Column

Temple Marucci-Campbell is an emerging writer and scholar pursuing her PhD in art history at Concordia University. Temple’s work traces olfactory and gustatory modes of memory work, archiving, and placemaking that constitute Black diasporic identity.

This issue begins from the tidal as literal image and metaphor for ceaseless movement and its force. We think alongside the inseparability of ocean and land, inspired by Barbadian poet and scholar Kamau Braithwaite’s idea of tidalectics that moves away from easy binaries—the ones that continually justify colonial and capital expansion. From Turtle Island to the Caribbean archipelago, Palestine, Central America, and Bidong Island in Malaysia, artists wade through interconnected and overlapping struggles across multiple shores, times, and material inheritances.

This issue begins from the tidal as literal image and metaphor for ceaseless movement and its force. We think alongside the inseparability of ocean and land, inspired by Barbadian poet and scholar Kamau Braithwaite’s idea of tidalectics that moves away from easy binaries—the ones that continually justify colonial and capital expansion. From Turtle Island to the Caribbean archipelago, Palestine, Central America, and Bidong Island in Malaysia, artists wade through interconnected and overlapping struggles across multiple shores, times, and material inheritances.

With feature contributors: m. nourbeSe philip; Roxanne Fernandes and Chiedza Pasipanodya; Magally Zelaya; Tak Pham and Alvin Luong; Rana Abughannam, Emelie Desrochers-Turgeon, Karen Lutsky, Ozayr Saloojee, and Zoe Todd; Yasmine Whaley-Kalaora and Chipo Chipaziwa; Laura Grier, Michele Pearson Clarke, Vicky Moufawad-Paul, Scott Miller Berry, and Christina Oyawale; Bushra Junaid and Kai Trotz-Motayne; kimi malka hanauer; Temple Marucci-Campbell

Reviews by: Micaela Dixon, Rosemary Flutur, Isha Musampa, Shazia Hafiz Ramji, Irem Karaaslan, Zoe Imani Sharpe, Rebecca Salazar

Tidal

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Food

Race

Colonialism

Temple Marucci-Campbell considers sugar cane through the lens of gastropoetics. Conceptualized by Parama Roy, gastropoetics takes taste and the alimentary tract as a way to question colonial appetite, which Marucci-Campbell pushes further to explore Black histories sustained through the mouth and stomach.

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One Thing: A Gastropoetics of Sugar Cane

kimi malka hanauer is an artist, writer, and publisher. They are a founding collective member of the publishing initiative Press Press, steward of nomadic education initiative Ungovernable Study, and an assistant professor at Pratt Institute.

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Language

Memory

kimi malka hanauer’s image-text moves through a pre-partition Jerusalem, Palestine, and al-Andalus, the Muslim-governed society that covered much of the Iberian Peninsula from 711-1492. hanauer writes from the unspoken relational and linguistic excess that seeps through empire's hold.  

Composition: on the edges of a mother tongue

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Oxygen

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Editorial

Maandeeq Mohamed is a writer, researcher and the Associate Editor of _C Magazine_. 

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_. 

“Hotels are Squatting on my Metaphors,” writes Kamau Brathwaite in _The Namsetoura Papers_ (2004). He was referring to the explosion of tourism industries across the Caribbean, and in particular, their impact on Barbados, where he was fighting a government that wanted to build a road to the airport over his home in Cow Pastor. It’s a line that sticks out: squatting implies property relations, where privatized land must be protected from theft. Brathwaite’s turn of phrase reverses the logic of property so that it is capital itself that squats and forecloses on imagination, on metaphor: the very stuff of language itself.

m. nourbeSe philip paraphrases Brathwaite’s maxim in her correspondence with him over the years regarding the fate of Cow Pastor, which we are so honoured to excerpt in this issue. It’s a fitting start to think through some of the preoccupations in these pages that include how we might think of capacious organizations of space, beyond borders, private property, and nations. This issue’s theme of “Tidal” is inspired by Brathwaite’s notion of tidalectics, which sees the ocean and land as inseparable, as “shifting points of contact, arrival, departure, and transformation” against easy binaries that justify colonial expansion or divide nature and culture. [^1] This is especially relevant in the recent context of Hurricane Melissa, in the literal bleed between water and land, where the Caribbean archipelago is disproportionately affected by climate change (even though they've contributed the least to ecological and capital crises).

In their collaborative feature, Rana Abughannam, Émélie Desrochers-Turgeon, Karen Lutsky, Ozayr Saloojee, and Zoe Todd are indebted to tidalectics in their work as an arts collective. They consider how imperial expansion in the authors’ various homelands—from South Africa to Gaza to Turtle Island—are contemporary manifestations of the logics of the Roman empire, which “looms large in the contemporary colonial psyche.” But, like the Tiber River flooding Rome, they also remind us of the “possibilities for solidarity, liberation, and return that come from breaking the dam.”

kimi malka hanauer’s significant entry for the Composition column moves through a pre-partition Jerusalem, Palestine, and al-Andalus, the Muslim-governed society that covered much of the Iberian Peninsula from 711–1492. hanauer writes from the unspoken relational and linguistic excess that seeps through empire’s hold.

In his interview with Alvin Luong, Tak Pham discusses Luong’s video work _Corals of Bidong_ (2023–2025). Their conversation reflects on the history of Bidong Island, previously a refugee camp for displaced Vietnamese peoples from 1978–1991, and now a site where corals are cultivated. That the US received both corals and refugees from Bidong spurred Luong to arrive at analogy as a method that “enables the past to serve as a framework for engaging with our contemporary condition.”

Historical continuity is also central to Bushra Junaid’s Artist Project _Portraits in Time_ (2025). Here, Junaid presents a series of collages and photographs that connect her familial history in Newfoundland to histories of maritime colonial economies and plantation labour in the Caribbean, in ways that, as Kai Trotz-Motayne observes in her accompanying essay, highlight “the histories of enslavement and forced labour that shaped the Atlantic world.”

In Magally Zelaya’s winning text for the 2024 Indigenous Art Writing Award, she traces how amatl, the ancient Mesoamerican paper made from the wild fig tree’s bark, is used in Michelle Peraza’s ongoing work. Surviving its banning and burnings by Spanish colonizers in Mexico and Central America, amatl’s sacred significance was sustained by Otomi artists through the last 500 years. As Zelaya writes, “The artist heals the paper. The paper heals the viewer [...] The paper heals.” Meanwhile, Roxanne Fernandes and Chiedza Pasipanodya ask what’s possible when the light shifts—a literal and metaphoric invitation to notice subtle transformations of matter that unsettle fixed meaning in Pasipanodya’s sculptures. Through clay, steel, concrete, wood, graphite, wax, and more, Pasipanodya recalls the shapes and lineages of objects like the Zimbabwean instrument m’bira or termite mounds that represent legacy-building, labour, and the family. To Pasipanodya, materials are already imbued with cultural transmissions that arrive through time and place.

For the One Thing column, Temple Marucci-Campbell considers sugar cane through the lens of gastropoetics. Conceptualized by Parama Roy, gastropoetics takes taste and the alimentary tract as a way to question colonial appetite, which Marucci-Campbell pushes further to explore Black histories sustained through the mouth and stomach.

Toward a more fluid idea of archival legacies, Yasmine Whaley-Kalaora and Chipo Chipaziwa speak about Chipaziwa’s “conduits of citation” that document the artist’s performance practice with/in the absence of her physical body, including through collaborators’ writing. Through Chipaziwa’s performance series _Slipping Into Slipping Away_ (2024–ongoing) and artist book _My Mother, My Home_ (2024), they explore how the self is in tension with its own representation, and what it might mean to share the responsibility of witnessing through acts of recounting, retracing, recording, and reprocessing.

Finally, in the second of three dispatches from Open Hearing, which took place in Toronto last winter, transcripts from artists and arts workers cover the urgencies and frustrations of cultural work in this moment through grief, anger, censorship, and possible strategies of organizing and feeling. As Christina Oyawale declares, “The fascists are currently winning at politics, but they will never win at culture.”

[^1]: Elizabeth DeLoughrey, “Revisiting Tidalectics: Irma/ José/Maria 2017,” in _Tidalectics: Imagining an Oceanic Worldview Through Art and Science_, ed. Stefanie Hessler (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2018), 94.

Editor

Environment

Conceptual

Editors Maandeeq Mohamed and Joy Xiang reflect on the issue’s theme, _Tidal_ and its contributions.

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Editorial: TIDAL

Feature

Born in Tobago, former lawyer and Poet With- out Ambition (PWA) m. nourbeSe philip, is an
unembedded poet and writer living in the spacetime of Toronto. She has authored essays, plays, short fiction, novels. Best known for her genre-breaking, book-length epic _Zong!_ she has witnessed too many wars, but continues to love sunsets, libraries, the Caribbean, and cool, green Toronto ravines. In 2024 she was awarded the Windham Campbell prize for Poetry.

In 1998, the Barbadian poet Kamau Brathwaite bought a piece of land in Christ Church, Barbados. Shortly after purchase the Barbadian government informed him that he could neither build nor extend the premises—a small three-bedroom house with its old slave outhouse—because it was near the airport in a no-fly zone. Brathwaite’s intention was to use the property to house his archives, many of which had been scattered as a result of Hurricane Gilbert in Jamaica, where he had earlier resided. He also wanted to use the premises as an oumfo-palenque [1]—a place where artists could visit and work. Bussa Centre would be its name, after the enslaved African Bussa who in 1816 led the largest slave uprising in Barbados. Nearly 200 years later, and after ruling that the land was needed to build a road to the airport, the Barbadian government sent in bulldozers to raze Cow Pastor and fill its pond.

