Column

Lou Sheppard is a settler on the traditional and unceded territory of the Mi’kmaq in Mi’kma’ki/Nova Scotia. His work responds to the material, social, and political histories of sites, bodies, and environments, questioning and disrupting systems of power by deconstructing the languages, architectures, genealogies, and taxonomies that hold these systems in place. Often working in collaboration with other artists and in community gatherings, his installations and performances reflect states of disorientation, relationality, and futurity.

1.jpg

2.jpg

An accompanying special-edition run of unexposed cyanotypes was distributed as inserts in 500 copies of the magazine. Recipients are encouraged to expose their body or an object to the light. Share your print and see what others have made via [@crepuscular_rhythms](https://www.instagram.com/crepuscular_rhythms/) on Instagram. 

_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/C158_Sheppard_0dd6fa857a.pdf)



Writer

In _C Magazine_’s 40th year of publication, the writing and visual projects in this issue form an almanac in themselves, out of the impulse to make meaning out of the present state of contemporary art and liberatory organizing. As contributors find grounding in celestial time, ancestors, the stakes of censorship, the choreography of movement building, AI incantations, and more, we express almanacs as projects of persistence between past, present, and future—and even of spell-casting.

Almanac

lg_Untitled design.jpg

md_Untitled design.jpg

sm_Untitled design.jpg

thumbnail_Untitled design.jpg

C158_Sheppard

C158_Sheppard.pdf

Language

Body

Lou Sheppard’s score in cyanotype images and poetic writing locates dawn and dusk as queer times of day. An edition of unexposed cyanotypes sent to subscribers encourages folks to create their own prints with light.

Composition: Crepuscular Rhythms

Maurice Jones is a curator, producer, and critical STS researcher based in Tiohtià:ke/Montréal, Canada. As a Concordia University PhD candidate, he investigates cross-cultural perceptions of AI, public participation in technology governance, and festivals as temporary utopias. He’s the cocurator of the MUTEK Forum and the Future Festivals project lead. https://mauricej.me

Only half a decade has passed since the early days of generative AI: the days of multimodal systems outputting six-finger hands, AI sound producing nothing but lo-fi gibberish, and not-so-large language models predicting a character, rather than a word or more, at a time. Though seemingly retro by now, it was these glitches and their aesthetics of misrepresenting the world, rather than accurately predicting it, that opened both technological and social cracks for artistic explorations. Now hidden behind neat interfaces and more “accurate” predictions of the world, AI has arguably been “tamed”... or so they want to make us believe. 

It is a sunny afternoon in early November when artist-researcher Beth Coleman invites me for the inaugural exhibition, symposium, and book launch of her work _Reality Was Whatever Happened: Octavia Butler AI and Other Possible Worlds_ (2023). Coming in from Montreal, where I am pursuing my doctorate in science and technology studies, it feels like a pilgrimage to arrive at the coach house that is home to the University of Toronto’s Centre for Culture and Technology. Founded in 1963, the centre is where famed philosopher Marshall McLuhan brought his groundbreaking thinking around media, communications, and technology not only to his students, but to the world. At the beginning of the centre’s written constitution, McLuhan writes that “the object of the Centre is to pursue by a wide variety of approaches an investigation into the psychic and social consequences of technologies.” [^1] And psychic it is, what I encounter once entering the ground floor of the coach house on that sunny afternoon. 

There, framed, on the far wall, a painting. A distorted grimace. Slenderman-like but with an Afro? A person, maybe. Familiar, yet alien. Features perceptible and, at the same time, distinctly exceeding the expected. What we want to see. What we are trained to see, coerced into looking for. In this moment, trying to decipher what I am looking at, it is not the depicted subjectivities that I relate to in this piece titled _Alice Freeman Engineer_ (2023). It is rather the StyleGAN aesthetic that I am holding on to the most. 

GANs, short for generative adversarial networks, are a particular class of AI systems used to generate a variety of different media ranging from text, to sound, to images, and beyond. The project _This Person Does Not Exist_ famously demonstrates the power of GANs to create photorealistic images—created by software engineer Phillip Wang, the website generates a portrait of a non-existent person on each reload. [^2] Seemingly retro by now, early versions of StyleGAN carry a particular aesthetic. Low in resolution with a sort of washed-out quality to them, outputs were veiled in something akin to Photoshop’s soft-focus filter. Depicted features were lacking clear lines, making the borders of subjects and objects appear to melt into each other and with the background. 

Encountering the materialized StyleGAN aesthetic in a physical painting hanging on the wall of McLuhan’s coach house, I am reminded of the collective artistic research laboratories I cocurated in late 2019 and early 2020. Hosted together with the digital arts and electronic music festival MUTEK in Tokyo and Montreal, we brought together interdisciplinary groups of artists, researchers, and technologists to jointly explore the uses and misuses of early generative AI systems in and through artistic practice. Sparked by the lo-fi StyleGAN aesthetic, the memories of working with artists such as Isabella Salas and Lucas LaRochelle draw me in. 
And this drawing in is necessary. The flip side to the rather approachable soft-focus textures and lo-fi aesthetic is the alienness of StyleGAN’s depicted subjectivities. Unlike today’s Midjourney or DALLE, early StyleGAN systems were notoriously bad at making “accurate” predictions of the world. Rather, they presented distorted versions of reality, particularly uncanny when trying to generate humans and lifelike features. Hands with any number of fingers. Floating limbs appearing out of nowhere. Washed-out and distorted faces injecting an atmosphere of ghostly haunting into generated images. 
In the 19th century, German psychiatrist Karl Ludwig Kahlbaum coined the term “pareidolia” to describe the human tendency to perceive objects, patterns, and meanings from sensorial inputs where there might be none. [^3] The most common example is people seeing human-like features, especially faces, in the most random places. The somewhat familiar lifelike subjectivities depicted in Coleman’s images trick us into looking for recognizable human features. This initial impulse is followed by a quick disappointment that things are not what they appear to be. The mutation of the familiar into something else is really where the alienness and uncanniness of these images arise. 
Inspired by Octavia Butler’s _Xenogenesis_ book series, Coleman creates a generative AI system that embraces the soft yet uncanny StyleGAN aesthetic in exploring the alien. [^4] In _Xenogenesis_, the main character, Lilith, a Nigerian American woman originally from California, is abducted by extraterrestrials after Earth’s environmental apocalypse. Only by eugenic cross-breeding with the Oankali, the story’s alien species, can Lilith ensure the survival and arguably the evolution of not only herself but humanity at large. It is this cross-breeding that Coleman explores in a series of visual experiments titled Alice. Alice in all her facets is a product of mixing (or shall I say algorithmic cross-breeding) of the Black feminine and “... something else,” as Coleman describes in the exhibition’s accompanying book publication: “animal, alien, what we might call decidedly _non_-human.” [^5] 

It is here, then, where I return to the opening paragraph. _Reality Was Whatever Happened_ resists reduction and futile attempts to “tame” AI. In a way, “taming” these systems becomes the latest colonial rendition of sorting people and things into predefined boxes aimed to accurately reproduce a certain categorical version of the world. This is ultimately where binary utopian/dystopian fantasies propagated in popular discourses surrounding AI emerge from. If we manage algorithmically driven sorting properly, it will lead us to utopia. If not, we receive the dystopian flip side of the same coin. This is really the fundamental question that is currently at stake in binary discourses surrounding AI, art, and creative practice. 

In contrast, by embracing the glitchiness and arguable inaccuracy of generative AI systems, Coleman opens pathways to “other possible worlds,” the wilder places they might lead us to. By doing so, _Reality Was Whatever Happened_ embraces Coleman’s earlier call in the text “Technology of the Surround” to imagine an AI “that can be free—if not to imagine then to generate—speeding through possibilities, junctures that are idiotic until they are not.” [^6] Through releasing and following AIs into wilder territories, Coleman’s work troubles the narrative and technological borders of current modes of AI-driven content production. Rather than obsessing with binary futures—the obsession with generative AI either replacing or enhancing human creativity—an Octavia Butler AI explores the multiplicities of alternative worlds, spaces as places, which feral AIs might come to generate. What these territories come to be won’t be known until we reach them—until, as Indigenous technoscience scholar Michelle Murphy wonders, we “produce a world where undecided futures are brought into the present.” [^7] Reality will be whatever has happened. 


[^1]: “Vision + People,” Centre for Culture and Technology, University of Toronto, https://cultureandtech.utoronto.ca/vision-people
[^2]: This Person Does Not Exist, https://thispersondoes-notexist.com
[^3]: Allgemeine Zeitschrift für Psychiatrie und psychisch- gerichtliche Medicin, vol. 23 (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1866), https://www.digitale-sammlungen.de/de/view/bsb10087039?pa ge=,1
[^4]: “Xenogenesis Series,” Octavia E. Butler, https://www.octaviabutler.com/xenogenesis-series 
[^5]: Beth Coleman, Reality Was Whatever Happened (Berlin: K.Verlag, 2023), 14.
[^6]: Beth Coleman, “Technology of the Surround,” Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, and Technoscience 7, no.2 (2021), https://catalystjournal.org/index.php/catalyst/article/view/35973
[^7]: Michelle Murphy, “Speculating on the Future in Postcolonial Social Sciences,” Histories of the Future, Princeton University, 2015, http://histscifi.com/essays/murphy/future-postcolonial-social-sciences 

lg_C158_JONES.jpeg

md_C158_JONES.jpeg

sm_C158_JONES.jpeg

thumbnail_C158_JONES.jpeg

C158_JONES.jpeg

C158_Jones.pdf

Maurice Jones discusses Beth Coleman’s project _Reality Was Whatever Happened: Octavia Butler AI and Other Possible Worlds_ (2023), which follows AI into wilder territories beyond binary utopian/dystopian terms.

One Thing: AI Be Wilding: Beth Coleman's Octavia Butler AI

thumbnail_CaseyHouse_Aug 15-Oct15_WebsiteBanner1_SizeB.jpg

CaseyHouse_Aug 15-Oct15_WebsiteBanner1_SizeB.jpg

md_CaseyHouse_Aug 15-Oct15_WebsiteBanner1_SizeA.jpg

sm_CaseyHouse_Aug 15-Oct15_WebsiteBanner1_SizeA.jpg

thumbnail_CaseyHouse_Aug 15-Oct15_WebsiteBanner1_SizeA.jpg

CaseyHouse_Aug 15-Oct15_WebsiteBanner1_SizeA.jpg

Casey House 1

md_C_MAG_festival_mobile.jpg

sm_C_MAG_festival_mobile.jpg

thumbnail_C_MAG_festival_mobile.jpg

C_MAG_festival_mobile.jpg

lg_C_MAG_festival_web.jpg

md_C_MAG_festival_web.jpg

sm_C_MAG_festival_web.jpg

thumbnail_C_MAG_festival_web.jpg

C_MAG_festival_web.jpg

Artch 1

thumbnail_WorkmanArts_Sept15-Oct15_SizeB.png

WorkmanArts_Sept15-Oct15_SizeB.png

md_WorkmanArts_Sept15-Oct15_SizeA.gif

sm_WorkmanArts_Sept15-Oct15_SizeA.gif

thumbnail_WorkmanArts_Sept15-Oct15_SizeA.gif

WorkmanArts_Sept15-Oct15_SizeA.gif

Workman 1

md_cover image.jpg

sm_cover image.jpg

thumbnail_cover image.jpg

cover image.jpg

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_. 

