magazine_, 

I’ve often mused on—and at times, have admittedly tried my best to avoid—that irksome distinction between art and craft. It’s one of those theoretical questions posed in a classroom that ultimately leads to no definite answer. Instead, it proposes a sticky gateway of unstable categorizations, so-called difficult histories, and implied value. 

In reading about craft practices in your previous issue, it seems as though their distinguishing characteristic is one of a particular embodied experience—from the motion of making, to an invitation to touch, to feel, to remember. Repeat. I identified with Anni Araújo Spadafora’s comparison to weaving as cooking, in its methodical and mechanical nature. Much like a meal, craft is an agent to share the end result (especially if it's something to be consumed, worn, or touched). There exists an inherent vulnerability in sharing something that you’ve made with others. _Does it need more salt? Is that wool too itchy? That seam doesn’t look right Here, let me fix it!_

And what of the response to that generous act of sharing? On Qualeasha Wood’s textile practice, Salena Barry notes that the tiniest shift in context—whether an object hangs on a wall or lies flat on the floor—can categorize art into craft, or vice versa. Overwhelming receptions of love and care by artists in community are at the heart of Amanda Shore’s recollections of an exhibition curated in memory of Canadian craft scholar Sandra Alfoldy.

To my chagrin, I don’t think educators will give up on ruminating around the competitive binary between art versus craft any time soon. It obviously generates some worthy discussion. In some of the most frustrating classes I’ve been in, binaries were an entry point to discuss the multitude of possibilities along a spectrum of thought. Ultimately, I am consoled by the intentional, embodied vulnerability that comes with the generosity of craft practices highlighted in your previous issue, and in their careful responses. The future of craft is, quite literally, in good hands. 

##### Sincerely,
##### Austin Henderson 


C157_Letters.pdf

Letters reflecting on issue 156 “Craft.”


Letters

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Maandeeq Mohamed is a writer and researcher. Engaging Black Studies and related cultural production, her writing is featured in _Real Life_, _C Magazine_, and _Canadian Art_. 

Reviews Editor

Editor

Designer

Publisher

Artist Project

Liliona Quarmyne is a dancer, choreographer, actor, singer, and organizer based in Kjipuktuk/Halifax, on the unceded and unsurrendered territory of the Mi’kmaq people. From Ghana and the Philippines, she has an eclectic background that has taken her through many performance styles on four different continents. She performs and creates both as a solo artist and with various companies, facilitates community programming, and is an experienced curator and artistic director. The scope of Liliona’s artistic work is broad, but is particularly focused on the relationship between art and social justice, on the body’s ability to carry ancestral memory, and on the role the performing arts can play in creating change. Liliona loves to work in collaboration and community, and is mom to two wonderful kids.


In my memory it feels like it took us forever to connect, but it wasn’t actually very long. Looking back to eight years ago, I realize that time/space/proximity messed with Mo and me from the start: winding our paths toward each other and then away again, playing with our bravery and curiosity, dancing with when to bring us into deeper connection. Laying sticky threads between us across the sidewalks, studios, couches, and facilitation rooms where our first meetings happened. 

When time/space/proximity brought us into shared artistic practice, the result was destabilization. Our work together spilled into, around, and through other areas of our lives. It messed with how we thought about intimacy, what our boundaries were, our relationships with our partners. How could it not have? We were fierce with ourselves and one another, insisting on being both rigorous and tender, working in the space where we pulled both away from and toward one another. Together we were sieving our curiosities, fears, and boundaries through the ultimate site of vulnerability and power—the body. 