Upon hearing about the threats faced by Cow Pastor in 2005, I wrote the following email to Kamau:

#####“----- Original Message -----
#####From: “M.NourbeSe Philip”
#####Date: Friday, May 20 2005 at 8:55 AM
#####Subject: from m. nourbeSe philip

>#####Dear Kamau:

>#####Please accept my support in your struggle for your land. My thoughts and energy are with you. Stay strong. The ancestors are with you.
>#####M. NourbeSe Philip
>#####Art is not a mirror to reflect the world, but a hammer with which to shape it.
>#####Vladimir Mayakovsky.

>#####M.NourbeSe Philip

>#####My website: www.nourbese.com”

I also wrote to Kamau again, this time in 2006, in response to “The lass days of KB and CowPastor Vandal,” a widely circulated email Kamau wrote in 2005 to publicize his fight against the Barbadian government for Cow Pastor. The following are some excerpts from this 2006 letter:

>Dear Kamau,

>This place here, where I am, is called Dunvegan, marking a history of settlement by the British—in this case the Scots. Four hours from Toronto and one and a half hours from Montreal, the French presence is here as well… What does any of this have to do with Barbados and Cow Pastor. You will, as we Trinis say, have to hold strain. At Dunvegan, I walk and think of those hardscrabble islands that we call home—those pieces of rock where we navel strings bury. [2] Islands whose beauty can make you weep. Where coconut palm, blue sea and white sand are the basic recipe for financial success in the business of package tourism. Add the enticements of the Black body, cypher of all that is illicit and transgressive, and you’re guaranteed to “keep them coming back.” Year after year after year. Decade after decade, as in the case of Jamaica and Barbados.

>Islands where memories are a dime a dozen. Where ghosts walking bout in broad daylight and nobody seeing them for the glare of the bling. Years ago, you wrote that they built hotels on our metaphors; I would add that they resurrect the plantation, complete with smiling _yassuh nossuh_ darkies, and demand that we love it.

>It is 1990 and Trinidad & Tobago has been in the grip of rightwing economic policies of the A.N.R. Robinson government. The constitution is changed to allow foreigners to buy land. Until then, the island of Tobago was the neglected sister island state, or a well-kept secret among tourists (mainly the birdwatching types). Once foreigners are allowed to purchase land, there is an explosion of tourist initiatives, with no attempt to encourage local agricultural practices, or even initiate industrial production. Tourism has become the holy grail of the economy. On the south coast of the island, in a small village, Black Rock, a clutch of villas are built. All pink with white wooden gingerbread flourishes, the great house, the plantation house, has been brought back.

>One softly bright blue morning in 1990, the contractor—an African Trinidadian man—and I engage a fierce argument about the name. If we understand what the plantation meant for us in this part of the world, I say, we would not be calling anything a plantation, let alone these villas catering to primarily white tourists serviced by Black people. But those who resurrect the plantation are, by and large, the descendants of, or associate themselves with, the former slave-holding class. The contractor might not own the villas, but he defends the use of the word as if he owns them.

>[…]

>I know the arguments—Barbados is a tourist economy, and everything must be subsumed under that. So, if the airport is to be expanded into Cow Pastor, or a new road is needed to service the airport, then everything must fall before the relentless march of progress. Including you, Kamau, before the god of airports that ferry white northerners to their island of choice, so that they can lie in the sun and tan themselves. And no, it doesn’t matter that increasingly, Bajans have less and less access to the sea, except for the odd window that is allowed them. All the best coastal land is taken by hotels, and those who can afford to purchase coastal property.

>Do you remember those few days after 9/11, when the skies were silent? The entire world was a no-fly zone. I felt the world exhale. And celebrated the fact that the inhabitants of the so-called civilized world could fly nowhere.

>Your connection with that plot of land, Cow Pastor, touched me because for us children of the volcano [3] (as Aimé Césaire described us), condemned to wander the world looking for a home, as you yourself poignantly described in “The Emigrants,” [4] the idea of finding a place to rest, to call home, and to call others home, is a powerful one.

>[…]

>Where are the trees, Kamau? Los Barbados, the bearded fig tree that gave the island its name, are now no more. The island is denuded of most of its trees. An island of no hills, or valleys. No mountains, nor forests, and nowhere to run. Nowhere to hide. Nowhere to maroon; to palenque. It is interesting, is it not, that Barbados’ sobriquet is Little
England, and like its erstwhile mother country it is almost entirely deforested. What does this do to the psyche of the inhabitants—this absence of places of refuge where one could hide? In a globalized world, with increasing surveillance, the need to find private spaces becomes increasingly necessary. What does this do to our psyches? Does one develop inner hiding places? How do our physical spaces shape us and we them?

>It is the 21st of March, 2006. I’m flying over the island of Barbados and once again I am struck by its flatness, compared to the other islands of the Caribbean. I’m also struck by the many seemingly new houses. And the absence of trees. I think of your dunks tree and the bearded fig tree on Cow Pastor and I wonder: why don’t they plant trees? Why haven’t they, and why didn’t they? In each of these questions the “they” differs. In the first question, I’m thinking of the current owners of property; in the second, the government since “independence,” and in the third, the slave owner or colonizer. Is it because without trees you can more easily control a populace of forced labour? Not too long ago a Bajan taxi driver told me that his father told him that slaves built the roads with curves and bends and twists, so that their masters could not see them and they could hide from them. If this is true, it signposts an awareness of the need to have places of retreat, places where one could not be seen. Such strategies would have been crucial on an island where you could run but you couldn’t hide.

>[…]

>All of which brings me back to Cow Pastor, which appears not so much as a place, but as a space/time configuration. A space-time of the sacred, of remembering, of maroon and palenque; a space-time where we can allow a haunting of those ancestors who were caught up, consumed and spat out, in that earlier globalization. I refer of course to the four-hundred-year transAtlantic slave trade. A space-time of understanding how it all begins and ends: with the land. Whichever land we stand upon as we are moved by forces apparently beyond our control. Where we can understand that maroonage and the palenque are states of mind as well as physical states that we will need to employ as a challenge to the many ways of death that globalization now offers. Cow Pastor is a vital element in this challenge: this is its legacy in the face of the simultaneously seductive and brutalizing forces of globalization.

>NourbeSe

I want to end with a couple of Kamau’s replies to my messages:

Kamau’s Reply London 24 May 05

>Thank you NourbeSe. coming from an admired fellow poet & warrior like yrself, this means a lot. what i'm trying for is not only the future of my small strip from where i kno i cd make a contribution from a place of such remarkable spiritual healing - the appearance of yr twin, Namsetoura, there, for instance - is no accident. it is a portal and a warning So that what i really - or rather AT THE SAME TIME tryin for, is a saving of the pasture - the entire actual & symbolic space - trying to make my Bajams realize before it is too late, too late, that we possess precious choral coral thats worth far more than hotels and gold courses golf curses and the selling out & off of our land into hotels casinos sepulchures And i want to take this concern not only to newspapers and letter protests, but to courts of justice, since thats perhaps the only way that we will ever be able to make, paradoXically, a moral
point. Its what you've done in yr campaigns ><Show-boat5> and other cultural obstacles and i'm therefore wondering if you have any ideas on how i/we can move this CP crisis and its crisis of conscience on to the Caribbean Court of Justice as a TEST - as test case (Cecile Clayton at Mona said this from the inset) - that we the people - not only our government-becoming-our-governors - must co-operate in determining our future & therefore our blessing(s) <Kamau>

A year before Kamau would pass in 2020, he wrote to me with a final update on Cow Pastor, after the Barbadian government leased the land on which Cow Pastor was situated to a private entity:

#####Begin forwarded message:
#####From: Kamau Brathwaite
#####Date: June 11, 2019 at 3:56:33 PM EDT
#####To: m. nourbeSe philip

>#####My dear NourbeSe, been ages since ‘meditation on cowpasture’ and all's been more or less Quiet here until this morning w/the newes that the Govt has leased the Airport/of which CP is physically and ecologically and more or less economicaly a part, to a private conglom for the ujal 99/or 999 or 9999 years - instead of selling it - so that our Calibanic 'Quiet' since you was here is coming tp an end/

[^1]: An oumfo is the name for a voudou or voudon temple. A palenque is the name given in Central and South America to places of refuge for escaped slaves. Kamau combined the two words to describe his Bussa Centre. The very name suggests a bringing together of the spiritual and revolutionary traditions of the Haitian revolution and the traditions of marronage in Central and South America.
[^2]: The phrase referring to where one’s navel string (placenta) is buried is a common Caribbean expression to identify where one was born.
[^3]: D. Maximin and A. Césaire, “Aimé Césaire: La poésie, essentielle,” _Présence africaine_ 126, no. 2 (1983), 7–23, https://doi.org/10.3917/presa.126.0007
[^4]: Kamau Brathwaite, “II: The Emigrants,” in _The Arrivants: A New World Trilogy: Rights Of Passage: Islands: Masks_ (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973), 51–56.
[^5]: In 1993, the musical Show Boat, based on the 1926 novel by Edna Ferber, opened to vociferous objections from Black and African-descended Canadian communities in Toronto. Demonstrations and protests began when ground was broken for the première show of the then brand-new North York Performing Arts Centre (now Meridian Centre). _Showing Grit: Showboating North of the 44th Parallel_ (Poui Publications, 1993), which outlined the history of Show Boat’s production and the surrounding issues as they related to the Black and African-descended communities in Toronto, was my contribution to critiques of the controversial event.