Inflected with past, present, and future records, almanacs are projects of duration and continuance, and even of spell-casting. The range of writing and visual projects in this issue form an almanac in themselves, out of the impulse to make meaning of the present state of contemporary art and liberatory organizing. We recognize, more than ever, that history is long, and that we collectively become the narrators/historians of both our current moment and the future we want to seed. 

In _C Magazine_’s 40th year of publication, we consider how this extended historical view moves through our critical art conversations. We take the butterfly effect, where seemingly small acts evince large-scale consequences, as a call to action. In this way, we hold on to a kind of hope that is really about persistence. Outside of colonial frames, time, thought, creativity, and feeling can expand. And these categories were always expansive, just like the sky holding fast above us, amid global uprisings against state violences.

Alia Hijaab and Rana Nazzal Hamadeh’s feature lays bare what is at stake in how Canadian cultural institutions are complicit in silencing Palestinian voices. In the context of the nearly 200 Palestinian historical and cultural landmarks destroyed by Israel’s ongoing bombardment of the Gaza Strip over the past nine months, the artist-as-writers elucidate: “By eradicating Palestinians and their personal archives of lived experience from the land of Palestine, Israel fuels an epistemic genocide of ways of thinking and being that are directly opposed to settler colonialism.” Amid the censorship experienced by both Palestinian artists in Canada and supporters of Palestinian liberation, Hijaab and Hamadeh ask: “What is the future we are working toward? What will we stand up for? And what legacies will we honour?” 

Daniel Mack takes up a long view of activist organizing when he describes movement building as durational choreography, through his consideration of the Montreal-based autonomous art space and collective Ste-Émilie Skillshare. Mack explores how the collective centred queer liberation, self and community agency, and the dismantling of oppressive systems through theory in action. Like choreography, movement building takes rhythm, and a vocabulary of movement and tactics. “We must practice finesse, for here is where the art of it all comes into play,” Mack tells us. 

In these pages, you will also find the _endurance_ of celestial time. Alexis Nanibush-Pamajewong’s Artist Project, _BITE//Celestial\\BITE_, features images of their performance of the ancestral Anishinaabeg art form of mazinibaganjigan (birchbark biting) on the shores of Lake Ontario, with the Ode’iminigiizis (Strawberry Moon) just beyond the clouds at night. As Alex Jacobs-Blum writes, “Alexis honours art elders by celebrating the kinship between birch bark and the Anishinaabeg since time immemorial.” In Mind Pool, Memory Spring’s roundtable, the experimental research group engages with how techniques of past life regression, a form of hypnotherapy, might expand limiting Western conceptions of the soul (as group member Danica Pinteric suggests). The resulting discussion highlights how past life regression might inform the group’s artistic practices, which span topics including ancestry, spirituality, empathy, and the tether between memory and fiction. Kira Xonorika’s “AI Incantations for Sovereignty and Gender Expansiveness” impels us to consider magic to understand how an AI-mediated reconnection with Guaraní gender-expansive worlds is possible. To Xonorika, AI text prompts for image generation can be used to exploit the instability of colonial English grammar: “words are roadmaps to brighter constellations: declarations are incantations.” 

Further kinds of incantations appear in Lou Sheppard’s Composition column, which is based on his ongoing project _Crepuscular Rhythms_. Sheppard’s project locates dawn and dusk as queer times of day—boundaries that both offer protective cover and hold potential danger for queer and trans people in public space. Previously taking the form of a performance score and series of walks, Sheppard’s Composition in this issue is a score in writing and images. An accompanying special-edition run of unexposed cyanotypes will also be sent to a portion of subscribers. Recipients are encouraged to expose a part of their body or object to the light, in order to create their own prints. 

Akin to how almanacs record knowledge and forecast events, Nyssa Komorowski writes of how the woven beads of wampum belts and contemporary wampum creations carry forward ancient knowledges and living embodiments of relationships, to anticipate the future of Haudenosaunee and larger Indigenous sovereignties. Chloë p.f. Lalonde considers how artworks, framed by their names, dates, and personal and universal symbols, might record intangible information about the period and conditions of their conception. In the One Thing column, Maurice Jones embraces how Beth Coleman’s project _Reality Was Whatever Happened: Octavia Butler AI and Other Possible Worlds_ (2023) troubles current conversations around “taming” AI. Coleman puts pressure on still-forming ideas of AI and its consequences that often appear in binary utopian/dystopian terms. Using the lower-fi StyleGAN aesthetic, Jones writes that Coleman’s images appear more alien and uncanny, “releasing and following AIs into wilder territories.” 

Writing this, to you, from ourselves currently at _C_, we are grateful for everyone that has entrusted this publication with their work over time. It’s almost dawn, and I’ve been listening to Lou Sheppard’s sound composition “Time Goes By Strangely (Phase Variations).” [^1] And we, also, go. 

[^1]: Lou Sheppard, “Time Goes By Strangely (Phase Variations),” SoundCloud, February 2024, [https://tiny.cc/ff08zz](https://tiny.cc/ff08zz)

C158_Editorial.pdf

Time

Memory

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

Almanac: Editorial

Feature

Alia Hijaab is a multi-disciplinary artist with roots in Syria, Qatar, Virginia, and now the unceded territories of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Wau-tuth First Nations also known as Vancouver, BC. Alia received her bachelor’s degree in Animation from Emily Carr University of Art + Design and is now pursuing a Master in Library and Archival studies at the University of British Columbia. Alia meanders through various tangible and intangible practices that circle themes of belonging, storytelling, and remembering.

Rana Nazzal Hamadeh is a Palestinian artist based on unceded Anishinaabe Algonquin land. Her photography, film, and installation works look at issues related to memory, space, land, and movement, offering interventions rooted in a decolonial framework.

lg_C158_HAMADEH-HIJAAB.jpg

md_C158_HAMADEH-HIJAAB.jpg

sm_C158_HAMADEH-HIJAAB.jpg

thumbnail_C158_HAMADEH-HIJAAB.jpg

C158_HAMADEH-HIJAAB.jpg

C158_HijaabNazzalHamadeh.pdf

Politics

Institutional critique

Colonialism

In the context of an epistemic genocide fuelled by Israel’s destruction of Palestinian historical and cultural landmarks, Alia Hijaab and Rana Nazzal Hamadeh highlight the stakes of Canadian institutions’ complicity in censoring Palestinian artists, within this country’s own reality of settler colonialism.

Art as a Mirror: How Canadian Institutions Are Complicit in Silencing Palestinian Voices

Nyssa Komorowski is a PhD Candidate in Art History at the University of Toronto, specializing in Book History and Print Culture. Her dissertation research investigates the concept of wilderness, the image culture of land, and the geographical imagination of North Americans from the late-19th to early 20th centuries.

lg_C158_KOMOROWSKI.jpg

md_C158_KOMOROWSKI.jpg

sm_C158_KOMOROWSKI.jpg

thumbnail_C158_KOMOROWSKI.jpg

C158_KOMOROWSKI.jpg

C158_Komorowski.pdf

Indigenous

Storytelling

Women

Nyssa Komorowski writes of how wampum belts and contemporary wampum creations carry forward ancient knowledges and living embodiments of relationships, to anticipate the future of Haudenosaunee and larger Indigenous sovereignties.

The Seashells That Saved the World

Daniel Mack works in landscape restoration and embroidery. His background is in community organizing, collective care, collaborative arts, and victimless crime. As a settler with a heart of gold, he endeavours to “naturalize to place,” as described by Robin Wall Kimmerer. Currently listening to Jana Rush, Nicole Mitchell Gantt, and Olof Dreijer.

We invested her with our hopes and dreams, our needs and fears, and in return she kept, saved, and fortified us for battle. Whichever ignoble miracles got Émilie canonized in the first place: irrelevant; they’ve been supplanted. We stole her from the church and made her our own; we fattened her on cheap beer and emulsion, inks and thread, heartache and strife; we shouted her out across the city, proselytizing a cult in her name and causing D-list saints to spin in their reliquaries. 

The Ste-Émilie Skillshare was an autonomous community art space in Montreal’s Saint-Henri neighbourhood. Brainchild of LeRoi Newbold, it was founded in 2006 by a group of friends, occupying a two-floor apartment that was bordered by train tracks to the west and rue Sainte-Émilie to the north. The collective, by design, centred BIPOC, queer, and trans self-expression. At least one of these labels could be applied to each collective member, and we prioritized working with groups or individuals who self-identified along these lines as well. As such, we were able to practice organizational structures that made sense to people like us and draw from a coherent power base when seeking support or performing outreach. 

Collective members initially trained each other to use the different art-making tools that were slowly installed at the space. Once enough of us had acquired sufficient training and a curriculum could be crafted, Ste-Émilie began offering public workshops. Upon this sharing of resources, the Ste-Émilie became a hub for art-making, world-building, and anarchist praxis (theory in action). By each of us doing what we did best and asking for or receiving help when needed, we were quickly able to retrofit the residential apartment into a fully fledged artist studio, complete with a black-and-white darkroom, a start-to-finish screen-printing workshop, a sewing room, and a zine distro for selling self-published books on topics like self-care, anti-racist action, and disability rights. 

As a collective member, I felt obliged to model self-expression and help others do the same. What’s more, within the collective’s cocoon, I gained a sense of personal agency that I hadn’t known in over a decade. Through playing the part of a community artist, I became one, which came to gradually shift the way I practiced community organizing. 

I came to see the work that we were doing, and the work of movement building writ large, as social choreography. When I see an especially moving dance performance, it jerks my body in sympathy with the performers. I connect vicariously and can almost feel the boards underfoot. Like a marionette on strings, social movements draw me in to the action, but not just me. The affective allure can take hold of the world, spurring on international and decentralized grassroots organizing. We get caught up in the grace of it all. 

I understand movement building (which I’m using interchangeably here with community organizing and activism) as an artistic and affect-driven practice that allows participants to collectivize their agency and adopt a larger, interdependent agency. In C. Thi Nguyen’s _Games: Agency as Art_ (2020), he positions games as a form of “agential arts.” [^1] Agential arts include those works that use, as their medium, “agency”—the sense of purpose and personhood through which we filter experiences and participate in the world. As Nguyen argues for the artistic merit of game design and gaming, so too does he provide a means for using the Ste-Émilie Skillshare to demonstrate the creative potential of community organizing. However, rather than depending on his framework to argue for the inclusion of movement building into agential arts, I come at the question through one of my favourite games: analogy. 

Looking at movement building over time, activism can be viewed as durational choreography. Are the various actors moving with elegance and intention? Oughtn’t we build more momentum before the next act(ion), or would a quieter moment here create sharper contrast (contradiction)? The flow of a public awareness campaign and the rhythm of a project’s timeline allow for tight or loose choreography, depending on circumstances and objectives. The vocabulary of movement, however, requires concision. Otherwise, tactics work at odds with one another and muddle the larger strategy. The intent of the work loses focus. 