Now, as I look at Mo’s work, I see that same power and vulnerability enacted through the landscape of their dolls. The relationship between Mo and me is different in this project—their work is in the foreground while I am protected by the veil of curation—but I still feel aspects of the same beautiful tension I felt when we created together. A phrase from the call for pitches for this issue keeps coming back to me—“Kink, after all, is a shape-shifter; a negotiation of desire as it meets with another’s.” In one sense, I see these dolls doing exactly this—actively negotiating desire through and in relationship. But the work of these dolls goes much further. The more I interact with the work, the more I realize the layers upon layers that are at play. In my mind’s eye I begin to see those same threads I mentioned before, the ones laid by time/space/proximity, but this time they are everywhere. They emanate from Mo toward their dolls, from the dolls toward each other, over and through the camera lens, around shadow, along background and foreground. They shift and move, changing texture, colour, and luminosity, almost as though glowing with each relational shape they highlight. Unwinding, enfolding, pulsing, gliding, rubbing, suctioning onto limb/curve/flesh/plastic/colour/crack. The threads take on their own lives, manipulating the multidimensionality that is possible when we—no, when the dolls—allow themselves to shapeshift. 

Because the “doll-ness” of the dolls themselves is critical here. They can inhabit and enact a world that we have yet to see. They can expose their gouges, cover the holes through which they breathe, meld into one another, and adorn themselves in vibrant, viscous clay. They can occupy their landscape without consequence, separate from us. Their freedom to live in their fullness may be painful, funny, playful, curious... but it is always glorious. 

The dolls inhabit their world, but if I listen to my own body resonance, I know their threads also snake out toward and around us. I feel the suction cups on my skin too, the smoothness of clay against the back of my neck. Boundaries blur. There is an implication that, if we let it, spills out of the work and onto/into us, the witnesses. Doll allies. After all, multiple things can be true—we are distanced by the page from the world of the dolls, and yet they are also part of the world in which we live. A world of constant negotiation. Of chosen and imposed manipulation. 

Questions arise in me as I contemplate all this, following the track of those early meetings with Mo through to now, as I see their work pulse on the page. Mo’s own threads are, again, rigorous and tender, sieving their curiosities, fears, and boundaries through the ultimate site of vulnerability and power—the body. 

Does Mo show us a world that could be, or a world that must not be?

In the time/space/proximity dance of our world, must we choose?

Curator

Mo Glitch is a visual and performance artist who opens up new possibilities for how to live in this world in non-normative ways. Their practice utilizes academic research methods, inquiry through embodiment practices, and experimentation with materials translation. Glitch studies queer/trans art and theory, ecology and wildness, critical phenomenology, and nightlife. They draw huge pictures, sculpt small creatures, and leave trails of neon scraps behind them. With a background in facilitation and community organizing, Glitch brings years of experience to gathering groups and hosting collaborative processes that centre justice and care. Glitch is an emerging artist who opens portals to surviving within the confines and crumblings of modernity. They attended NSCAD University and live in Kjipuktuk/Halifax.


Artist

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Relational

Guest curated by Liliona Quarmyne, Mo Glitch’s artist project features photographs of staged dolls engaged in acts of “unwinding, enfolding, pulsing, gliding, rubbing, suctioning onto limb/curve/flesh/plastic/colour/crack” to trouble our distinction between reality and its representation.

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_proxy_ by Mo Glitch: Text

Review

Darian Razdar is a writer, photographer, and textile artist with roots in the Great Lakes and Caspian Sea basins. Practicing in both independent and community contexts, his work emphasizes poetics, landscape, abstraction, and collaboration. darianrazdar.info

During a post-screening discussion of “Foggy: Palestine Solidarity, Cinema & the Archive,” b.h. Yael (who cocurated the program alongside Marc Siegel, Lior Shamriz, and John Greyson) tells us of how the screened films ask “what _was_ and what _is_” Palestinian freedom. Taken together, the films use oral history, performance, fabulation, deep looking, and elegy. “Foggy” not only looks into an archive caught between—after Mahmoud Darwish—Palestinian presence and the absence wrought by Zionism, but looks again from a queer angle. In doing so, the films describe an alternative archival practice of redoing, remaking, and restaging rather than filling in the faulty archive so shaped by colonialism, capitalism, and queerphobia.