Writer

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Relational Colonialism

In their series of email exchanges, Kamau Brathwaite and m. nourbeSe philip discuss Cow Pastor—Brathwaite’s home, the planned future site for the Bussa Centre (“a place where artists could visit and work”), and a site of struggle against the Barbados government’s plans to raze the land to build a road to the airport.

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Wheel and Come Again: Cow Pastor Revisited

Alvin Luong works with videos, photographs, and sculptures to express stories of human migration, land, and dialogues from diasporic working-class communities. He has shown and screened artworks in places including the Images Festival (Toronto), Boers-Li Gallery (Beijing), Gudskul (Jakarta), and The Polygon Gallery (Vancouver). Luong has held research and resident artist appointments at the Inside-Out Art Museum (Beijing), HB Station Contemporary Art Research Center (Guangzhou), the Art Gallery of Ontario (Toronto), and Gallery TPW (Toronto). Luong was longlisted for the 2023 Sobey Art Award (Canada). The artist’s works have been acquired and shown by The Rockefeller Foundation (New York City).

**Tak Pham** is a is a contemporary art curator and
writer. He is currently the Curator of the Illingworth Kerr Gallery at Alberta University of the Arts in Calgary, Treaty 7 territory. He holds an MFA in criticism and curatorial practice from OCAD University. In 2023, he received the Hnatyshyn Foundation-Fogo Island Arts Young Curator Residency. His writings and reviews have appeared in _Canadian Art_, _C Magazine_, _ESPACE art actuel_, _esse arts + opinions_, _Galleries West_, _The Brooklyn Rail_, _ArtAsiaPacific_, and _Hyperallergic_.

Through artistic and critical investigations of human migration, land, and stories from diasporic communities, Alvin Luong creates artworks that reveal connections between past and present. As a friend and supporter of Luong’s work, I have developed a deep appreciation for how he approaches complex questions of diaspora in today’s world, which is marked by the incessantness of empire. The following conversation between Luong and me focuses on his latest work in the solo exhibition “Calcium Breather” (2025) at Toronto’s Hunt Gallery. It examines Luong’s practice, traces how his interests have evolved, and follows how his exploration of his family’s refugee journey—from Vietnam to Canada via Malaysia—and diasporic experience have changed over the years.

>**Tak Pham: Could you discuss how earlier video works like _Bidding War_ (2017), _Turbo_ (2019), _The Young Comrade_ (2019), and _Workers’ Dance (Young Workers, 2021)_ (2021), which satirize capitalism or explore state ideology, led to your research on Vietnamese boat refugees?**

**Alvin Luong:** The subtext behind these projects is a desire to understand a site and its occupants, both materially and politically. These earlier projects span engagements with a contemporary strip mall in Scarborough (_Bidding War_), my parents’ home during the Great Recession of 2008 (_Turbo_), Civil War–era Beijing (_The Young Comrade_), and Toronto during the COVID-19 pandemic (_Workers’ Dance_). These are sites that I am intimately connected with, and they compelled me to probe questions in relation to class and subjugation.

Specifically, my interest in understanding the experiences of Vietnamese refugees stems from my own family. If they had not survived their sea voyage from Vietnam to an island in Malaysia following the end of the American-Vietnam War in 1975, then I would not have been born or at least not exist on this side of the world.

In 2023, I visited Bidong Island in Malaysia to write about my experience through field notes. Located off the coast of Terengganu, Malaysia, it became a major refugee camp from 1978 to 1991, sheltering Vietnamese “boat people” fleeing persecution. When the peak of the refugee crisis on Bidong occurred in 1979, [1] Bidong was widely considered the most densely populated islands on the planet, [2] with an estimated 40,000 people. [3] On Bidong, many refugees like my father gained visas to resettle in Canada.

Bidong now hosts two opposing initiatives: a research facility for the study and conservation of coral operated by the Universiti Malaysia Terengganu (UMT), and a commercial coral farm operated by Yayasan Coral Malaysia with sponsorship from Telekom Malaysia. In June 2024, I was invited by Dr. Muhammad Hafiz Borkhanuddin, head of marine biology at UMT, to join him and his students on their monthly diving excursion to inspect the corals below the waters of Bidong. During this second visit, I connected refugee histories to the island’s corals.

>**TP: Your installation _Ration Market_ (2022) is another work that poetically highlights how the aftermath of the American-Vietnam War, which caused the Vietnamese refugee crisis in the ’70s, has evolved and continues to threaten the livelihood of Vietnamese peoples. The installation features items like dehydrated morning glory, disposable SIM cards, and congee-ready bags in a mobile cart—common street imagery in Vietnam. While referencing history, you have remarked that the installation is a response to what you call a “near-future crisis” with rising water threatening livelihoods. Can you discuss how you connect these timelines and how this influences your view on current climate issues?**

**AL:** In 2020, I began incorporating analogies into my practice, to draw parallels between the historical and the contemporary, after I visited family in Bình Chánh. This was a rural district located on the outskirts of Ho Chi Minh City in Vietnam, where flooding now occurs daily.

The lack of robust infrastructure on the land allowed for the naked observation of where groundwater sat relative to the terrestrial surface. During the dry season, flooding occurs when the gravitational pull of the moon draws groundwater to the surface. The water then recedes as the day breaks, leaving behind muddy footprints that dry in the afternoon sun. During the wet season, the land floods to knee height almost daily. The flooding becomes more severe every year as the water table continues to rise, and the monsoons become more intense and frequent.

Within this drenched landscape, the morning glory vegetable (also known as rau muống or kangkung) has proliferated around my family’s home. This aquatic plant has taken over the land that was once a battlefield during the American-Vietnam War. Morning glory was a staple food in the aftermath of the war. It is a hardy plant that endured nearly a decade of biological and chemical weapons, as well as bombings by the United States that blighted Vietnam’s rural land for agriculture.

I could see that this former spectre of war had returned as a spectre for the contemporary crisis of climate change. I think about how my family in Canada became refugees due to the cascading effects of the war and how my family that remain in Vietnam may soon be refugees because of the rising sea. Analogy in my practice enables the past to serve as a framework for engaging with our contemporary condition.

>**TP: All the discussed threads seem to converge in your new work, “Calcium Breather” (2025), exhibited at Hunt Gallery. It revisits Bidong Island to recount Vietnamese refugee camp memories, Malaysia’s post-1991 rehabilitation efforts, and the coral smuggling industry. What similarities do you see between Vietnamese refugees and the coral
cultivated around Bidong Island?**

**AL:** I struggled to find an appropriate form or methodology to create artworks about Bidong until I discovered that the coral farm operating on the island had made its inaugural commercial export in 2016 to Canada. Since then, my guide Alex Lee, who has guided refugees to Bidong since the early aughts, has informed me that the coral farm has made shipments of live corals to places including the United States, Luxembourg, and Australia. Thinking through analogy, the corals cultivated in Bidong are being shipped to the same places that the refugees of Bidong resettled in. It was this discovery that allowed me to create artworks where corals and refugees could serve as analogies for each other, yet still remain autonomous from one another.

The video _Corals of Bidong_ (2023–2025) reimagines a drowning at sea while attempting to reach Bidong from a point-of-view camera perspective. Through a magic realist narration spoken in Vietnamese, the video then imagines the transformation of human refugees, who have sunk to the sea-floor, into the corals that are now farmed on the same sea-floor. The video then follows the farming of corals beneath the waters of Bidong.

Historically speaking, the corals disappeared when the Vietnamese refugee crisis was unfolding on Bidong. The intense human pollution and overfishing severely damaged the marine ecosystem surrounding the island. In 1991, the refugee camp was shut down and the island itself was officially closed off from public access [4] to recover the bio- diversity of the marine and terrestrial ecosystems, [5] only to reopen to the public in 2017. [6] The corals re-emerged with- in this nearly two-decade-long period.

The exhibition “Calcium Breather” imagines an alternative to watery death for refugees by envisioning the transformation of humans into corals, which are now headed to the same destinations as the refugees who managed to survive the journey.

In the exhibition, a second video titled _Camp Atlanta_ (2025) depicts a closed-door facility at the Georgia Aquarium in Atlanta. The facility houses corals transported into the United States on dubious grounds. The video uses a deadpan documentary approach to depict how corals are cared for in state-of-the-art aquarium tanks, as they await the conclusion of legal proceedings between their importer and the United States Customs and Border Protection agency. If the legal proceedings conclude in favour of the importer, then the corals re-enter commercial circulation in the United States. If the legal proceedings rule against the importer, then the corals will find their new permanent homes in the public-view displays of the Georgia Aquarium or its partner institutions. Through a dialectical pairing with _Corals of Bidong_, _Camp Atlanta_ becomes contextualized as a new refugee camp or migrant detention centre for corals. The pairing creates an intertextual relationship in which the refugees-turned-corals find entry to the United States through Atlanta.

>**TP: As you have mentioned above, analogy links human migration with environmental phenomena like coral propagation and flooding. Do you face specific challenges translating these complex analogies into tangible artworks for viewers?**

**AL:** A constant challenge is how to inform the viewer about the specific environmental phenomena of a place or object that is being used in an analogy. I am referring to how elements of a site or object, such as the morning glory plant, which was a food of necessity after the American-Vietnam War, can now be a spectre of climate change. Concepts related to the war and climate change are materially embedded in a sculpture like _Ration Market_, which uses morning glory as a material that is further processed into the shelf-stable rations that constitute the artwork. The labels on these rations contain a clue, in the form of a graphic of the plant and a faded hammer and sickle, a political symbol of communism, in the background.