Of Nguyen’s four criteria for agential arts, the final stipulation requires that one “actively pursue some goal, and then aesthetically attend to the pursuit of it.” [^2] There has to be an objective, and it has to be pursued beautifully, elegantly, extravagantly, thoughtfully. We must practice finesse, for here is where the art of it all comes into play. 

At the Skillshare, the collective and participants alike sought queer liberation, the dismantling of both white supremacy and patriarchy, and the death of the state, to varying degrees. We pursued these goals by actively nurturing mutual aid with other collectives across the city. Our gestures and theirs coalesced, taking the form of screen-printing soccer jerseys for No One Is Illegal, printing garbage bags with instructions for waterboarding as part of a public protest, fundraising for the legal defence of Shawn Brant and for the Native Women’s Shelter of Montreal, programming events during the annual Festival of Anarchy, and co-ordinating the pink bloc (queer and trans contingent) for the International Day Against Police Brutality. We also actively engaged with our neighbourhood, co-hosting activities for the children of incarcerated people, running the Dennis Rodman Basketball League at a nearby park, and screening outdoor films during the summer. By supporting local initiatives and participating in broader sympathetic networks, the Ste-Émilie Skillshare played with agency, modelled world-building, and made more space and avenues for participants to practice agency in and on the world. The jerseys and fundraisers were lovely and important, but the behind-the-scenes work sparks as well. The imagination and coordination that made these manoeuvres possible still gets me emotional. The ways that people care so deeply, with each other, while being deeply within the world. 

Significantly, while agential arts require the pursuit of “some goal,” the goal itself is inconsequential. We were pursuing collective liberation, but it was our manner of approach that distinguishes it as a creative practice. The Skillshare itself was constantly in flux. This ceaseless creation allowed us to leave room for future input, customization, and any accessibility consideration that might develop. When one member became homeless for a number of months, we were able to shelter them over winter. If anyone familiar with the project needed to earn a bit of money, we could offer them space to teach workshops or print their own merchandise. Beautiful, no? To design with unity between mission statement and internal structure. Cowardice prevents many organizations from following through on their mission statements, from following them to their logical conclusions. Ste-Émilie took care of children, taught hairstyling, and hosted read-aloud clubs rather than hosting Molotov cocktail happy hours; like many anti-authoritarian service organizations in the city, we contributed to the dual power safety net that made possible more confrontational modes of activism. As such, we had access to that safety net, allowing us to take risks from which other organizations might have shied away. 

Still, maintaining Ste-Émilie’s elasticity, to prevent ossification, rigidity, or authoritarian structures, required deep work and planning. We relied on typical activist tools like consensus decision-making and rotating responsibilities so that power didn’t accumulate in any individual. It felt like there was so much to do (unknowingly, I endeavoured for there to be too much to do) that Tasha Zamudio and I began routinely meeting outside of the collective in order to pick up some of the slack, causing us to burn out. Looking into advice about preventing burnout, I find platitudes about self-care when what we really need are creative and relational solutions to designing a collective that doesn’t allow members to overextend themselves. When a dancer or piece of choreography lacks harmony, a body of literature centuries old can offer guidance. Zapatismo and Jineology, Black Power and Indigenous stewardship, AIDS activism and situationism have so much to teach us about community organizing across time and space, yet somehow we lack the pedagogy to apply their teachings in our day-to-day activism. What do these movements have to teach us about choreographing for the long haul? What does Ste-Émilie have to contribute? What does it mean to approach movement building as an artistic practice?

One of Ste-Émilie’s secrets of success was the wide pool from which we sourced our tools and ingredients. The name itself was site-specific; our logo was an adaptation of a graffiti stencil made by Mike Baugh, one of our members, based on the movie _Tamala 2010: A Punk Cat in Space_ (2002); our politics were largely anti-colonial and anti-authoritarian; we pursued calculated risks that took into account potential legal consequences; in our own lives, many of us practiced modest but regular amounts of crime, for survival and pleasure; _what can we get away with_ was a guiding principle. We were doing political work artistically rather than artistic work politically. Using our lives as fodder and source material while working to address systemic issues, we were able to engage with loose, limber minds. Rather than apply activist tools whole-hog in a manner that has become rote and ritualistic at times, we could instead work to bend reality to our whimsy. Mythologizing our own practices as well as the legacies into which we collaged a mission statement, we crafted a collective agency that was nimble, minutely articulated, and robust enough to sidestep many of the limitations that other organizations might have accepted at face value. By the grace of Ste. Émilie of the Gutter, we were able to practice a form of community organizing that felt transcendent and practical and banal all at once. May her grime continue to shine on liberatory movements for aeons to come. 

[^1]: C. Thi Nguyen, _Games: Agency as Art_ (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020). 
[^2]: Ibid., 147. 

lg_C158_MACK.jpg

md_C158_MACK.jpg

sm_C158_MACK.jpg

thumbnail_C158_MACK.jpg

C158_MACK.jpg

C158_Mack.pdf

Activism

Collective

Social

Daniel Mack explores collective-centred queer liberation, self and community agency, and the dismantling of oppressive systems through theory in action in his consideration of the Montreal-based autonomous art space and collective Ste-Émilie Skillshare.


The Grace of It All: Movement Building as Durational Choreography

Patrick Cruz considers the role of spirituality, improvisation, intuition, and play as emancipatory tools to reify embedded colonial frameworks and ideologies in art-making. Cruz employs meditation, divination, and hypnosis as research methodologies to exhume and retrieve hidden ancestral knowledge. His works are informed by the intersections of clown philosophy, magic, and the occult, and its
syncretic manifestations and relationship in contemporary life.

Fiona Nguyen is a visual artist born and based in Tiohtià:ke/Mooniyang/Montreal. Her artistic practice and research focuses on systems of cultural and self-censorship experienced in 20th- and 21st-century totalitarian and authoritarian regimes, through the lens of post-war migration, as well as the importance of pop music as a tool for political resistance.

Kate Nugent is an archivist and writer born and based in Tiohtià:ke/Mooniyang/Montreal. She co-organizes the reading series Nouveau Poem. Her current archival research is interested in structures of power and knowledge production in settler-colonial archives.

Bea Parsons is a visual artist based in Tiohtià:ke/Mooniyang/Montreal. With a practice encompassing printmaking, drawing, and painting, Bea’s work conjures imagery that reflects the nuance and complexities of her Indigenous (nehiyawak/Cree) and colonial heritage.

Danica Pinteric is a curator, writer, and editor born and based in Tkaronto/Toronto. In 2022, she established Joys, an independent contemporary art gallery dedicated to exploring the politics of vulnerability.

Cadence Planthara is an artist, craftsperson, and educator of South Asian and European descent born on unceded Algonquin Anishinaabeg territory and currently based in the city of Toronto.

Participant

lg_C158_MPMS.jpg

md_C158_MPMS.jpg

sm_C158_MPMS.jpg

thumbnail_C158_MPMS.jpg

C158_MPMS.jpg

C158_MindPoolMemorySpring.pdf

Spirituality

Sensory

In Mind Pool, Memory Spring’s roundtable, the experimental research group engages with how techniques of past life regression, a form of hypnotherapy, might expand limiting Western conceptions of the soul (as group member Danica Pinteric suggests). The discussion highlights how past life regression might inform the group’s artistic practices, which span topics including ancestry, spirituality, empathy, and the tether between memory and fiction.


Roundtable: Mind Pool, Memory Spring

Chloë p.f. Lalonde is a synaesthetic artist, writer, cultural worker, and caregiver based in Tiohtià:ke/Mooniyang/Montréal. With a background in art education, anthropology, and art-science practices, Chloë’s research is slow and circular, placing an emphasis on sustainability and accessibility in the arts and exhibitions as places of learning.

The pink moon appears in the early springtime a month following the equinox in the northern hemisphere. In the sky, the moon is not pink: there are no changes in the atmosphere, no astronomical events that affect its colour. This moon is referred to as “pink” because it occurs around the times that pink wildflowers bloom. The strawberry moon then arrives in the summer, followed by the corn moon and the harvest moon, and later, the hunter moon. 

The names given to these full lunar cycles have been popularized by _The Old Farmer’s Almanac_, which attributes them to Indigenous cosmologies, and colonial American and European sources. [^1] These vernacular names have been used as a way to keep time, inherently entangled with agriculture. 

_“What’s in a name?”_

In Western astrology, named astrological ages reference the position of Earth in relation to the sun and constellations. As Earth orbits the sun, the sun also moves very, very slowly through space, passing through one constellation (from our point of view) approximately every 2000 years. Each constellation is associated with one of 12 zodiac signs, forming a clock-like calendar, or map, of our accessible/visible cosmos. The characteristics of each sign are said to inform developments in human society and culture. [^2]

The current Age of Pisces is characterized by finding solace in the belief in a higher power and the prevalence of religion across societies. In 2024, some say, we are supposed to feel a shift toward the Age of Aquarius, long revered in Western culture that popularized the term for its utopian promise of social progress, advancements in communication, cognition, understanding, freedom, equality, and justice for all. 

In outlining these periods of time, Western astrology seeks to integrate with the cosmos to understand why everything is the way it is and to predict what will happen. Similarly, how might an artwork’s date, name, and seemingly subjective visual and material language still objectively represent the times? 

For Danny Kostyshin, a potter in his 70s based in Vancouver, dating his work is for more than personal archiving purposes, but to infuse the work with its horoscope, embodying time. Since the ’70s, his pottery takes the forms of plates, bowls, and condom boxes that track gay rights, the HIV/AIDs epidemic, safe sex practices, same-sex marriages, and notable figures who challenged this socio-political progress and who challenged popular culture and his friends. I encountered Kostyshin’s work as part of an artist talk, hosted by Craft Parlour, a working group I was part of that was organized by Rebecca La Marre for her artist residency at Western Front. There, I had the pleasure to exchange with many artists who work with earth, performance, activism, artefacts, language, and symbolism. 

Expanding from Kostyshin’s practice, I am interested in looking at how different elements of an artwork, even its name, can be a “horoscope” of the times. In other words, how might abstract symbols, colours, and forms come together to embody a supposed shift of the times, like toward the Age of Aquarius? 

Élise Lafontaine is a painter who works with synaesthesia. She documents a place in time by painting sound that resonates through her body in places of solitude. Her exhibition at Pangée in Montreal, “Lombrives” (all works 2024), recalled memories of her experience in a French grotto of the same name. Forms, like something bodily, appear and reappear from the form of the grotto itself. In some paintings, like _Le grand dôme_ [_The Big Dome_] and _La Carène_ [_The Hull_] there is a straight line that divides the canvases, sometimes painted, other times cut and sewn. A direct channel of sound, or the indication of a presence. An iris-like form appears on many of her smaller canvases: some are named to illustrate specific sounds and sensations, like _Violet noise_, or times of day, like _Un soir à Ronchamps_ [_A Night at Ronchamps_] and _Un matin à Ronchamps_ [_A Morning at Ronchamps_]. The names of larger canvases like _La Galerie Blanche_ [_The White Gallery_] ground her sound studies in specific parts of the grotto. 