“Foggy” opened with Hadi Moussally’s _Sultana’s Reign_ (2023). A carefully stylized portrayal of New York –based Palestinian drag queen, the titular Sultana oscillates between mundanity and tragedy, and between her glory and longing. Sultana tells us about how she grew up, as a Cairo-born Palestinian living between Egypt, Jordan, and Lebanon at the whims of political tragedies, only to land in New York City by 1996. The term “oral history” doesn’t do _Sultana’s Reign_ justice. Scenes of her in full old-Hollywood drag lingering in Parisian cafes and épiceries, recounting her love for parties, Fairuz, and Egyptian divas feels more akin to hanging out with an old friend. We can also view _Sultana’s Reign_ through the lens of performance. Sultana calls herself a performer “representing another aspect of the Middle East, another sexuality [...] [and her] complexity as a character.” With patient detail, Moussally documents Sultana’s nuances while she conveys a performance of gender and sexuality so often made absent. Sultana, then, doesn’t fill in an archive—she is one.

If Sultana’s Reign is an oral-history performance of a queer Palestinian abroad, Elias Wakeem’s _Homecoming Queenz_ (2023) performs the archive of queer Palestinians living under Israeli occupation today. Relayed from the first-person perspective of a shaky hidden camera, Wakeem gives viewers intimate access to a drag quick change while seated in a descending airplane, before being confronted by border guards at Ben Gurion airport. Wakeem enacts a different kind of archival practice—one that does not wait for queer Palestinian experiences to enter the archive, but performs an archive through the body, no matter the cost.

In _Even a Dog in Babylon_ (2023), filmmaker Lior Shamriz stages a conversation between themselves and actor Myriam Ali-Ahmad. With the director playing director, actor playing actor, and viewer eavesdropping, we learn about the development of Shamriz’s new film. Based on a letter from an ancient Babylonian king that asserts “even a dog in the city will be free,” Shamriz speculates on a Palestine without occupation and a West Asia without colonialism—or rather, they speculate on the idea of making a speculative film on these matters. Metacinematically, Shamriz’s subtly fabulous method puts the absence of a free West Asia in haut-relief.

If _Even a Dog in Babylon_ is solidarity with Palestine, then Annie Sakkab’s _The Poem We Sang_ (2023) is resistance. The introduction to Sakkab’s _The Poem We Sang_ features the Palestinian director calling her film a “gift to Palestinians,” rather than a documentary for an outside audience. The curatorial decision to screen resistance cinema to an audience of mostly non-Palestinians begs the question: why does how artists tell the story matter?

In the absence of family archives, Sakkab explores her family history from the Nakba to today via a plethora of found and documented imagery—primarily, contemporary and archival footage of Palestinians as well as original animation and photography. Sakkab’s process of archival fabulation stitches together a family portrait through the image of others. The personal, familial, and national intertwine not only in image but in sound— particularly in a recording of Sakkab’s uncle describing his displacement from Jerusalem in 1948, and the poem “We Are a Proud Nation” (1925) by Khalil Al-Sakakini sung by the filmmaker.

How Sakkab tells the story matters distinctly—in the fogginess of absence, Sakkab refuses to fill in an archive to “prove” Palestinian trauma. Rather, she uses the many affordances of cinema to devise a different kind of archive completely.

Within absence, the protagonist of Iraqi Canadian filmmaker Noor Gatih’s _Layla_ (2021) daydreams. Set in a sterile interior common in this part of North America, a young woman imagines anonymous hands washing a pink dress. A close-up of another person pans from their chest to chin, with gold earrings and long dark hair falling past their shoulders. Gatih knowingly omits verbal language in her film, instead preferring a visual language. By fabulating an alternative reality in dream space, the quietness of Gatih’s dreamer references, as she says in the post-screening discussion, the “silent presence of queerness” in many West Asian communities.

Excelling in the art of silence, Essa Grayeb’s _My Whole Heart Is With You_ (2022) looks deeply at political language. By cutting, layering, and looping pauses in former Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser’s 1967 resignation speech, the film requires us to watch differently. Over nine minutes of entrancing repetition, cropped to only show microphones and Nasser’s mouth, Grayeb creates an entirely new speech—one that drips, drones, and struggles for words. In a moment where many of us are at a loss for words, _My Whole Heart is With You_ shows us that sometimes there are none.