The idea of materially embodying migration is also something I am developing through a series of frottage drawings called _The Drowned Can Speak Again_ (2024–ongoing). The drawings are made by rubbing over a tombstone belonging to a mass grave of Vietnamese people who drowned on their sea voyage to Bidong. The tombstone marks over 400 people whose bodies, recovered by local Malay fishermen, remain unidentified in a cemetery with many hundreds more. The grave is in the town of Kuala Terengganu, across the waters from Bidong Island. I am drawn to the potential of frottage to both physically witness the tombstone through tactile interaction, and to recontextualize the deaths through prose. The letters that constitute the names of the deceased are traced to produce new texts.

Video art challenges me to deliver information without sacrificing form or prose. Intertextual readings between artworks inform an approach that was implemented with _Corals of Bidong_ to transform interpretations of _Camp Atlanta_, and vice versa. Intertextuality drives the constellation of artworks I am continuing to develop by focusing on the migration and environmental phenomena in Bidong. The videos present an illusory image where an alternative to death can be imagined, while the frottage drawings bring forth the reality of the deaths.

>**TP: You previously presented the work in a different format, including a bedframe sculpture and several drawings (_The Drowned Can Speak_). I understand this was part of your MFA thesis exhibition at the University of Pennsylvania (Penn). When presenting it again in your hometown of Toronto shortly afterward, did you observe any differences in how audiences in Philadelphia and Toronto responded to the work?**

**AL:** The reception of the work in Philadelphia, among an academic-adjacent audience, changed how discourse was exchanged between artworks, viewers, and the institution. The artworks required less context in Philadelphia because the city has one of the largest diasporic Vietnamese populations on the East Coast, with roots dating back to the refugee crisis. The engagement with the history of the American-Vietnam War is much more of a lived reality in Philadelphia due to the societal rupture and blowback from the war in the United States. Everyone was either impacted or knew someone who was impacted by the war. There is a massive mural depicting the sea voyage of the refugees on the Bồ Đề Buddhist Temple near the city’s core.

In Philadelphia, the exhibition opened on May 1, 2025—one day after the 50th anniversary of the end of the American-Vietnam War on April 30th, 1975. I gave a speech at the exhibition opening, remarking that May 1st was also the unofficial anniversary of the Vietnamese refugee crisis that followed the end of the war. In the speech, I also highlighted Penn’s role in developing biological and chemical weapons for use in Vietnam, to connect the violence enacted by the site of the exhibition to the artworks that would be created and exhibited at the university 50 years later. Furthermore, the historical legacy of campus activism in the United States against the American-Vietnam War by students and faculty, and their repression by the university, remains relevant today for many students and faculty as an analogy for the crisis currently faced by college campuses in the United States. A crisis that includes the suppression of solidarity with Palestine, the dismantling of diversity, equity, and inclusion programs, and the reversal of trans inclusion. This level of significance made the exhibition highly urgent and unique to Penn and Philadelphia.

The legacy of the war carries a fog of mystery shared by many people in my generation and younger. I was touched to know that an undergraduate student, in a class taught by Ken Lum that I had served as a teaching assistant for, attended the Philadelphia opening and revealed to me that her parents were also refugees from Bidong. In Toronto, a few people also attended the opening at Hunt Gallery because they too had familial connections to Bidong. For both cities, the exhibitions offered a rare in-depth engagement with Bidong, a place that remains understudied and undertheorized.

>**TP: How have diasporic Vietnamese communities, former refugees, or coral-conservation researchers responded to your projects? I’m especially curious about responses to the analogy between coral movement and refugee experience. Have these responses influenced your future work?**

**AL:** When I worked with the marine biologists and students at the Universiti Malaysia Terengganu, they were unaware of the refugee history of Bidong. Yet, they have research facilities on the same island where the refugees once lived, and dive in the same waters where the Vietnamese had drowned. The work I am producing, beyond the poetic encounter, fills a gap in a history that is suppressed in Malaysia. As I mentioned before, my work also begins to fill a gap for a younger generation of the Vietnamese diaspora. For people like me, with refugee roots, the history is in amnesia due to the psychic burdens of reliving trauma. For a newer generation of diaspora from a liberated Vietnam, the history of the refugees is suppressed.

The responses of these communities to the discovery of the island’s history and its contemporary status led me to a realization that this work operates within an ontology of movement. Essentially, it is crucial to acknowledge that the refugee does not choose where they may end up—whether it be the water or a distant country. They only choose a trajectory. My father told me how his boat first aimed for the shores of Thailand, before changing course to Malaysia. Their last resort was Indonesia, before the boat gave out. Evidence of their movement is left in the temporary wake of the water.

This realization has influenced the direction of my work by identifying qualities that cannot be produced without a wide, and perhaps watery, perspective that links distant sites and temporalities together. Something new can be created if the process becomes unspecific to the site and instead becomes specific to motion.

[^1]: Norhayati Ab Manaf et al., “Historic Vietnamese Settlement of Bidong Island,” in _Bidong Island: Natural History and Resources_, ed. Ong Meng Chuan et al. (Cham: Springer, 2021), 33.
[^2]: Abdulmaula Hamza et al., “Diversity of Birds in Bidong Island,” in Ong et al., 106.
[^3]: Ab Manaf et al., 33.
[^4]: Ibid.
[^5]: Iqbal Harith Abd. Razak et al., “Decapoda Crustaceans at the South China Sea Repository and Reference Centre in Terengganu, Peninsular Malaysia,” in Ong et al., 61.
[^6]: Ab Manaf et al., 34.

Artist

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Migration

In his interview with Alvin Luong, curator Tak Pham discusses Luong’s video work Corals of Bidong (2023–2025). Their con­versation reflects on the history of Bidong Island, previously a refugee camp for displaced Vietnamese peoples from 1978–1991, and now a site where corals are cultivated. 

Calcifying Bodies: An Interview With Alvin Luong

Chipo Chipaziwa (b.1997) is a performance artist exploring power dynamics between performer and audience. A BA graduate of UBC (2019), she has presented work internationally and nationally, including at Index (Stockholm), Art Metropole (Toronto), and Western Front (Vancouver). Her artist book, _My Mother, My Home_, was published by Archive Books (2024). chipochipaziwa.com

Yasmine Whaley-Kalaora works as a writer and critic, a Studio Assistant for Tom Burrows, and in archives for artists and artist-run organizations. Yasmine’s practice encompasses video, experimental audio, writing, sculpture, and curating C.L.A.M.—an intermittent interdisciplinary series featuring audio-visual work, performance art, readings, and (occasionally) food (@_c.l.a.m_). Recent writings can be found in _The Capilano Review_,
_ReIssue_, _C Magazine_, _Le Sigh_, and _Momus_. ywk.cargo.site

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Performance

Artists Books

Yasmine Whaley-Kalaora and Chipo Chipaziwa speak about Chipaziw’'s “conduits of citation” that document the artist's performance practice with/in the absence of her physical body, including through collaborators’ writing. They explore how the self is in tension with its own representation, and what it might mean to share the responsibility of witnessing.

 Recounting, Retracing, Recording: In Conversation With Chipo Chipaziwa

Rana Abughannam is a Palestinian architect and educator with an interest in the politics that govern urbanism and built heritage. Her research focuses on paradigms of counter-colonization exemplified in Indigenous, bottom-up, and constant practices of resistance against on-going colonial projects. She is an Assistant Professor at the School of Architecture and Landscape Architecture at the University of British Columbia.

Émélie Desrochers-Turgeon is an architectural historian and designer whose work traces
the ways land and life are negotiated through architecture. Her research moves between built environments and ecologies, attending to the entanglements of colonial modernity, extractivism, and the architectures of soil, repair, and return. She lives in Kjipuktuk/Halifax, where she works as an Assistant Professor at Dalhousie University.

Karen Lutsky is an associate professor of landscape architecture and the Director/Founder of the Great Lakes Design Labs. Her creative practice and writings focus on how landscape architects and designers might better design with changing landscapes. She recently co-authored the book _Five Bay Landscapes: Curious Explorations of the Great Lakes Basin_ (2022) and holds a position at the University of Minnesota’s Department of Architecture, Landscape Architecture, and Interior Design.

Ozayr Saloojee is a South African/Canadian teacher, writer, and designer. He is a Professor of Architecture at Carleton University, where he is also cross-appointed in African Studies, and at Carleton’s Centre for the Study of Islam. His research and creative practice look toward architecture enacted otherwise, where design is a practice of tender, epistemic dreaming.

Zoe Todd (she/they) is a citizen of the Manitoba Métis Federation from Edmonton, AB, Canada. They are an artist, storyteller, and interdisciplinary scholar who studies Indigenous governance and fresh-water fish futures in the Prairies.

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Drawing

History

Rana Abughannam, Émélie Desrochers-Turgeon, Karen Lutsky, Ozayr Saloojee, and Zoe Todd consider how imperialism in their homelands—from South Africa to Gaza to Turtle Island—are contemporary manifestations of the logics of the Roman empire. But, like the Tiber River flooding Rome, they also remind us of the “possibilities for solidarity, liberation, and return that come from breaking the dam.” 

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All Floods Lead to Rome: Watery Repetitions of Resistance Against Empire

Roxanne Fernandes is an experienced arts worker specializing in administration, production, and research; and an emerging curator/programmer based in Tkaronto/Toronto. Her evolving practice explores archives and counter-archives, memory-making, and storytelling. Roxanne supplements her artistic and historical knowledge with research and applications of critical theory. She has curated and programmed for Images Festival (Toronto, 2019), Confederation Centre Art Gallery (Charlottetown, 2023–2024), Art in the Open (Charlottetown, 2023), and the OCAD U Graduate Gallery (Toronto, 2023). For her MFA in criticism and curatorial practice (OCAD U), she presented her award-winning thesis publication “Stories of Rivers and Gold: Counterarchives of a Guyanese Transnational Identity.” Roxanne has worked at Toronto Biennial of Art, Images Festival, and TIFF, and has freelanced for various institutions and artists across the city. She served on the board of SAVAC from 2021 to 2024.