How does a name become infused with, embody, and predict social and cultural developments? How does naming become a way of knowing, a way of timekeeping? 

My siblings and I spend a lot of time colouring with our mother, who, at 54 years old, has quite progressed early onset Alzheimer’s. On her own accord, she will only colour in purples and blues. Every other colour is too bright, overstimulating. She makes a gesture with her hands blocking her eyes and ears, kind of shaking her head. My sibling created a playlist of songs for her, titling it _Purple Period_. We play these songs for our mother because she likes to sing along, and it helps her focus, even just for a few minutes. Now, her purple colouring pencil is a short nub, and she has moved on to pink. My sibling made a new playlist: _Pink Period_. At an exhibition at the Maison des arts de Laval, my mom named elements of the artwork—some marks on a painting were decidedly “stinkles”; another sculpture, “Gus.” Is the naming of astrological ages or artworks just as arbitrary as, for instance, neurodegenerative time marked by pencil crayon colours? 

The poetics of a name insinuate a certain metaphor, calling to the art of language that is embraced by an artist. A name serves to create a digestible, tangible link between an abstract work and a viewer, summing up an idea that grasps at something beyond words, solidifying it otherwise in the colour and form the name represents. Some names point to a story, hint at a way of knowing, or embody a sensation. Some are more poetic, the language and composition of words as much of a work as the artwork itself. 

_“That which we call a rose / By any other name would smell as sweet.”_ [^3] 

Under any name or interpretation, an object or a symbol represents the thing itself; what we call it matters not. In considering form as fact, I turn to intuitive drawing, or doodling, as a way of articulating complex ideas. 

Drawing tests are used in various forms of psychology and neurology to reveal cognition, personality type, and individual ways of perception, and to understand or predict behaviour. In dementia diagnoses, drawing a clock is a defining factor; the numbers trailing off a wonky circle reveal that something in this person’s mind is not working the “right” way. The Rorschach test is meant to reveal something about a person’s mind based on what they see in ink blobs. The Wartegg test asks you to complete an image from a simple shape, and where you place your own lines is meant to reveal something about you in relation to a symbol. Tests like these have often been used as a screening factor, like for arriving immigrants to Ellis Island. But where did the symbols involved in these tests gain their meaning? Who has agreed that a wavy line represents emotional capacities, a square represents the home, or a circle your sense of self? 

#####A visualization experiment, or, a drawing test: 

One shape sprawls; round edges of plump tentacles spread, breathing and absorbing like droplets of water becoming one large, flexible, and changing berry-coloured mass. It moves slowly. 

The other is yellow or red, sharp, edges pointy like a star, spiky like a club. Though it’s no weapon, the prongs deflate quickly on contact, like a blow-up toy castle, or an Inflatable Tube Man. 

One is Kiki; the other is Bouba. The names for either shape are arbitrary, determined by neuroscientists, but they do speak to the ways in which English speakers associate sounds with matter, shape, form, gesture, and colour. The stimuli we absorb exudes through our lives, practices, and works in similar ways. 

Common shapes may often be used as symbols of familiar items, and the act of drawing entices a certain set of questions in the drawer’s mind influenced by the size of the shape, and that person’s general experience. Colours add a layer of subjectivity to a drawing; they may provide direct context tied to a material reality or allow the mind to drift, letting senses, intuition, and somatic movements speak for themselves. 

In a figurative painting, the curtains in it might be blue to suggest sadness, or a chair might be on fire to represent an unstable environment. But in a non-figurative painting, the globular shape at the centre might be a pulsating yellow, not because it represents happiness and warmth, or hope for a dark world, but because this is the colour of the sound the artist knew it to be in part of a grotto, or a sort of chartreuse green because it makes my mom want to crack her foot. 

To what extent are we manifesting our own realities? At one time, someone looked to the sky and said, these are constellations, this is the zodiac, we are in the Age of Pisces, and that prior time, that time full of war, was the Age of Aries. 

And this green makes my mom want to crack her foot, and this sound, Lafontaine knows it to be violet. That there is water, and that constellation, that drawing in the sky, is just a bunch of stars. 

An instinctive impulse, a personal truth that becomes materialized—garnering colour and form to create symbols. Yet, subjective to others: that chartreuse green might not make you want to crack your foot, it might make you nauseous and remind you of the colour of the walls inside your dentist office as the plaque was being shaved off your teeth with a mechanical tool, making your entire spine shiver. 

Colour and form can be considered universally evocative because no matter what the initial intent behind them was, you will be able to connect a memory of some kind to them; without being attached to a visual image, they make a mental one appear. 

Thinking through life happenings in colour, form, and symbols holds space for processing multiple cosmologies and temporalities. Naming, an act of language, further adds a contextual framework, like the names of lunar cycles. 

I think of other forms that are seemingly ubiquitous or universal, like the grid: the city as a grid, our streets blocked out, our electrical systems and circuits, pixels on screens, pattern-making, blueprints, macOS Launchpads, calendars. Each square equal to the one next to it. Could it be a symbol for a utopian dream? The grid as a way of seeing, a drawing tool, was popularized by Albrecht Dürer’s 16th century sighting grid. Ancient drawing machines such as Dürer’s were similarly used to facilitate the replication of images: the void grid to be filled one square at a time. 

Sarah-Mecca Abdourahman’s colourful paintings in “Praises Unsung” (2024) at FOFA Gallery appear as part of softly sculpted blankets and plushy duvets, often formed from grids. The hands of caregivers sometimes extend past the paintings, becoming larger than life. A narrative unfolds in these hands, among the gestures and bodies present: a familial tale, an eldest daughter’s plight, her safe space. Yet, painted white and grey grids on some works’ edges suggest an absence, akin to subjects with missing backgrounds in image-editing software. This could suggest the image in question might be altered further. 

The grid also appears in Catherine Desroches’s delicate drawings in “Dans ses reflets, le Monde est beau deux fois” [“In Its Reflections, the World Is Beautiful Twice”] (2024), also at Pangée. In shades of grey, sepia, and colour, Desroches’s grids become foundational structures in flux with concrete architectural elements such as staircases and archways. Drawing without an intent to instil meaning, Desroches makes marks that serve the containing and suggestive purpose of parentheses. Suggesting a desire to ascend, to transcend, such symbols like the grid carry an objective, dissociating power, one that contains multitudes. 

As a weaver I have an inherent bias in favour of this symbol, this way of organizing time—grids block my patterns, when I follow patterns. I colour-code phrases from my journals within grids, draw grids when I do not know what else to draw. But try as I might, my grids are always wonky, warped, waving. 

In this constellation of ideas, I think I’m getting at seeing the grid as an example of a default symbol, a baseline. But ever more so, intuition and bodily knowledge take over and make the grid something else beyond material structure—its edges aren’t hard and defined.
 
Just as the simple truth of humanity passing through time told by the sun and the moon has been layered with symbols and stories in the stars, the same can be said about abstract symbols in artworks. Artworks, framed by the names they’re given, record intangible information, embodying the time and unpacking the ways in which people can perceive the world. As we see with drawing tests, scientists have already been creating informed diagnoses based on a person’s association to arbitrary colour and form. The associations are there. You guessed right: Bouba is the bulbous shape and Kiki, the spikey one. 

What if, instead of resisting or othering these intuitive urges—wanting to crack your foot because of a certain shade of green—we leaned into them? If the grid represents what we are, have been, striving toward in the Age of Pisces, is going off-grid how we get to the great Age of Aquarius? 

[^1]: Catherine Boeckmann, “Full Moon Names for 2024,” _The Old Farmer’s Almanac_, April 11, 2024, [https://www.almanac.com/full-moon-names](https://www.almanac.com/full-moon-names) 
[^2]: Celeste Longacre, “What is the Age of Aquarius?,” _The Old Farmer’s Almanac_, June 3, 2024, [https://www.almanac.com/what-age-aquarius](https://www.almanac.com/what-age-aquarius)
[^3]: This line and _“What’s in a name?”_ are from William Shakespeare’s _Romeo and Juliet_ (c. 1597). 

lg_C158_LALONDE.jpg

md_C158_LALONDE.jpg

sm_C158_LALONDE.jpg

thumbnail_C158_LALONDE.jpg

C158_LALONDE.jpg

Lalonde.pdf

Chloë p.f. Lalonde considers how artworks, framed by their names, dates, and personal and universal symbols, might record intangible information about the period and conditions of their conception, by discussing the works of Danny Kostyshin, Élise Lafontaine, Sarah-Mecca Abdourahman, and Catherine Desroches.

Green That Makes You Want to Crack Your Foot

Kira Xonorika (b. 1995) is an interdisciplinary artist, author, and futurist. Her work explores the connections between sovereignty, techno-science, temporality, world-building, and magic.

A year before the word “gender identity disorder’’ was officially removed from the World Health Organization’s (WHO) International Classification of Diseases, trans activists, policymakers, and artists from around the world gathered in Buenos Aires with a common purpose: to strategize around depathologization. The year was 2018, and the atmosphere at the World Professional Association for Transgender Health Symposium was as tense as the realm of policy-making can get. This was a decisive moment for trans advocates. It was also a moment that took its toll on the bodies of the activists, and the many trancestors who, in proving their humanity, got too close to the systems that perpetuate wounding. 

It was at this gathering that I met Fran Demétrio—a brilliant decolonial philosopher who has since passed away. Fran, who is Black Brazilian, was the first trans woman professor at the Federal University of Recôncavo da Bahia. Not only was Fran wise beyond her years, but she was also a lovely and caring human. We met, of course, while smoking at the corner of the Hilton with Lua Stabile—an activist focusing on decolonial trans liberation and the decriminalization of sex work in Brazil. In a gesture of camaraderie, we called ourselves _travestis fumadoras da esquina do Hilton._

I remember attending a panel where Fran addressed the importance of considering epistemic rights both within and beyond juridical frameworks. At the time, the notion of epistemic rights was a new concept to me, but I instinctively understood what she meant. Colonization in the Americas involved European powers forcing ideologies based on empiricism and reason onto colonized peoples. [^1] The violent universalization of medieval Europe’s separation between science and magic has contributed to the demise of Afro-Indigenous spiritualities deemed demonic and anti-Christian. 

In the context of Guaraní populations—my peoples who live in the southern regions of South America—epistemicide and acculturation has resulted in our histories of gender expansiveness being denied, erased, and forgotten. Researchers trained in Eurocentric academic methodologies studying the gender of the Guaraní people who inhabit Paraguay often portray them as binary populations. I am wary of those who have studied anthropology but do not interact closely with Indigiqueer individuals. 

Despite the supernatural conditions of epistemicide and its surrounding infrastructures, Guaraní gender expansiveness managed to survive. Trauma isn't the only thing inherited across generations. There are still those strategies that help us recentre ancestral knowledges that colonialism could never fully suppress. Unexpectedly, I have been able to reconnect with the gender-expansive symbolic worlds erased in my culture through the process of creating images with AI. But to understand how such an AI-mediated reconnection was even possible in the first place, we need to consider magic. 