Toronto-based filmmaker Mike Hoolboom has no trouble finding words. Using a method he calls “deep looking,” in _Nazareth_ (2023) Hoolboom asks, “Would it be possible to stop and look, to see for the first time what we have seen so often before?” Hoolboom uses an almost forensic approach as he deconstructs a black-and-white photograph from 1948 Nazareth, during the Nakba. In it, a local family stands facing the camera and toward a foreign soldier, or as Hoolboom calls him, “a kid who’s dressed up as a soldier on the street.” Unpacking the minute body language of those photographed—the step of a foot, lift of fingers, spreading of arms— Hoolboom asks us to pay attention to the ways occupation speaks through the body. Hoolboom asks us to see this photo in a new light, even as a “family portrait.” Making an archive of a single photograph, _Nazareth_ tells a story of presence and absence one detail at a time.

Dedicated to Amy Gottlieb—the Jewish anti-Zionist artist, activist, and educator who called Toronto home until her death in July 2023—the explicitly political stance of “Foggy” is also an homage to Gottlieb’s life’s work. Gottlieb’s contribution to “Foggy”—_Tempest in a Teapot_ (1987)—is an elegy to her mother’s activism. Set to a triumphant symphonic score and narrated by the artist, Gottlieb peruses the archive her mother left behind. Included in this is a teapot her mother brought back from a trip to Soviet Russia, and what appear to be her ashes, which the artist lays out decoratively on a dark blue sheet. An elegy for a woman whose radical activities attracted even the attention of the FBI, Gottlieb’s film is an homage to the freedom fighters we’ve lost. Now that Gottlieb herself has passed, we’re left not only to ask “what _was_ and what _is_?” but more crucially, when the fog clears, what _will be_?

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“Foggy: Palestine Solidarity, Cinema & the Archive” was screened on 4 December 2023 at Cinema Politica, Montreal; Bachir/Yerex Screening Room, Toronto; and VIVO, Vancouver.


“Foggy: Palestine Solidarity, Cinema & the Archive” — Noor Gatih, Amy Gottlieb, Essa Grayeb, Mike Hoolboom, Hadi Moussally, Annie Sakkab, Lior Shamriz, and Elias Wakeem

Shannon Webb-Campbell is of Mi’kmaq and settler heritage. She is a member of Flat Bay First Nation. Her books include: the forthcoming _Re: Wild Her_ (Book*hug 2025), _Lunar Tides_ (2022), _I Am a Body of Land_ (2019), and _Still No Word_ (2015), which was the recipient of Egale Canada’s Out in Print Award. Shannon is a PhD candidate at the University of New Brunswick, and the Editor of _Muskrat Magazine_ and _Visual Arts News_.

In the introduction to _Breaking Protocol_, Maria Hupfield describes the book as a “response to the feeling of alienation that united many of us during the pandemic and the ongoing lack of resources afforded to Indigenous performance artists.” As in-person programming shifted to online spaces during the COVID-19 lockdowns, Hupfield would host coffee breaks on Zoom from her home studio in Toronto as a way of connecting and conversing with Indigenous performance artists across borders. _Breaking Protocol_ is inspired by and builds on these conversations.

Mi’kmaw artist Ursula Johnson’s “A Few Words” is a manifesto on how to navigate the art world. Written in 2023 during her Koerner Residency at Queen’s University, Johnson begins with practical advice about attending openings, talks, lectures, and workshops as well as the importance of showing up for other artists. “This is your life. This is your family,” she tells us. Her text also highlights the potential of art to make a difference despite the elements of solitude and loneliness that are inherent to artistic practice. “You will work alone. We all work alone,” Johnson writes. At the same time, Johnson acknowledges the collaborative nature of being an artist. As artists, it is important to build relationships and treat people with dignity and respect. Johnson tells us, “Technicians and preparators are your best friends. Take care of them like your best friends.” In the context of individualistic and incredibly competitive art markets, Johnson reminds us that art is also a series of relationships.