Chiedza Pasipanodya is a sculptor, writer, and curator whose practice investigates material culture, diasporic memory, and the transformative potential of ritual and form. Born in Harare, Zimbabwe, and currently in Toronto, Canada, Pasipanodya works through a post-minimalist lens, drawing from Afro-diasporic and speculative frameworks to explore how objects become vessels for lived histories, perceptual shifts, and cultural transmission. Their work has been exhibited in institutions including Gardiner Museum, Cranbrook Art
Museum (USA), Artspeak Gallery, Art Gallery of Burlington, BAND Gallery, Zalucky Contemporary, and Catinca Tabacaru Gallery (Romania). Pasipanodya holds an MFA in sculpture from Cranbrook Academy of Art (2025) and a BFA in criticism and curatorial
practice from OCAD U (2019) and has participated in international residencies including Watershed Center for the Ceramic Arts (USA), Dzimbanhete Arts and Culture Interactions (Zimbabwe), and the Global Experience Project: Maria Thereza Alves (Italy).

**Balancing on the steel coil, the round and impressionable 
shine of a hardened ceramic. 
Cool stone, the touch evoking memory. 
Raku-fired, a map of the passage of time. 
Gripping the clay in whatever form it presents itself. 
Peeling back the curtain, reading the scores. 
Lying in the grove beneath the light. 
Making, and making again, until intimacy is a familiar score.**

**The work of Zimbabwean Canadian sculptor, writer, and curator Chiedza Pasipanodya is an invitation to see differently. 
Through investigations of material logic and temporality, Pasipanodya
explores how objects are vessels
that embody lived histories and
cultural transmissions. To explore
what and how the body can hold a
sculpture is an invitation to shift
perception: through human and
non-human participation, weathering, breakdown, and (re)placement. It is a snapshot of relationality and how the artist’s interest
in pursuing mind-body-world connectivity with the work is a portal to profoundly understand our
histories and motivations. It is a
practice of socially poignant and
critical storytelling.**

**Roxanne Fernandes:** Previously, when we spoke during our studio
visit in 2022, you shared a playful description about process. It was a
“bringing of wobbly imaginings to tangible form and an endless mediation and generative medication.” [^1]

Something that struck me about 
the introduction of different materials like asphalt, textiles, cement,
steel, and wood into your practice—
when it was rooted in ceramics for
so many years—is what you’ve referred to as “material intimacy.” [^2] 
How have you worked through the
sentiment of intimately trusting the material when it goes through inevitable transformations?

**Chiedza Pasipanodya:** I started working
with clay over five years ago, the week
before everything locked down. I spent most of that year working with clay every single day. It taught me that materials have their own life. Five years later, it has taught me that every material has
its own conditions, restrictions, boundaries, and capacities. Clay has become a kind of listening, and my thinking about
my practice started to reflect how musicians may think about music—it’s about resonances. Like in _Kukokwa (The Invitation)_ (2023), there is a resonance when the steel interacts with the concrete, whether or not they touch directly. It’s a bit of a synaesthetic experience. That’s how I hear it and think about it.

I do a lot of research about my materials. When I started working with
asphalt, I wanted to know what it was
made of. Where does it come from?
What is the history of it? How do I make
my own? What I was interested in was
the shimmering, reflective, auditory quality of the material. The density, how my
body knew it before I was told what it is,
and then playing with that.

**RF:** In _Kukokwa_, there is a direct invitation to visitors to lie down and be among the elsewhere or otherness of the work. Embedded in the
ground, the wood halo and metal headrest become, in combination,
an aesthetic, functional, and spiritual object. 

What has it been like to introduce performance or the use
of the body into your sculptural work? How does the inclusion of
the body itself, or the act of physically or metaphorically holding
a vessel, speak to a decolonial construct of object-making and
sculptural installation? 

**CP:** The introduction of the body is, I
think, an insertion of myself in a very
literal way: in the way that I present,
with the work asking me to show up in
a vulnerable way and to put myself forward. I wonder, how can I insert the body and what are the qualities of that
body that I’ve been looking to? It is a
decolonial practice because of the institutional spaces I’m entering into. It’s a tricky thing of both asserting my existence and not saying my existence is the work. I am asserting histories and
the things I am bringing forth with me.
It is not monolithic.

“Kukokwa” means “the invitation”
—to invite somebody. It’s calling in
Ubuntu philosophy, an African-centred
philosophy around how people relate to
one another. “I am because we are” and
“I am because you are.” It means that
we are interwoven in our existence, and
when you live in that way, it becomes
difficult to harm and easy to have empathy and forgiveness.

_Kukokwa_ was the first piece I made
in Michigan [at the Cranbrook Academy of Art]. I had been walking outside, and I found this space where the light
kept hitting every morning. My thinking
was to bring in this traditional African
design of a headrest that’s found across
the continent, learn how to make it, and
reinterpret it. I was turning, making
spindles, and carving claro walnut wood,
a hybrid walnut that is native to the US.
So, the material and location of the artwork became very site-specific. I made the headrests out of steel, a material that
I’m now working with quite a bit. My
mother worked in a steel manufacturing
plant for approximately 30 years, but
that material has only now become a
part of my visual vocabulary. It speaks
to that relationship in many ways—
with the potential to reflect light, heat,
and energy.

Working with metal and wood comes from my relationship with the m’bira, a lamellophone musical instrument from
Zimbabwe, and its material logic. I find
it fascinating, the resonance of the metal
and the almost bass-like quality of the
wood in combination. Now, it is often a
deconstruction of this “m’bira methodology” when I’m working with wood and metal.

The work is an invitation for the
body to further reorient and look upward. My hope was that through that reorientation, a new perspective was possible. A transformation or a slight shift. And then emerges the question of what’s
possible when a slight shift happens?

> _Lying down openly in public, or inviting someone to rest, is a vulnerability in Pasipanodya’s approach
that I find myself returning to over
and over. A shift in perspective—especially in the current socio-political and cultural climate of art-making—is a necessary vulnerability in
order to recognize the world around
the piece in tandem. Over the years,
I’ve been adamant in reaffirming
that we do not exist, or create, in
a vacuum. Pasipanodya has recalled
French philosopher Roland Barthes’s
idea of “shimmering,” [^3] a quality of
subtle transformation. They have
described it, in relation to their
work, as “a perceptual flickering
like heat on asphalt that unsettles
fixed meaning.”_ [^4]

**RF:** I believe that through your devotion to materiality, you have so
beautifully and continually (as is its
nature) embodied the act of shimmering. Graphite and wax, materials that you’ve introduced into your
practice, have discernible slip and
shine that changes when the light
hits a different spot.

What has it meant for you to embody that notion metaphorically, symbolically, and through
all the stages of creation? That idea of a shifting perspective and the shifting of material meaning
through exploration?

**CP:** I think there are so many of us like
that—we are just watching the light shift
and sometimes it’s so everyday that maybe we don’t document it, but at the same
time it’s extraordinary that it happens.
And it is not guaranteed.

How can I create more opportunities for myself, and by extension others, to be more present with this thing we
are describing? Shimmering is a way
to bring that, our connection to light,
back into view. It requires the viewer to
work around this object. It’s not asking
you to be static or stable because it’s
not possible.

> Kunyoresa (Scores) _(2025) is that ask
to work around the object. To push
the question “What can the object
hold?” toward “How can the body
hold the object? And what does it
mean to do so—here, now?”_ Kunyoresa _is presented as a four-part sculpture: a soda-fired ceramic mass,
an almost anthropomorphic handful of clay, and a curtain of dyed
fabric. Each is accompanied by a
curved steel rod that meticulously
holds or supports it in some form.
The fourth component is a series
of written scores that prompts the
visitor to interact further, and
form intimacy with and responsibility for the objects by holding or
grasping the ceramic, or pulling back the curtain. There’s a
thoughtful, although precarious, 
level of balance and participation
with the work, affixed so gently to
its walls. “Pick-up / Pick-up the ball
/ Pick-up the ball and…” reads one
of the scores, leaving the rest up to
you. Will you return the ball to its
steel hold?_

**RF:** I’ve been interested to know
how you coalesce the experience
of “returning” in your life and work?
Geographically, in this triangulation between Zimbabwe, Toronto,
and Michigan; or in the themes and
shapes that appear in your work:
the baobab, other seeds and fruits,
and the termite mound or other
conical forms?

**CP:** Like many people who have immigrated from one place to another, images have been a way of staying in touch.
My family has an informal photographic archive because people were sending things back and forth. What I like about
the archive is that, in a particular way,
it’s stable, because the past has already
happened. Whereas, when I’m dealing
with the future or even the present, it’s
rhizomatic. There are a million arms
that I can’t completely wrangle. This has
taught me that objects can hold memory, and it can be recalled.

For _Mauuyu_ (2025), in making ceramic fruits over and over again, it became a remembering of the initial fruit
in my hands and everything that’s happened since. The fruits themselves have
changed and evolved over the years and
different types have emerged, but the series is still _Mauuyu_. As they evolve and
grow, they both hold memory and create
memory, which for me operate in different time-space continuums. The shape
of a termite mound, like in _Munda (The Field)_ (2021), is very much about ascension, but also legacy building, ancestry,
labour, and the family. It is said that
termite mounds, their shape and size,
often outlive the colonies they house.
Also, the mounds recall traditional Southern African ceramic techniques and
are created by labour-intensive coiling
and burnishing. In all, it is another way
of looking at time and measuring what
we are doing here.