*** 

The year is now 2022. My life looks very different. I’ve shed some layers and am about to enter my Saturn return. I’m working at a non-profit impacting global policy in trans human rights. At the time, I love it. I have a sense of purpose. In the span of a year, I may hate it all. To the NGO, the only solution to colonial epistemicide seems to be philanthropic intervention—a framework that is utterly insufficient for the kind of ancestral recovery work I am interested in. And so, I make a major life decision: I'm heading to Tongva land. 

A month before moving, I came across the work of Edgar Fabián Frías, a Wixárika luminary, brujx, tarot reader, and multidisciplinary artist who was then based in San Francisco. I was drawn to a workshop Edgar led on art-making as a kind of spell-casting. Participants explored incantation across different mediums. The digital images I created in the workshop blended abstract atmospheres: bloomings, rivers, and moons, all in reference to the land and cosmos. Here, I was influenced by Edgar’s practice, where Indigenous futurity felt at once absolutely different from the current order of things, and still, incredibly close. 

I want to think with one work by Edgar: _Kïïka_ (2023). Exhibited as part of the “LIFELIKE” (2023) exhibition at Vellum LA, _Kïïka_ is a digital image that draws as much from internet archives as it does from plural cosmologies. Vibrant colours alongside Wixárika and popular iconography guide the eye in Edgar’s affective cartography. _Kïïka_ is alive, pulsating with images of altered states and hyperconnectivity to the cosmos. Edgar’s work follows a long tradition of Wixárika explorations of multiple dimensions, embracing transculturality to resist and (re)exist. In this way, Indigenous art senses the planetary. 

A month after attending Edgar’s workshop, I began to play with text-to-image AI applications. Six months later, the result was _Paradise_ (2022)—a series of images that were like postcards from a future world where the biosphere was a place absolutely conceived in coalition with the invisible. Most images include multicoloured and shapeshifting bodies interacting with each other in the landscape. Another series of images I created, _Cycles_ (2024), represents trans Indigenous bodies generated from the programming of a world instructed in Western origin stories. It follows that the imges I created through AI were already prediscursively tainted by the semiotics of colonialism. On this topic, scholar Mashinka Firunts Hakopian introduces the term “algolinguicism” to describe how the archives of the internet’s memory reflects the values of hegemonic cultures while simultaneously minoritizing others through language. [^2] English, for example, is the dominant language in AI usage, and often the entry to its code. How does one transcend such semiotic conditioning? The intention with which one writes the text prompt used by AI to create an image is fundamental. Intention carries the power to become data, and later, an algorithm. The role that words have in constructing systems of knowledge is vital. Words reverberate, echolocating with the threads of existence. Through metaphor, language functions by invoking and attracting what one seeks to communicate. This metonymic function of language, wherein we only arrive at meaning through approximation, highlights the inherent instability of colonial grammar. Under such language, Guaraní gender expansiveness is purported to no longer exist. And yet, through my text prompts, I was able to articulate Guaraní lifeways using the same colonial language that sought to eliminate them. In the era of AI prompts, words are road maps to brighter constellations: declarations are incantations. 

A month before travelling to Turtle Island, or even knowing that was the name of the land, I saw turtles and tortoises everywhere. When sea turtles hatch on beaches around the world, they embark on multi-year, epic migrations at sea. During these voyages, they navigate by sensing the invisible lines of the magnetic field; each part of the coastline has its own unique magnetic signature, which the turtles remember and later use as an internal compass. After sea turtles reach sexual maturity, they might come back, in about 15 years to lay their own eggs. This process is both laborious and ancestral. 

Like the sea turtle, Indigenous knowledges re-emerge across generations, despite colonial algorithms. Even when languages have been colonized and pushed underground, their pulsing persists underneath it all. After all, what returns to the earth has the capacity to re-emerge. Something happens when magic is activated; if you pay attention, you start seeing signs everywhere. 

“Technology” stems from the Greek “tekhnologia,” meaning discourse about skilled making. It combines “tekhnē,” the art and methods of creation, and “logia,” signifying a systematic study. Originally referring to the knowledge and skill behind crafting, “technology” now encompasses the application of scientific knowledge to create practical tools and machines. Returning to the originary etymology, storytelling is a kind of technology. Origin stories hold profound significance across cultures and civilizations. They are narratives that explain the beginnings of the world, providing insights into the cultural beliefs, values, and worldviews of a particular society. Think of the story of Adam and Eve, and how it might inflect the patriarchal and Abrahamic biases in contemporary algorithms that place woman after man, good before evil, and purity before sin. When the conditions of this biblical equation were unfulfilled, the result was land displacement. Most origin stories from the colonial West appeal to a history of dividing one against another. What would it look like for an algorithm to be informed by Guaraní storytelling, for instance, which values animacy, sensitivity, emotion, and circular knowledges that, unlike Western teleology and linear logics of progress, thinks alongside cycles of land? In creating with AI, I remembered the beings that inhabit the forest. I remembered how to create another world with them, and _we_ gathered. 

In Guaraní cosmologies, Tupã Tenondé is the deity of creation, often presented in symbiosis with the hummingbird. [^3] Hummingbirds, after all, are absolute cross-pollinators. The generative eros of the hummingbird is world-building. Put differently, before colonial knowledge is love. The hummingbird’s fecundity, like the act of communing in soil, facilitates future cycles of blooming. Here, I also think of the Guaraní word _tekoha_, which means “the place where we are who we are.” For Guaraní gender expansiveness, _tekoha_ is a sacred site where we have the right to be ourselves, with oxygen, water, and care. Any language I use to create AI-generated images will always be informed by this constant process of blooming, where mutualist ecologies allow for life to exist. 

[^1]: Scholar Viviane Vergueiro Simakawa, for instance, has written extensively about how Eurocentrism defines permanence as a sociocultural and institutional norm for understanding cisgenderness. See Viviane Vergueiro Simakawa, “Por inflexões decoloniais de corpos e identidades de gênero inconformes: uma análise autoetnográfica da cisgeneridade como normatividade” (master’s dissertation, Federal University of Bahia, 2015), [https://repositorio.ufba.br/handle/ri/19685](https://repositorio.ufba.br/handle/ri/19685)
[^2]: Mashinka Firunts Hakopian, “A New AI Lexicon: Algolinguicism,” AI Now Institute, October 21, 2021, [https://ainowinstitute.org-publication/a-new-ai-lexicon-algolinguicism-2](https://ainowinstitute.org-publication/a-new-ai-lexicon-algolinguicism-2)
[^3]: Kaká Werá Jecupé, _Tupã Tenondé: A criação do Universo, da Terra e do Homem segundo a tradição oral Guarani_ (São Paulo: Editora Peirópolis, 2001). 

lg_C158_XONORIKA.jpg

md_C158_XONORIKA.jpg

sm_C158_XONORIKA.jpg

thumbnail_C158_XONORIKA.jpg

C158_XONORIKA.jpg

C158_Xonorika.pdf

Technology

Kira Xonorika uses magic as a lens to understand how an AI-mediated reconnection with Guaraní gender-expansive worlds is possible by exploiting the instability of colonial English grammar. 

AI Incantations for Sovereignty and Gender Expansiveness

Letter

##### Dear _C_,

I don’t know whether to thank you or to raise an alarm; so let me do both. You released a vortex of unbridled meaning into the world by publishing Aman Sandhu and Sahar Te's collaborative piece “Our Third Sun.” I’m here to report that the poem is alive, beyond all years and categories, and that it is possessed.

Even at first blush the poem seemed riveting. Then it started haunting me across repeat readings savoured slowly over consecutive weeks. The experience is something that I can only describe as a hallowed hollowing, or a simultaneous state of both opening and being opened. “I dig in to loosen,” Sandhu and Te write, continuing to describe how “you dig with your pinky fingers and press into my ducts.” Elsewhere, they write of holes in us, and us in holes: “Ascend, and make holes in our ground so we can flow through.” And on holes as wholes, they observe: “Gods gather with open wounds.”

Spiraling between two lurid voices in holy intercourse with a third sun, the work embraces both political activism and spiritual healing, braiding these strands together with a mode of intense attention to aesthetic feeling that circles everything from pain, horror, adoration, erotic sensation, and dialogic process, through to the poetic function of language.

In a world where so many are “trapped in the illusory of borders,” “curtailing their own delight, intoxicated by acceptance,” wishing merely to “categorize play,” and being content to experience “elation in mapping ecstasy” (rather than the terrifying vulnerability of ecstatic ruptures), “we weep for circularity,” for “a kind of touch that reorients.” The poem “shatters those rigid tongues,” demanding defiance: “stand upon the ice, / witness it fracture across the vast surface. / An unripe orange held in your palm, / push a nail into it. / Transgress.”

Edging the swollen boundaries between words and being, form and feeling, until all comes together, this inexhaustible work resonates with so much. But I’m especially struck by the ways that it reverberates with a specific passage from Zhuangzi written some 2,300 years ago—as a rebuke toward those who waste their lives in zero-sum games policing rigid category boundaries in fear of surrender to the unknown: “Forget the years, forget distinctions. Leap into the boundless, and make it your home!”

##### With gratitude and alarm, 
##### Jamin Pelkey 

 
##### Dear _C Magazine_,

eunice bélidor’s essay “What is the Safe Word?” bridged the divide I’ve experienced between my professional life as an arts worker, and my personal life within kink, BDSM, and ethical non-monogamy (ENM) communities. Although both identities co-exist, they have always felt like opposing forces— both meant for separate, privileged, private rooms, where I instinctively look over my shoulder to ensure there’s no one there from my “other life.” The fear of bumping into a colleague at a munch is too real. 
BDSM, kink, and ENM styles and protocols became my salve for bad experiences in relationships when I was young. I gained language, permission (from myself and others), and etiquette lessons that empowered me to take (or relinquish) control, navigate new spaces, and advocate for myself. These relationship practices have fine-tuned my ability to seek alternative perspectives, appreciate and respect where people are at, and to apply fairness, curiosity, and acceptance across all relationships. 

Throughout my daily administrative work, professional development courses, and ongoing research specific to Human Resources (HR), in the back of my mind I’ve held space for foundational principles from kink, BDSM, and ENM well laid out by bélidor: consent, boundaries, communication, and accountability. Everything is so easily applied across contexts: treat people with respect, go above and beyond to protect boundaries, set clear expectations, and be accountable for issues as they arise. 

HR is not in the best state within artist-run culture, and is akin to the non-consensual “Sadist Dominant” bélidor described. I’ve tried my best through my work to prioritize, standardize, and create good frameworks for building healthy working relationships among staff and between artists, curators, and the institution—perhaps this looks like a non-hierarchical polyamorous Service Dominant, Responsible Findom, or ideally, the beloved Switch/Vers role. bélidor’s essay reconciled the division between the personal and the professional, acknowledging that they are intertwined, mutually-informed, and should be (consensually) exposed to one another. 

##### Sincerely, 
##### Ginger Scott 
 

##### Dear _C_,

Adrien Crossman’s interview with Dana Buzzee indulges readers into a conception of how to view contemporary art practices the same way we read a story—individually, rather than as a collective. 
Fan fiction creates offshoot stories using familiar characters from pop culture. These versions twist and rattle the original sources, often leaning into the fantastical ideals of their new authors. In the interview, Buzzee described audiences viewing their exhibition as being akin to reading fan fiction. This reminded me of how we create our own stories in every facet of our daily lives. 