In her essay “Sensation,” Tanya Lukin Linklater explores how the hide on a drum expands and shifts to produce a vibration. Linklater writes, “When Inupiaqu, Yup’ik, or Sugpiaq singers stretch hide on drums, it moves. It is moved. Misted water droplets are rubbed into it with circular motions. Hands pull tighter around a wooden edge. [...] We call it and, in its response, hide (the skin of a sea or land mammal) is transformative. Hide is an edge.” In this way, the hide creates new sonic horizons that continue to honour the spirit of the sea or land mammal.

Sound is also significant to curator Wanda Nanibush’s “The Sound of the Colour Field: On Rebecca Belmore.” Nanibush writes about her trip to the 2022 Venice Biennale with Rebecca Belmore, where Belmore performed _The Sound of the Colour Field_ (2022) at aabaakwad, a yearly convening of Indigenous artists and curators co-founded by Nanibush. Nanibush tells us about how Belmore wanted to create a kind of colourfield painting from the sonic rapture of 16 artists ripping thousands of metres of fabric arranged in blue, green, orange, red, and white strips at the church of San Lorenzo (where Marco Polo was buried). This site-specific work at the epicentre of colonial violence was monumental. Through the use of bodies, sound, and colour, the powerful performance honoured the thousands of children who were killed in residential schools of so-called Canada, as well as the survivors. The prominence of the colour red in the performance also raised awareness about missing and murdered Indigenous women, girls, and two-spirits. These reds, alongside the watery blues and lush green fabrics in _The Sound of the Colour Field_, offer a kaleidoscopic rallying cry to protect Mother Earth, our life-giver and protector.

Like Belmore, artist Meagan Musseau also draws inspiration from the land. Musseau is a L’nu woman, artist, and dancer from Elmastukwek, Ktaqmkuk Territory. In _Breaking Protocol_, she shares video stills from _Cousins_ (2021), a performance where the artist walks through Crown land while wearing bear paw snowshoes with an orange ribbon fringe. Musseau works with natural, brightly coloured, and commercially made materials, her body, and the land to produce a visually striking image that contrasts the winter scene with her fluorescent fringe. _Cousins_ is part of a larger Mi’kmaw revival in Ktaqkmuk (or what is colonially known as Newfoundland), where many like myself are fighting to reclaim our history and restore our pride as Mi’kmaq peoples on the island.

As a series of exchanges, _Breaking Protocol_ is a cohesive, visually stunning, compelling and thought-provoking text. The pages are filled with collective approaches to protocol-bending practices rooted in Indigenous knowledges that demand sovereignty and critical accountability from the settler nation state. While these conversations came together during 2020–2023, in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, the text pushes beyond the confines of linear time and weaves together non-Eurocentric worldviews, ultimately creating space for future generations of Indigenous artists to shake things up even further.



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_Breaking Protocol_ was published by Inventory Press, Los Angeles and Vera List Center for Art and Politics, New York, 2023

Header

C Mag

Issue 157

Kink

Credits

Related Events

Letters

Letters

Editorial

Editorial: Kink

Explore Issue by Images

Features

What is the Safe Word?

Fetish Aesthetics and Fan Fiction in Dana Buzzee's Philosophically Pornographic Practice

Sinister Pleasure: Interview with Ja'Tovia Gary

Our Third Sun

Hard Limits, Soft Landing

A Good Animal on Wet Sheets: Disobedient Gasps in Subspace

Gui B.B’s Performances and the Erotics of Debt

Artist Projects

proxy by Mo Glitch: Text

Columns

Composition: give up your own

One Thing: Tracing Fragments of Queer Desire

Reviews

“Foggy: Palestine Solidarity, Cinema & the Archive” — Noor Gatih, Amy Gottlieb, Essa Grayeb, Mike Hoolboom, Hadi Moussally, Annie Sakkab, Lior Shamriz, and Elias Wakeem

Breaking Protocol — Maria Hupfield

“Remainder” — Hiroshi Sugito

“Signal to Noise” — John Monteith and Lou Sheppard

“this bridge between starshine and clay” — Renee Gladman, Adee Roberson, Rashid Zakat

“Leather Bar in Bangalore” — Arjun Lal

Kwewag Dreaming — Liz Howard

“Point Reflection” — Aki Sasamoto

Demolition of a Wall (Album 1) — Lucy Raven