I remember my grandmother and
my mother saying to me “Ziva kwawakabva nokuti kwaunoenda usiku," which means “Know where you’re coming from,
so that you know where you’re going.” It
was embedded in me. Within return is
this whole belief system around the
value of eldership and ancestors. That’s
a whole worldview.

> Mauuyu, _in particular, is a work that
I’ve seen change over the years—
imbued with the energy of an archive and picked with care for the
occasions in which the pieces are
shown. In prior studio visits, texts,
and exhibitions by Pasipanodya,
I’ve been privileged to witness the
glisten of experimental glazes, the
lustre and blackening of raku firing, and the cold touch of the serpentine stone. The seed, fruit, clay,
and stone are immensely nourishing
in their reimaginations. Playful in
their inconsistencies. And, like the
mounds, a testament to labour. Each
beckons to an event or a learning,
bookmarked, with that memory carried forward._

**RF:** _Chibereko (Womb) III_ and _Chibereko (Womb) IV_ (both 2024) are
pieces where materials are in companionship with one another, and
manipulated toward a physical transformation. To what you were shaing about resonance, I can imagine
moments coming together when
you’re welding, or adding pigment
and laying concrete, where there
may also be a resonance of sound
that is almost onomatopoeic—and
so linked to the sounds that we
know from spoken language. And
that shows up, visually, as this record through the work. Can you
share a bit about that?**

**CP:** I think there is a bit of imbuing there.
It’s a translation and transference of energy. The way I can describe it is that it’s
a layering. In _Chibereko (Womb) IV_, the
cement is mixed with the pigment so
it looks like a red clay. Some kids have
thought that it’s gum. There’s asphalt in the cement, but there are also rose
petals from openings, and gifts and orange rinds from friends over the years
embedded into it. There is an accumulation in a single form, all the way down
to the red pigment that is grasping on
to the hardware and cloth. When we talk
about sound and resonance, for me, it’s
the wind blowing clothes on the line and
the softness of the silk dress that my grandmother is wearing. The resonance of
this experience has become fragmented
and reorganized so the body is no longer physically present or represented, except through the two-dimensionality
of the barely visible figures on mulberry paper in _Chibereko (Womb) III._ The
resonance sits in the place of a collective memory. The work is not asking
for you to know who those people are. Rather, I think it’s asking for connection to a feeling.

For both pieces, there’s an invitation
to a kind of softness, and I think that
this softness arrives through colour, a
flesh tone that is showing up in my work
as of late, and through the curves on
the forms. Even in the roundness of the
clay that has been fired or hardened.
The softness encourages a potential for
holding, touching, or caressing, which
I welcome from an art object even if
they can’t always do that in the spaces
they are shown in. It’s nice to know,
and see, that there is still softness in
the world available to us. These materials
had to be found, given, bought, dried,
and then embedded. Softness arrives
through the history of those objects. I
think by the time the organic material
arrives in a work like _Chibereko (Womb)
IV_, it’s representative of holding on.
Other times, when materials arrive in
an artwork, it’s the end. Sometimes,
things may make it through the tides
of time. Like when you see something
in the water, washed up on the shore,
and wonder “Where did you come
from?” and “What life have you had?”


[^1]: Chiedza Pasipanodya, conversation with Roxanne Fernandes.
[^2]: Material intimacy can be understood as how an artist utilizes the multiplicities of a material toward greater personal connection.
[^3]: Roland Barthes and Thomas Clerc, The Neutral: Lecture Course at the College De France (1977-1978), trans. Rosalind E. Krauss and Denis Hollier (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), 51.
[^4]: Chiedza Pasipanodya, Chiedza Pasipanodya (artist book, Cranbrook Academy of Art, 2025).

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Sculpture

In their conversation, Roxanne Fernandes and Chiedza Pasipanodya notice subtle transformations of matter that unsettle fixed meaning in Pasipanodya’s sculptures. Through clay, steel, concrete, wood, graphite, wax, and more, Pasipanodya recalls the shapes and lineages of objects like the Zimbabwean instrument m'bira or termite mounds that represent legacy-building, labour, and the family. 

What Happens When the Light Shifts?: Chiedza Pasipanodya's Perceptual Flickering

Michèle Pearson Clarke is a Trinidad-born visual artist, writer, and Assistant Professor of Photography at Toronto Metropolitan University. Working primarily in photography and video, her work situates grief as a site of possibility for social engagement and political connection.

Laura Grier is a Sahtu Délı ̨ nę First Nations artist and printmaker, born in Somba Ké (Yellowknife), and based out of Alberta and currently living in Toronto. They hold a BFA from NSCAD U (Kjipuktuk) and an MFA from OCAD U (Toronto), and are currently a PhD candidate in Visual Arts at York University.

Scott Miller Berry is a filmmaker and cultural worker who lives in Toronto. He is currently Managing Director at Workman Arts, an art + mental health organization. He was previously Executive Director (2005–2015) at Images Festival.

Vicky Moufawad-Paul is a Toronto-based visual and media arts curator and writer. She is the Director/Curator at A Space Gallery. She situates her work in terms of curatorial praxis, which simultaneously offers substantive analyses of world politics and embodies processes of enacting justice. She is interested in the ways that experiences of colonialism and complex diasporic intersectionalities can demonstrate new possibilities for transnational solidarity.

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

Christina Oyawale is a hierarchy averse self-proclaimed “commie-punk,” with a reverence toward Web 2.0 and DIY punk aesthetics. They are a working-class queer disabled artist, curator, and writer from Toronto, currently based in Winnipeg.

Note: To read this dispatch in the intended print layout, please [view or download the PDF.](https://strapi-uploads-c-mag-prod.s3.ca-central-1.amazonaws.com/C162_Open_Hearing_e13a0daf12.pdf)

This is the second dispatch from “Open Hearing: Dreaming in Dark Times” to be published in the magazine. [A full public transcript of the event is also available.](https://cmagazine.com/articles/open-hearing-dreaming-in-dark-times-dispatch-i)

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Collective

Institutional critique

“Open Hearing: Dreaming in Dark Times” was initiated by EMILIA-AMALIA as a town hall that gathered more than 200 cultural workers in Toronto to confront urgent issues including Palestine solidarity, censorship, and labour. Inspired by the 1969 Art Workers’ Coalition open hearing in New York, the dispatch features transcripts from Laura Grier, Michèle Pearson Clarke, Vicky Moufawad-Paul, Scott Miller Berry, and Christina Oyawale.

Open Hearing: Dreaming in Dark Times, Dispatch II

Magally Zelaya is a Nahua writer based in Toronto, hailing from Winnipeg, by way of Mexico City and El Salvador. Her creative writing has appeared in publications such as _sin cesar_ and _The Normal School_; her journalism in outlets such as _The Guardian_ and the _Toronto Star_.

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Indigenous

Spirituality

Magally Zelaya’s winning text for the 2024 Indigenous Art Writing Award traces how amatl, the ancient Mesoamerican paper made from the wild fig tree’s bark, is used in Michelle Peraza’s ongoing work. Surviving its banning and burnings by Spanish colonizers, amatl’s sacred significance was sustained by Otomi artists through the last 500 years. 

Notes on Paper: Spiritual Healing for Artists and Other Humans

Letter

##### Dear _C_,

On October 27, the Alberta government invoked the notwithstanding clause to force striking teachers back to work. Premier Danielle Smith recently expressed solidarity with the Quebec government’s use of the notwithstanding clause to ban public employees, including teachers, from wearing religious symbols in the workplace, and has been threatening to use the clause to prevent transgender youth from accessing healthcare,
playing on girls’ sports teams, and changing their names or pronouns without their parents’ knowledge. In writing this letter, I kept asking myself: how do we strike back when striking is forbidden? I started revisiting Fred Moten, Silvia Federici, Ariella Azoulay—names I learned in my MFA program before joyfully dropping out—hoping I could find something to turn the mood of this letter around.

My phone rang. A dear artist friend of mine wanted my advice on a performance. He asked if themes of surveillance, imperialism, and data collection were explicit enough in his idea. I said _no_. He asked if the work was queer enough. I said _yes, because you’re making it_. We talked for an hour about how to produce something radical, how to inspire people to organize, and how we grapple with the responsibility of creating political work while running the risk of being wrong. We talked about his performance some more. He wanted to read aloud during it, and I talked about memorization, failure, and semantic satiation (the repetition of a word until it becomes meaningless). All the while, I was thinking about the notwithstanding clause; if our rights and freedoms can be readily taken away when they are exercised, well then, they were meaningless all along.

Today I want to read those rights out loud, over and over again, to perform an inversion of that phenomenon. _Freedom of expression. Freedom of religion. Freedom of association. Protection against unreasonable search and seizure. Right to legal counsel and habeas corpus. Protection against cruel and unusual punishment. Protection from discrimination by the government._ I want to recite these words aloud like an incantation, in a crescendoing polyphonic chorus until they mean something. Our bodies are opaque, solid, but sound permeates
and intrudes—it reaches places where our bodies are not welcome. I invite you to perform this counter-invocation with me.

##### Sincerely,

##### Marsel Reddick

##### Dear _C_,

The Stop! issue’s exploration of dissent and opposition struck a powerful chord for myself, here in Kenya. Our Gen Z has erupted into spontaneous demonstrations against President Ruto's administration. I was deeply moved by how this generation transformed their resistance into a vibrant form of expression. Hand-crafted signs evolved into potent political statements, impromptu street art emerged under the cover of night, and
real-time streams on TikTok built a living, digital record of courage and sorrow.