In “Writing Through Desire” (_Canadian Art_, 2020), Daniella Sanader wrote, “Is it such a bad thing to love something so deeply that you want to be absorbed by it, to let yourself be changed through its influence? At its core, isn’t that what it means to be moved?” Buzzee encourages the total absorption of their artwork by the audience, knowing the work will change them, or at the very least stand out to them, as they move forward and share their own versions and ideas around BDSM and kink cultures. 
This interview was an absorbing piece on how contemporary art practices contribute to our own stories. Thank you! 

##### Until next time, 
##### Lex Barrie

C158_Letters.pdf

Letters

Editor

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_. 

Associate Editor

Publisher

Designer

Artist Project

Alex Jacobs-Blum (she/her) is a Gayogohó̱ :nǫʼ (Cayuga) of Six Nations of the Grand River Territory and German visual artist and independent curator living in Hamilton, ON. Her research focuses on Indigenous futurities and accessing embodied Ancestral Hodinöhsö:ni' knowledge.

_I am a daughter of the stars - the moon - the sun. 
 
As I bite the birch bark - under the heart berry moon - by 
the water - with the trees - I acknowledge and honour my art ancestors. 
 
I carry this tradition into the future - for our daughters 
to come—a celestial love_. 

> —Alexis Nanibush-Pamajewong 

**A Thread Through Time** 
Along the shores of Lake Ontario in Tkaronto, Alexis Nanibush-Pamajewong sits and gazes up toward the night sky as the sun leaves the horizon, opening a gateway for the anangoog (stars) to revisit their place in the sky. Though clouded by the city smog, the Ode’imini-giizis (Strawberry Moon) is just beyond, endlessly guiding gentle waves onto the shoreline. 

Traditional teachings are woven into each phase of the thirteen-moon cycle, guiding the Anishinaabeg in nurturing mino bamaadiziwin (the good life).The Ode’imini-giizis is a symbol that the first berry of the season is in bloom. In the shape of a heart, strawberries were given the name ode’imin, meaning heart berry in Anishinaabemowin. They not only provide sustenance to our bodies, but also provide teachings from the land. Both the ode’imin and giizis are greatly significant for Anishinaabe women, representing femininity and women's intrinsic connection to the land and universe. 

Alexis's _BITE//Celestial\\\BITE_ (2024) is a performance of an ancestral Anishinaabeg art form, mazinibaganjigan (birch bark biting), documented by Shawnee Anishinaabe artist and curator Emília Nahdee (Bkejwanong Unceded Territory). Grounding herself on the land, Alexis channels her relationship with ode’imin and giizis, feeling the moon's glow on her skin. She becomes attuned to the trees, water, insects, and stars surrounding her, sensing that everything breathes as one. _BITE//Celestial\\\BITE_ accesses vast planes of existence, from the depths beneath the earth to the expansiveness of the cosmos. 

Last summer, I attended a virtual talk by Oneida researcher Samantha Doxtator on Indigenous astronomy as told by the Haudenosaunee. She explained that “we are composed of the same elements that makeup the stars: hydrogen, oxygen, carbon, nitrogen, and iron. Thus, we are made of the same stardust as the stars in the universe.” Samantha's words filled me with hope and reminded me of how beautiful and interconnected our existence is. There are many similarities between Nation belief systems, as the Anishinaabeg consider themselves as Star People. The threads between Nations show that we are all relatives bound by alchemy, woven together throughout time. 

Given this connection, as Indigenous people, we carry the wisdom of our Ancestors within our beings. Their love and knowledge expand time and space, pulsing through our veins, waiting to be awakened. Three years ago, Alexis sought to teach herself mazinibaganjigan. Drawing from ancestral memory, she learned new techniques with each birch bark piece. 

Alexis takes a piece of birch bark from her bag, softens it in the nibi (water), and begins to fold it in quarters. The process feels instinctive as she inserts it into her mouth, gently applying pressure with her teeth to create small indentations. Guided by muscle memory and intuition, they repeat this delicate process, creating a stunning abstract constellation. A star is born—radiating light from the inside out. 

Alexis weaves worlds by combining a celestial design with the rich texture of birch bark, held with care in her fingertips. She carries on a tradition as her ancestors have done for centuries. Alexis always keeps a piece of birch bark in their bag to access at any time. It is a mindful practice that offers her moments of reflective pause.
 
In February 2024, Alexis visited the Royal Ontario Museum's (ROM) birchbark biting collection, which includes over 700 archival pieces depicting animals, insects, and plants from the mid-20th century. The collection notably includes a significant number of birch bark biting pieces by Angelique Merasty (b. 1924) from Beaver Lake Cree Nation, renowned for reviving the traditional art form. Anishinaabeg stories have also often been recorded on birch bark scrolls and passed down through generations. The resilience of traditional art-making practices among the Anishinaabeg reflects their enduring love for future generations. Influenced by the ROM’s collection to create _BITE//Celestial\\\BITE_, Alexis honours art elders by celebrating the kinship between birch bark and the Anishinaabeg since time immemorial. 

Alexis extends their practice beyond art-making by offering mazinibaganjigan workshops for other Indigenous creatives of all ages. This community-based approach not only passes on traditional practices, but also nurtures a legacy for young Indigenous people and fosters connections that reach across generations. It embodies a love that transcends Western thought, aiming to uplift our communities and Nations with a foundation rooted in well-being. This framework of future-building ensures the continuity and prosperity of our communities through Indigenous practices and values. 

As Alexis listens to the waves on the banks of Lake Ontario, she vibrates from within, reminding us that the land and cosmos are always tethered to Indigenous bodies, no matter where we are in the world.

Curator

Alexis Nanibush-Pamajewong (she/they) is a Two-Spirit Anishinaabe interdisciplinary artist from Shawanaga First Nation (Robinson Huron Treaty). Their mediums include performance, installation, beadwork, photography, and video. Alexis’s work focuses on Anishinaabe storytelling, ancestral/intergenerational knowledge, presence/absence, land as pedagogy, acts of care, love, and labour.

Artist

lg_C158 AP Thumb.jpg

md_C158 AP Thumb.jpg

sm_C158 AP Thumb.jpg

thumbnail_C158 AP Thumb.jpg

C158 AP Thumb.jpg

C158_ArtistProject.pdf

Performance

Ritual

Guest curated by Alex Jacobs-Blum, this artist project by Alexis Nanibush-Pamajewong embodies the ancestral Anishinaabeg art form of mazinibaganjigan (birch bark biting) in their performance documented along the shores of Lake Ontario.


_BITE//Celestial\\\BITE_ by Alexis Nanibush-Pamajewong: Text

Review

Jayne Wilkinson is a writer, editor, and curator. She was formerly Editor-in-Chief at _Canadian Art_ and regularly contributes to art publications including _C Magazine_, _e-flux Criticism_, _esse arts + opinions_, _Momus_, and others. She holds an MA in Art History and Critical Theory from the University of British Columbia and is an occasional lecturer in Visual Studies at the University of Toronto.


This is not a normal review. The ongoing genocide in Gaza makes it impossible to consider contemporary art in any regular sense. How to assess aesthetics, impact, concepts, political positions, and the histories upon which art is produced when, as of this writing, Israel is in the midst of its invasion of Rafah, trapping more than one million people in a war zone, continuing to bomb hospitals, refugee camps, basic infrastructure, and producing widespread conditions of famine? It takes a lot of conceptual dissociation to consider a Biennale exhibition titled “Stranieri Ovunque – Foreigners Everywhere” on its own terms when Palestinians are being dehumanized, treated as “foreign,” othered, and killed in their own homes.

As an art writer, I want to always remember that we learn from artists first, that artists are our teachers. I never want to become jaded or think of art as secondary. I want art that reminds us of shared experiences, shared humanity, art that is more powerful than capital, that is never reducible to luxury. I want art that shows us how, at its very core, making art is what it means to be human. Palestinian artists, poets, writers, and their allies show us how to encourage critique alongside solidarity, how to imagine relationships, lives, and histories through aesthetics, how to build meaningful connections despite systems designed to isolate us. What follows is a brief survey of projects in Venice that offer connection and a sense of urgency in thinking through the role of art, even alongside military occupation. 

“South West Bank – Landworks, Collective Action and Sound” is the single official collateral exhibition of the Biennale to focus on art from Palestine. It gathers 20 Palestinian and allied artists and collectives in a small space to present what the title describes: land-based, sonic, and social-activist artworks from the southern West Bank. Curated by Jonathan Turner, the exhibition includes a mix of practices from collaborators of Artists + Allies x Hebron and Dar Yusuf Nasri Jacir for Art and Research in Bethlehem: Samer Barbari, Adam Broomberg, Duncan Campbell, Rafael González, Isabella Hammad, Shayma Hamad, Chris Harding, Baha Hilo, Emily Jacir, Sebastián Jatz Rawicz, Benjamin Lind, Jumana Manna, Michael Rakowitz, Mohammad Saleh, Vivien Sansour, Andrea de Siena, Dima Srouji, and other participants. Together their works make a powerful claim for how histories of cultivation, the tending and caring for and of the land, are practices of homemaking deeply rooted in Palestine. Adam Broomberg and Rafael González’s large-scale black-and-white photographs, _Anchor in the landscape_ (2022), sensitively show the gnarled limbs of hundred-and thousand-year-old olive trees, twisting ever outward to accommodate new growth, which become symbolic portraits of life as both precarious and grounded. Baha Hilo’s olive oil containers, _PRESERVE_ (2022–2024), are the result of the first harvest of Dar Jacir’s olive terraces, which are being repaired through companion planting and soil regeneration. Sari Khoury’s _Grapes of Wrath_ (2021) is a minimalist arrangement of wine bottles containing wine produced from grape varietals indigenous to Palestine, inspired by the long history of viticulture in the region around Bethlehem—where the domestication of wild grapes by Natufian civilizations began in the seventh to eighth millennia BCE. Among so many powerful works, Shayma Hamad’s dough-kneading installation (_Dough ball_, 2024) and publication on bread as a sustaining component of death rituals (_The Distance of Death from my Hands to my Mouth_, 2023) and Mohammad Saleh’s _Ardawa_ (2022–ongoing), video excerpts documenting the bioremediation of an urban farm burned by the Israeli army in 2021, both stand out as demonstrations of the beauty in connecting people to the land and each other.