Observing the Kenyan protests as they unfolded, I recall the protesters’
stillness as they faced a line of riot police, with hands raised in a gesture of peace. As an architect, I frequently reflect on how urban spaces orchestrate movement, including the flow of traffic, the movement of people, and the dynamics of commerce. I also consider how, sometimes, the most innovative design lies in disrupting that very flow. These demonstrations transformed the streets into fresh visions, where the framework of resistance redrew the city’s energy. “Stop,” in that moment, functioned as both a form of protest and an invitation: what if we stopped to envision a completely different structure?

Your publication reminded me that artistic expression and activism can share a common core: the determination to challenge repetition, to interrupt what should no longer endure.

##### With sincere regards,

##### Cynthia Mmboga Khamadi

##### Dear _C_,

I was struck by the relationship between Mark Kibet’s letter and Hung Duong’s conversation with Grace Samboh in “Between Restful and Radical.”

Whether it’s the “ability to pause” Kibet described in terms of the make-
shift shrines made with plastic flowers and broken radios, the “three copies of ourselves” that artist Grace Samboh jokingly insists are necessary for keeping up with work, or the exhibition “REST” (Ruang Elok Sarat Tempo) curated by Samboh and Julian Abraham, we are
witnessing art about a _struggling to cope_. We live in such tumultuous times, which “REST” offers a response to, in a way that reminds me of Dada artists in 1916 Zurich. The rise of nationalism witnessed
during that time continued, in many ways, into the times in which we find ourselves now. I think of how Duong writes about the need for “a halt to this rollercoaster before an existence-on-fire is completely normalized.”

Thanks _C Mag_, for providing rich food for thought.

##### Sincerely,

##### Danielle Hogan


Letters

Associate Editor

Designer

Publisher

Artist Project

Kai Trotz-Motayne is a Guyanese-Canadian researcher and writer from Tkaronto/Toronto, whose work takes inspiration from the many Caribbean people that raised her. She spends most days reminiscing about family gatherings that would end with tales of her family’s
Caribbean past. Inspired by their imaginative retellings, her mind now wonders what stories she will one day tell. Her work now explores how storytelling practices, like identities, evolve and transform through movement.

Bushra Junaid’s mother, Adassa, came to Montreal from Jamaica in the ’50s as part of the West Indian Domestic Scheme, which saw thousands of Caribbean women migrate to Canada as domestic workers from 1955 to 1967. It was in Montreal that she met Junaid’s father, who had emigrated from Nigeria. After living in Montreal for some years, the family moved to Newfoundland for her father’s work. Standing at the meeting point of coasts, continents, and oceans, Junaid’s practice weaves together her parents’ histories, tracing their arrival as she searches for her own
place in Newfoundland.

Junaid told me a story that took place before her late mother’s passing: catching sight of her mother at the sink, for a moment she saw herself instead. As if a system glitched, time seemed to immediately collapse. That vision led her to think about time as layered. Even when we spoke about her work, her stories challenged any linear understanding of time, with anecdotes zigzagging across varied places and moments, before eventually returning to Newfoundland. Junaid’s work continues to blur the boundaries of time, memory, and history in her attempt to configure a reciprocal relationship with a province from which she has felt estranged.

Caribbean storytelling practices, like Junaid’s work, are themselves layered. [1] Memory is held close, and passed down through generations like an heirloom. The gaps left by time invite acts of critical fabulation, [2] as our stories wander, like Junaid’s, through unexpected constellations of memory, time, and place.

The images that fill the first few pages of this issue are taken from Junaid’s _Portraits in Time_ (2025) series and reference the technology of the stereoview photograph. Stereoscopy, which dates back to the 1840s, requires a stereoscopic camera featuring two lenses placed at the same distance as the space between two human eyes, to produce two separate photographs at the same moment in time. Viewed side by side, each separate photograph is combined by the brain into a singular image, creating a singular multi-dimensional (or 3D) image. Junaid’s use of this practice considers how the historical past of centuries ago, Junaid’s own family history, and the present moment are interconnected. Drawing on the stereoview format, the work positions the viewer between temporal, cultural, and familial dimensions.

On the right-hand side of “A Portrait in Time II” (2025) is a faded family photograph taken at Middle Cove Beach, NL, in 1970, where children are seen playing at the water’s edge, framed by cliffs and the cold Atlantic. To the left is an archival image from 1903, captioned
“Planting Cane, Island of St. Kitts,” depicting Caribbean children labouring in the fields. The juxtaposition reveals unsettling and overt continuities between freedom and bondage, leisure and labour, and the Canadian shore and the Caribbean plantation. The convergence of all these threads produces a discomfort that likely arises from Junaid’s acknowledgement that her family’s happy moment is inseparable from the histories of en-
slavement and forced labour that shaped the Atlantic world. By pairing these photographs with an 18th-century Nova Scotia merchant’s list of commodities (sugar, rum, molasses) the work binds personal (and collective) memory to the material traces of empire.

On paper, Junaid’s artistic journey begins in St. John’s, NL. The city is an important context for understanding her work. As Junaid spoke to me on the phone, I imagine that she looked out her window and thought about the events that happened on the same coast in 1497 when the first European, John Cabot, stumbled upon the land. His arrival marked the beginning of “exploration,” settlement, and the violent displacement of the Beothuk. The European settlements that grew on this shore, like those farther down the Atlantic Coast (such as Cape Cod in Massachusetts), were built around the cod fisheries that sustained tight-knit coastal communities. Over 500 years later, Junaid and her family would live in one such community in St. John’s.

Long before Junaid’s arrival, ships were built and shipped out of Newfoundland to transport stolen people from the coast of West Africa to the coast of the Caribbean. Once there, our ancestors laboured to produce sugar, molasses, rum, and cotton. By the 18th and 19th centuries, Newfoundland’s fishing economy saw large profits from the sale of cheap salted cod to the Caribbean colonies, for planters to feed the enslaved populations. When the conversation around abolition was first broached, it was opposed in the British parliament out of fear that its Newfoundland colony’s fishery would collapse. [3] Wealthy merchants and coastal fishermen alike profited from the economy of slavery.

Junaid’s inquiry into Newfoundland’s history began in 2014 when she was told about the Plantation at Quidi Vidi, an ongoing project in St. John’s. Its name, chosen in part because settlers there were once called “planters,” disregarded the word’s connection to slavery. Though the building management first defended the use of the name in 2020 saying
that the name honoured the village’s rich history and culture, they quietly changed their name to Quidi Vidi Village Artisan Studios in 2022, ahead of a royal visit. [4] Junaid’s discomfort around such an unthinking, unknowing use of the word stirred Junaid into considering how the Atlantic region is bound to both the Caribbean and West Africa—the former her mother’s home and the latter her father’s. The very ships that once traversed these waters touched each of those shores, linking them through histories of movement and displacement: the same currents Junaid now brings together through her work.

The third spread in the _Portraits in Time series_, “A Portrait in Time: Past and Present” (2025), temporally distinguishes itself from the others. While the other images remain anchored in the colonial past, grounded in the memories of Junaid’s childhood, this image turns outward and forward. Here, contemporary Black Caribbean Canadian children run along the same beach, in 1970 on the left, and 2025 on the right. Placed side by side as if holding hands across decades, the image collapses time and space. Though we as viewers understand the heavy history that binds these children, this is also the only image with no material link to slavery. There are no commodities lists or hundred-year-old images. It’s
just children. The children move together, radiant and unaware that they carry within them the quiet weight of the past. The image evokes a time when life felt more tangible, when the distance between then and now seemed bridgeable. It invites viewers to imagine a future defined by connection rather than the inheritance of pain; the haunting yet beautiful burden that binds them. Centring a tender, childlike innocence, the work becomes an ode to Junaid’s younger self—a self who once moved through the world before race and place became knowing boundaries.

On the phone, Junaid spoke longingly about her childhood home, brought to life by her mother, as the place where she first felt safe in her Blackness. Like Caribbean stories, we as Caribbean people are made of many pieces: layered, complex, and zigzagging. At times, those pieces seem not to fit, yet we continue to shape them, making what seems complicated feel right. As we grow older, new fragments surface, adding pieces we didn’t know existed. Each fragment, each memory, is carefully placed atop another until a fuller image emerges. Through her work, Junaid assembles herself piece by piece, tracing threads of belonging, to re-embody a once-disembodied past.

[^1]: Sarah Goodwin, “Bushra Junaid’s Two Pretty Girls, Stereographs, & Sugarcane Workers,” in _Like Sugar_, ed. Sarah Goodwin and Rachel Seligman (Saratoga Springs: The Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery, 2020).
[^2]: Saidiya Hartman, “Venus in Two acts,” _Small Axe_ 12, no. 2 (2008).
[^3]: _The Debate on a Motion for the Abolition of the Slave-Trade, in the House of Commons on Monday and Tuesday, April 18 and 19, 1791, Reported in Detail_, 2nd ed. (London: printed by James Phillips, George Yard Lombard Street, 1792), 112, https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=nyp.33433086978354&view=1up&seq=122
[^4]: Malone Mullin, “St. John’s Quietly Changes Name of Quidi Vidi Plantation Ahead of Royal Visit,” CBC News, April 28, 2022, https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/newfoundland-labrador/quidi-vidi-plantation-new-name-1.6433134

Bushra Junaid (she/her) is a visual artist, author, and curator working between Newfoundland and Toronto, whose work probes themes of history, memory, identity, and placemaking across the African diaspora. She has exhibited nationally and in the US and curated landmark exhibitions focused on Black and Caribbean diasporic experience. Her curatorial and community engaged work continues to advance equity and representation within Canada’s visual arts sector.