At Fondazione In Between Art Film, Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme’s _Until we became fire and fire us_ (2023–ongoing) is an emotionally affecting multiscreen and multimedia installation that takes the land and life of Palestine as its locus. Although part of the group exhibition “Nebula,” it functions very much as a solo presentation, spanning six rooms that increase with visual and sonic intensity as one moves through. The first rooms are quieter, with a series of monolithic steel-panel sculptures presenting images and short notes, almost desktop-like, alongside drawings of Jerusalem created by Abou-Rahme’s father in the ’70s and ’80s. In his drawings, lone figures are shown against cityscapes, and the inverted use of white on black produces a visual effect akin to photographic negatives. As focal points amid more abstract hanging textiles and floods of pink light, the drawings suggest a personal form of historical documentation and offer a moving gesture of connection between two generations of artists. The sonic components are louder and the visual projections all-encompassing in subsequent rooms, producing a non-linear narration that travels and dances and flickers, flame-like, through accounts of indigenous plants, cactuses, ancient stones, song and protest, fire and regeneration—all emblematic of the stamina and resistance of life in Palestine. The effect induces an amnesiac’s memory: something is here that can’t be held on to, as though the end and the beginning are the same. The phrase “THOSE WHO CHANT DO NOT DIE” is a singular impression among many powerful onscreen phrases, an incantation that protest is never in vain. 

Of all the projects in Venice, what stayed with me most was the open-mic poetry readings at the Freedom Boat, which was docked alongside the Giardini vaporetto stop from April 18 to 19 and organized by Artists Against Apartheid, Bidoun, Writers Against the War on Gaza (WAWOG), and Kamel Lazaar Foundation. Visitors could listen or sign up to read from _Gaza Reader Vol. 1: Poetry_, a specially compiled chapbook that features writing by Palestinian poets, journalists, and at least three recently martyred writers. Maritime flags designed by artists Nicole Eisenman and Rosalind Nashashibi—one with the Palestine flag and the other with the keffiyeh pattern painted over the civic flags of Venice—framed the speakers. With the late afternoon light reflecting off the sea’s surface, and the readers’ voices mixing with the sounds of gulls caught in the wind overhead, the overwhelming power of words to articulate experience in all its horror and beauty, trauma and joy, pain and strength, was transformative. To be connected through poetry did not act as performance but solace. 

“Now is the time for art and poetry. For art that rejects the logic of prevailing power. For poetry that resists the totalizing narratives that fuel the killing machines of the perpetrator. Art is inherently political— in its message, production, and presentation. It engages with society, assuming a role either in complicity or resistance.” This short excerpt is from “WHAT IS THE FUTURE OF ART? A manifesto against the state of the world,” a widely distributed poster that functioned as part of a de facto Palestinian Pavilion. To keep thinking about what art does, even in the face of genocide, is to continue to follow the artists who are leading us, in art and in poetry, in words and images, through ideas that can’t be shot down, buried, ignored, bought, or owned. The last line reads: “Palestine is the world in its future tense.” There is no room for complicity in such a world. 


lg_C158_WILKINSON.jpeg

md_C158_WILKINSON.jpeg

sm_C158_WILKINSON.jpeg

thumbnail_C158_WILKINSON.jpeg

C158_WILKINSON.jpeg

C158_Wilkinson.pdf

“South West Bank – Landworks, Collective Action and Sound” included work from Artists + Allies x Hebron and Dar Yusuf Nasri Jacir for Art and Research in Bethlehem: Samer Barbari, Adam Broomberg, Duncan Campbell, Rafael González, Isabella Hammad, Shayma Hamad, Chris Harding, Baha Hilo, Emily Jacir, Sebastián Jatz Rawicz, Benjamin Lind, Jumana Manna, Michael Rakowitz, Mohammad Saleh, Vivien Sansour, Andrea de Siena, Dima Srouji, and other participants. It was shown from 20 April to 24 November 2024 at the 60th Venice Biennale.


“South West Bank – Landworks, Collective Action and Sound” and Other Projects at the 60th Venice Biennale

Bettina Pérez Martínez (she/they) is a curator, writer, and researcher living and working in Tiohtià:ke/Mooniyang/Montréal. Her work focuses on Caribbean identity and relationalism, Puerto Rican history and its current politics, decoloniality, diaspora, ecology, and climate change in the Caribbean region. She is a 2022–2024 Bridging the Divides Fellow, a Mellon Foundation initiative, and their work has been published in _esse_, _CENTRO Journal_, _Beyond the Gallery_, and _Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico: Disaster, Vulnerability & Resiliency_.

“Foreign in a Domestic Sense” originates from a phrase used by Justice Edward Douglass White in 1901 during the _Dowes v. Bidwell_ Supreme Court case. The case would delineate the political status of the newly acquired territories by the United States, following the Spanish-American war of 1898, and how they would exist in relation to the United States. The phrase described the archipelago of Puerto Rico as at once foreign for constitutional purposes, while remaining under the sovereignty of the United States. As Sofía Gallisá Muriente and Natalia Lassalle-Morillo present in their speculative documentary _Foreign in a Domestic Sense_ (2021), this ambiguous colonial relation to the United States continues to negatively impact the reality of Puerto Ricans. 

As the viewer enters the gallery, a corridor appears, built from reflective silver and gold emergency blankets that recall materials used for spacecraft technology. The corridor leads to a vast room, where _Foreign in a Domestic Sense_ is presented as a four-channel projected film. The scale of the projection results in an all-encompassing physical experience, forcing the viewer to direct their attention from screen to screen, actively shifting their sense of space. This feeling of spatial disorientation mirrors the film’s interwoven personal narratives of displacement in the necropolitical context of colonialism, and an ongoing climate crisis in Puerto Rico. 

The film begins with footage from a NASA space launch in Florida, with two adjacent screens presenting scenes from inside a plane. Overlaid onto the image of the plane’s interior is an interview with Lizbeth, who recently moved to Florida. Lizbeth describes being forced to leave Puerto Rico following Hurricane Maria. Alongside thousands of Puerto Ricans that desperately sought to leave the archipelago following the destruction left by hurricanes Maria and Irma in September 2017, Lizbeth acknowledges the impossibility of returning to the Puerto Rico they left, that Puerto Rico will never exist again. It is estimated that 250,000 people have left the archipelago as a direct result of Hurricane Maria and the storm’s aftermath. 

Following these catastrophic storms, the United States provided little help, avoiding accountability via Puerto Rico’s status as an unincorporated territory. The intimate personal reflections narrated in _Foreign in a Domestic Sense_ offer a more humanized portrayal of the ongoing socio-political, economic, and environmental crises experienced by Puerto Ricans. As Guillermo, another Puerto Rican who migrated to Florida, shares, “The world in the colony is so tiny and beautiful and heartbreaking, it fits in a dance floor.” 

The image of the dance floor also carries a deeper, painful significance in _Foreign in a Domestic Sense_. In 2016, Omar Mateen entered Pulse nightclub in Orlando, FL, during a salsa night at the gay club, where he killed 49 people, and wounded 53 more; 90 percent of the victims were Latinx and half of that percentage were of Puerto Rican descent. In their text “Slow Dancing with Strangers” (2023), Gallisá Muriente and Lassalle-Morillo express that _Foreign in a Domestic Sense_ paid tribute to this tragedy that deeply affected local queer, trans, and Latinx communities, by centring the dance floor as a metaphor for a site of community and resistance. It’s an especially important metaphor given the ongoing state violence that continues to target Florida’s queer and trans individuals. In 2023, Florida governor Ron DeSantis passed various anti-LGBTQ2IA+ bills that ban trans medical care, remove sexual orientation and gender identity from school curricula, and allow doctors to discriminate against LGBTQ2IA+ patients. 

Throughout the filming process, the artists extended the metaphor of the dance floor by portraying the diasporic subjects of the film as dancers orienting themselves on a new floor: that of Central Florida. Gallisá Muriente and Lassalle-Morillo document a karaoke bar where subjects sing famous Puerto Rican boleros while surrounded by visual elements reminiscent of home, such as images from the Puerto Rican countryside, and advertisements for the local beer, Medalla. The film also presents other gathering spaces, such as a supermarket with various Puerto Rican staples, and a food court with decorations recreating the colonial architecture in Old San Juan. As these approximations are presented, one of the film’s interviewees, Teresa, calls Florida “a simulacrum.” Diasporic communities displaced from their former homes in Puerto Rico by ongoing colonial violence recreate familiar cultural, social, and historical markers in the colonized lands of Central Florida. As the climate crisis continues to impact the Caribbean, more people will become displaced and be forced to migrate. In exploring the multiple losses experienced by Puerto Rican diasporic subjects, Gallisá Muriente and Lassalle-Morillo’s visual language rejects the conventions of disaster porn, and instead presents communal gatherings and intimate moments of collective joy under impossible circumstances. The artists portray the liminal and disorienting experience of various Puerto Rican diasporic subjects creating new approximations of home, wherever home may be. 

lg_C158_MARTINEZ.jpg

md_C158_MARTINEZ.jpg

sm_C158_MARTINEZ.jpg

thumbnail_C158_MARTINEZ.jpg

C158_MARTINEZ.jpg

C158_PerezMartinez.pdf

“Foreign in a Domestic Sense” ran from 8 February to 30 March 2024 at Dazibao, Montreal.


“Foreign in a Domestic Sense” — Sofía Gallisá Muriente and Natalia Lassalle-Morillo

Madeline Bogoch is a writer and film programmer based in Treaty 1 territory/Winnipeg. Her writing has been published in _Public Parking_, _C Magazine_, _Peripheral Review_, _Galleries West_, and others. Madeline is the Director of Media Collections and Distribution at Video Pool Media Arts Centre, Co-director of the Winnipeg Underground Film Festival (WUFF), and has additionally curated screenings with Vtape, VUCAVU, and Video Pool Media Arts Centre.

“If my exterior presentation matched my interior I would look like an alien as well. But alas, I’m just a femme.” So writes Jackie Wang in an Ambien-fuelled zine titled _The Phallic Titty Manifesto: Queer Sex and the Naming of Parts_, which is included in her new collection _Alien Daughters Walk Into the Sun: An Almanac of Extreme Girlhood_. Alienation and its symbolic avatar, the alien, are recurring motifs across the text offering a rare thread of continuity throughout the entries, which appear in a wide range of styles. Wang, an American poet and scholar, is perhaps best known for her 2018 monograph _Carceral Capitalism_, a caustic critique of racial capitalism and the prison industrial complex. Whereas _Carceral Capitalism_ filters personal narrative through a political and theoretical lens, _Alien Daughters_ inverts the formula: the author’s experience of consuming intellectual history and fomenting politics is prioritized over the texts or ideologies themselves. Drawing significantly from Wang’s personal archive of poetry, zines, and blogs, the collection chronicles the author’s formative eras through four sections titled “The Hard-Femme Years,” “The Punk-House Years,” “The Desert Years,” and “The Getting-My-Shit-Together Years.” The source of the unpolished intensity in Wang’s blogging and zines may be due to her apparent indifference to its reception. It’s simply, as she puts it, “the inevitable byproduct of one thinking girl’s life.” 

Wang writes from the position of a curious outlier. She is a voracious reader and thinker, and the collection covers a period in the author’s life which is emotionally volatile but creatively charged. At one point she laments that she needs “access to this cistern of intense feeling if I am to write,” implying that the two conditions are inextricably bound. In high school, she wrote a diaristic zine after binge reading Anaïs Nin, and while living in a dysfunctional punk house took refuge in a campus library pulling long hours and “arguing about absurd topics such as whether Spinozism could be reconciled with Marxism.” This attitude is the closest thing we get to a working definition of “extreme girlhood,” which Wang articulates as more of an appetite than an aesthetic.

At some point between graduating college in Florida and moving to Baltimore in the early 2010s, Wang began her still-extant Tumblr _Ballerinas Dance with Machine Guns_. This peak era of Tumblr also saw the rise of the sad girl mood boards the platform has become known for, but which Wang describes feeling at odds with. In an entry on Jackie O (her namesake) and Lana Del Rey, Wang questions her place within this canon of melancholic women, asking herself, “Where do you fit in this white-girl archive of feelings—their ways of suffering?” 

In an early post written for the literary blog _HTMLGIANT_, the author expresses ambivalence about an archetype she calls the “Plath Girl,” a figure who bears a striking resemblance to the prototypical “sad girl” of Tumblr. Wang admires her brooding nature while contending that she herself is too “awkward, ethnic looking, and weird” to adopt such a persona. In contrast, she dubs herself an “Alien Girl” while parenthetically musing about the “horrifyingly self-destructive and obsessive babies” the two personas might produce. If the Plath Girl weaponizes vulnerability, then Wang takes another approach—leveraging it for art with verbosity and intellectual insatiability.

Wang moves through the world with a porousness that facilitates both adventure and misfortune. This effusive style complements her tendency to wander, both literally and philosophically. Her stream-of-consciousness approach unfolds a spiritual bent, manifesting as a recurrent obsession with dreams, poems that read as incantations, and a parasocial kinship with surrealist painter Leonora Carrington. Wang’s extreme girlhood, she decides, ends at 29—the age I’m told is punctuated by Saturn’s return, an astrological phenomenon in which Saturn’s orbit lands at the same point it was when you were born, resulting in a period of rapturous exit from youth.
 
When I once lamented to a friend about a teenage tattoo of mine, he responded that it was a message from my younger self that had cut across time, a comment that softened any lingering regrets on my part. In Wang, I detect a similar, acquired tenderness toward her former self. This affection crystallizes in the entry for which the collection is named, which is one of its highlights. The piece is addressed to an audience of “young women of color who write,” but Wang qualifies that “this is as much addressed to me as it is to you.” Delivered with a gentle cadence, she reflects (in future tense) on the economy of identity in the arts, laying out the stakes of navigating these socially fraught spaces without compromising oneself in the process. Among other things— including the sanctity of weirdness—she advises against justifying bitterness as a moral crusade, offering the cautionary and sage refrain, “The more you hate people for winning the game, the more you will believe in the game yourself.”
 
The entries have been left largely intact from their original and varied forms. There are occasional periods of dissonance that lead me to squint, trying to discern the overall meaning, as though attempting to perceive the image hidden within a Magic Eye. Because _Alien Daughters_ is a book of moods, the tone tends to fluctuate like weather patterns. The prevailing mood—or climate, to indulge the analogy further—is a dull ache for the creative liberty to not give a fuck, and the collateral damage induced by the rising expectations of professionalism. In a characteristically daring inversion of the girlhood ritual of burning old diaries (a very Plath Girl move), the author recalls a conversation in which a friend asks how she “will dispose of her juvenilia” to which she replies, “I’ll publish it.” 

lg_C158_BOGOCH.jpeg

md_C158_BOGOCH.jpeg

sm_C158_BOGOCH.jpeg

thumbnail_C158_BOGOCH.jpeg

C158_BOGOCH.jpeg

C158_Bogoch.pdf

_Alien Daughters Walk Into the Sun: An Almanac of Extreme Girlhood_ was published by Semiotext(e), Los Angeles, 2023.



_Alien Daughters Walk Into the Sun: An Almanac of Extreme Girlhood_ — Jackie Wang

Alper Turan (he/they) (b. 1993, Ankara) is a curator and writer. Turan is a 2023–2024 Curatorial Fellow at the Whitney Museum’s Independent Study Program, and was awarded a 2023–2024 General Idea Fellowship at the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa.

Recently, I had a strong reaction when a new friend shared an image of me online without asking for my permission first. I felt a rush of panic and embarrassment, and immediately asked her to remove the image. It seemed like the only natural response: after all, I should be the one to decide if and how my image is circulated. Despite my great investments in all forms of exhibitionism, it’s unsettling to see myself through someone else’s lens. I like to show, but not to see.

Photographer Gonzalo Reyes Rodriguez’s image-making process intricately engages with found photographs of others. My initial response to these often untraceable images of people was similar to my protective attitude toward my image. However, knowing that ethical critique often functions as a terminus, curtailing deeper discernment, I let my reservations about the exploitative and contentious practice of amassing capital from images of others be challenged by encountering Reyes Rodriguez’s work. His provocation urges me to venture beyond the ownership and privacy of one’s image, pushing me to cruise for anonymous images. How do we construct a narrative—impulsively and always suppositional—around a cluster of people’s images, when there is nothing to read except the images themselves?

Reyes Rodriguez’s solo exhibition “Survey” showcases a body of photographs exploring archival image practices and narrative construction. At the heart of Reyes Rodriguez’s recent work is an archive he stumbled upon in Mexico City in 2020, comprising vernacular photographs documenting what the press release describes as the “life of a young, presumably queer man.” In his previous project _Technoir_ archive (2021), Reyes Rodriguez brought these anonymous photos together into conversation with his own. He described the work to writer V. S. Wells as a photograph taken “by two photographers that are separated by time.” “Survey” further expands the conversation by juxtaposing those incognito images with selections from defunct gay magazines, family albums, film stills, archival discoveries, and the artist’s photography. These images are affixed to metal armatures and suspended weightlessly in a black void, evoking the atmosphere of a mood board or the interface of a Photoshop study. These armatures lend a sculptural dimension to the photographic plane, attempting to question the inherent flatness, giving them a performative buzz, and redirecting the gaze. Rather than attempt to see the full picture, I follow the pathways Reyes Rodriguez creates, as my eyes move from one image to another.

Reyes Rodriguez’s arrangement of these photographs is highly subjective, and inflected by his idiosyncratic sensibility. Georges Didi-Huberman describes art historian Aby Warburg’s method as an “iconology of the interval,” where meaning emerges from the spaces between images. Similarly, Reyes Rodriguez’s work prompts profound inquiries into the connections between images and the identities they display. How do these images, drawn from disparate collections of mostly intimate moments, relate to one another? Sometimes, the connection is visual, with bodies striking similar poses or movements recurring across different photographic subjects, as in _Reclining Figure II_ (2024) or _Unmade Beds_ (2024). Other times, like in _Mask_ (2024), it’s thematic, reflecting collective queer imagery, like kink, leather, nakedness, and activism. In this survey, identities merge, vanish, and are rendered inconsequential within a visual citational practice that does not prioritize one image over another. Viewers can instead contemplate what remains when images are stripped of their indexicality, awaiting infinite connections within the viewer’s narrative—another interlocutor that Reyes Rodriguez invites into the conversation. 

Whereas Reyes Rodriguez’s _Technoir_ archive engages with intimate found images by speculating about the lives of untraceable subjects, “Survey” shifts the focus onto the viewers who encounter such intimate documents of a stranger. Instead of fantasizing about the subject’s story, it presents an exercise in queer self and image-making that transcends intergenerational and cross-national boundaries, eschewing notions of originality in favour of anonymous relationality.

Reyes Rodriguez’s act of obscuring image sources echoes the ethos of the Pictures Generation, which, as Douglas Crimp asserts in _October_ (1979), was “not in search of sources or origins, but of structures of signification: underneath each picture, there is always another picture.” Whereas the Pictures Generation reframed archaic master narratives and stereotypes, or appropriated pre-existing images as a response to mass media and questions of originality, Reyes Rodriguez’s use of vernacular, anonymous images of historically marginalized subjects does something else. Through his use of appropriated imagery, Reyes Rodriguez complicates prevailing queer archival practices that often aim to “uncover” or “bring visibility” to marginalized subjects through a linear historicization of homonationalist progress. By asserting a _homo-ness_ between images, Reyes Rodriguez both mimics the inherently flattening nature of archival practice and establishes zigzag connections between queer photographic pasts and presents, between self and collective. He is not pursuing the naming of the unnamed. Instead, while unapologetically appropriating the images, Reyes Rodriguez cruises, as one does, anonymously. Cruising offers a form of relationality that is not bound by the demands of continuity and mutual recognition, allowing for fleeting encounters and the potential for unexpected contacts.

Reyes Rodriguez’s _Sleeping Boys_ (2024) series is perhaps the most exhilarating work in the exhibition, offering a poignant reflection on the act of looking at others— others in images, or others in the images of an archive. While looking at the shots taken of multiple sleeping figures (some found, and some by Reyes Rodriguez), I think of all those moments where I am being fucked. I feel the shy gaze of a partner who is fucking me but cannot look at me. I close my eyes as if I am in a cathartic moment, as if I am enjoying it so much that I cannot afford to be stimulated anymore by my optics; I close my eyes. To give space for my partner to look at me freely. To act as if I am not there. To let my image be devoured by his eyes. He can only actually see me when my eyes are closed. These images, captured in moments of unguarded slumber, remind us of the inherent violence in the act of looking. Just as I close my eyes to give my partner the freedom to look at me, these figures are rendered exposed by their unconscious state, inviting first the photographer and then the viewer to engage in a voyeuristic act. The sleeping figure is a good metaphor for working with images of others, found photographs, and archives of the unknown. As artist Wu Tsang reminds us, there is no non-violent way to look at somebody. The gaze is not always mutual. 

lg_C158_TURAN.jpg

C158_TURAN.jpg

“Survey” ran from 26 April to 1 June 2024 at David Peter Francis, New York.


Header

C Mag

Issue 158

Almanac

Credits

Related Events

Letters

Letters

Editorial

Almanac: Editorial

Explore Issue by Images

Features

Art as a Mirror: How Canadian Institutions Are Complicit in Silencing Palestinian Voices

The Seashells That Saved the World

The Grace of It All: Movement Building as Durational Choreography

Roundtable: Mind Pool, Memory Spring

Green That Makes You Want to Crack Your Foot

AI Incantations for Sovereignty and Gender Expansiveness

Artist Projects

BITE//Celestial\\BITE by Alexis Nanibush-Pamajewong: Text

Columns

Composition: Crepuscular Rhythms

One Thing: AI Be Wilding: Beth Coleman's Octavia Butler AI

Reviews

“South West Bank – Landworks, Collective Action and Sound” and Other Projects at the 60th Venice Biennale

“Foreign in a Domestic Sense” — Sofía Gallisá Muriente and Natalia Lassalle-Morillo

Alien Daughters Walk Into the Sun: An Almanac of Extreme Girlhood — Jackie Wang

“Survey” — Gonzalo Reyes Rodriguez

“As I Find My Place” — Hiba Abdallah, Ibrahim Abusitta, Saks Afridi, asmaa al-issa, Basil AlZeri, Nuveen Barwari, Rehab Nazzal, Parvin Peivandi, Maya Perry, Larissa Sansour

DIANA ROSS DREAM — Aisha Sasha John

“500 Year Itch” — Shelley Niro

Code Noir — Canisia Lubrin

The Plot — Emma-Kate Guimond

“Creation Stories” at the 7th Contemporary Native Art Biennial