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Photography

In _Portraits in Time_ (2025), Bushra Junaid references the history of stereoview photography to present a series of family and archival images that, as Kai Trotz-Motayne writes in her accompanying essay, highlight the ongoing legacies of “enslavement and forced labour that shaped the Atlantic world.”

_Portraits in Time_ by Bushra Junaid: Text

Review

Micaela Dixon is a writer and gallerist working for KIN in Brussels. Micaela joined the gallery from Fogo Island Arts, a contemporary arts and ideas organization based off the east coast of Newfoundland and Labrador. Her writing has appeared in _Peripheral Review_, _Public Parking_, and on other platforms.

The Bonavista Biennale returned this year for its fifth edition under the theme “String Games.” A theme is a curious thing: while it helps direct you, it can’t prepare you for dirt roads that could have defeated our KIA sedan (on Route 236), the sudden appearance of a moose, or the shifting terrain that makes up much of the biennial experience. More than once my close friend (and faithful driver) asked whether the car would make it up a slope near one of the sites. Each time, I replied, half-distracted, “Oh for sure.” But after two days of driving around the peninsula, I began to see “String Games” less like a guide to the individual exhibition sites, and more like a prompt made to reinforce the Biennale’s local-to-global ties. The week leading up the Biennale had been challenging. A series of out-of-control forest fires razed nearby parts of the province and cast an ominous mood over the opening weekend. We asked ourselves if we were adding to the problem by flying into the province to go see art. When we landed, the air smelled of fire.

Our first stop was the Generator Shack in Bonavista. I felt a deep and immediate affinity for English Harbour local Douglas Penney’s sculpture presentation, _Smokey the Polar Bear_ (c. 2010). A birdlike snowman made from Styrofoam with buttons for eyes stood in the centre of the room, surrounded by wooden and rock creatures made to look like snakes, whales, and flamingos. What I liked so much about Penney’s work was the humour with which he imbues his sculptures. They’re light on their feet and adopt a sensitivity that is in equal parts resourceful and modernist. A few minutes down the road at the Ryan Premises, Larry Weyand’s hyper-embellished lobster sculpture offered an impressively decadent counterpoint to Penney’s refined yet playful approach. Where Penney leans more economical, Weyand’s _Fabulous Little Lobster_ (2025) revels in excess.

In Trinity, I was enchanted by Clara Clayton Gough’s basket sculptures: _Basketman_ (1998) and _Basketwoman with child_ (1998). Gough hails from a lineage of African Nova Scotian basket-makers who have been selling baskets since the late-18th century. Her sculptures are strict compositions that adopt basket-making techniques to represent the human form. In _Basketman_, the result is a scarecrow-looking figure who looks more scared than scary, but the effect is endearing.

Back on the road, we set out on an hour’s drive toward Keels. Lisa Myers had taken over the Keels Community Hall with an exhibition called “Sunset in Process” (2025) devoted to a temporality that she calls “blueberry time.” When we entered, visitors were invited to plot
the time of day along a large sundial set to the seasonal changes of the blueberry plant. In the adjoining room, a series of screenprints made with the anthocyanin pigment from blueberries annotated the depth of water bodies between the Georgian Bay and the Atlantic. A stop-motion video, _Sunset in process, don’t look away_ (2025), considered how the industrial development of the St. Lawrence River disrupted the flow between fresh water and salt water. The camera traverses the water’s flora, bobbing up to the surface and then back down into the waterway. In the video, shifts in colour between browns and greens eventually give way to the saturated blues of the Atlantic—this is how we know where we are. When I left Myers’s site, a couple entering apologized for their late arrival. She replied, “You’re not late, we’re on blueberry time here.”

On the way back toward Bonavista, we stopped into King’s Cove Community Hall. Here on display was an exhibition of works by Ethan Murphy and Inuuteq Storch. Where Murphy’s visual language is the result of patient fieldwork, often travelling the length of the province
for the opportunity to learn and document ferry-access communities, Storch’s relies on inspiration from his hometown of Sisimiut, Greenland. In Storch’s photographic series _Necromancer_ (2020–2023), the artist arranges scenes from the everyday into a heavily post-produced black-and-white register. When I first saw the photographs, I found them to look like etchings. When I asked Storch how he achieved this effect, he told me, “lots of contrast and Photoshop.” Murphy, on the other hand, deals with photography in an analogue register, producing images that foreground the medium. The outcome is a careful reflection on styles of self-suﬃcient living, with an editing process that emphasizes rhythm and sequencing over digital manipulation. Across his work, we see a man tending to his garden, scenes from the province’s intra-provincial ferry network, and moments of everyday leisure. Among my favourites is a photograph of high schoolers playing baseball dressed in suit jackets and baseball caps (_Baseball_, 2022). The ball hangs mid-air as it approaches the batter. Murphy has timed his shutter speed just right.

In the marketplace of ideas, it seems that biennials don’t satiate like they used to (consider recent reviews of the Berlin and Venice biennials). The Bonavista Biennale presents a meaningful counterpoint to the blockbuster mega-exhibition. Rather than presenting a list of blue-chip practices, the selection is well-considered for the setting. Things that are already part of the local context, like knitting, basket-making, four-wheelers, fish,
blueberries, and pigments, return as source material for the presentations on display. Yet, the way these objects and themes are approached (and sometimes abstracted), allows them to transcend the everyday and acquire new interpretations. The curatorial vision of Rose Bouthillier and Dr. Heather Igloliorte smoothly blends the range of artistic presentations into an exhibition context that is inspiring for onlookers. Contemporary
art has a tendency to feel strange, but here the works remain close to their origins.

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The 2025 Bonavista Biennale: “String Games” ran from 16 August to 14 September on the Bonavista Peninsula, Newfoundland and Labrador. Curated by Dr. Heather Igloliorte. 

“String Games”

Rosemary Flutur is a writer living in Montreal. 

To be familiar with Margaux Williamson’s art is to know that she often doesn’t paint what she sees as it is. One of her quotidian scenes might flout perspective, composition, or form, but each gesture is slight enough that a reverence for those very properties still exists. Depending on the canvas, you might find yourself in a barroom (_Public House_, 2025), staring at a necklace in a storefront window (_Store_, 2025), or pressing a book’s pages apart with a thumb (_Book_, 2025). Other works of figuration come closer to bending the rules of those aforementioned properties in half, but Williamson isn’t a rule-breaker as much as she is a meddler. By meddling, I mean that she uses her chosen medium to upend a certain veritas—less to cause undue trouble, and more to point toward the instability and multivalence of memory, time, and our immediate reality. Through pictorial manipulation of space and time, she makes us privy to what lies beyond physical sight while keeping us in the image.

Williamson’s art is often a confluence of varyingfactors: abstract and figurative, prosaic and eccentric, real and imaginative. In an exercise in labelling her work, intimism’s wistful domestic tableaux came to mind, the aesthetic movement that, despite its commonplace subject matter, is surreptitiously metaphysical. However, compared to the intimists of the late-19th and early 20th centuries, Williamson’s work is, in a word, grungier. In a Williamson painting, nothing is stable and nothing settles (like time and memory itself). Nature is hazily abstracted in _Rocks_ (2025), while water dramatically rises—or falls?—in _Storm_ (2025). Though Williamson’s paintings are technically fixed, her scenes gently announce that they are in the midst of something, like a story without an ending. Hers is a gentle rebellion against not only the static quality of painting, but also the human desire to capture an evanescent moment and pin it down by its wings.

Writer Sheila Heti said, in a 2022 interview with Williamson, of her painting _Fire_ (2021): it “makes me think about how little I actually see the world.” The way Williamson depicts light inspires the same thought in me. The bright flash on the flora in _Window_ (2025), the mysterious horizontal grey-blue streak in _City Tree_ (2025), and the red glow from string lights reflected on the bar in the exhibition’s eponymous painting are the punctum. Her paintings remind me to think about light in a new way, the same way each painting’s so-called movement changes my tune on time: that something so ubiquitous and unavoidable can also be magnificent. But Williamson isn’t using painting to lose herself in the latter point. The impact is in the image. And while light may be the phenomenon that takes me beyond the ordinary moment, that same banal moment is precisely where I’m experiencing that magic. This is key. When I stand in front of a work like _Public House_, what I see is a dive bar on a slow night, where the bar top is sticky, the scent of stale beer steeps in the air, and the bathroom could use some love. It’s not exactly the scene I’d envision would elicit this response, but it doesn’t matter: I am in a state of soft awe.

What Williamson shows us are the scenes that make up a life, but it’s not explicitly hers: it’s anyone’s. _Book_ is evidence of this. The horizontal lines where words should be are like placeholders for the text from whatever book we’re reading, or have read, or will read. Again, she meddles, as if to say nothing is stable or singular. For her paintings don’t try to capture a moment, but an experience—one that we may have trouble recollecting, but that we can always return to. By not including details of the book, abstraction then becomes a tool to depict the essence of time and of the object. (She does this in _Rocks_ and _Storm_ too, where she paints water in messy, gestural brush-strokes, the point being less about perfectly illustrating water than about reminding us that it moves, and that what we’re looking at is just a painting.) Williamson goes back to the basis of things. Big questions won’t always be answered. We know the beyond is there, and sometimes we even glimpse it, but never for too long. Ultimately this world suffices: a robin, a window, nasturtium, the night sky. The objective is to remain in the image, and we do.

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“Public House” ran from 13 March to 3 May 2025 at Bradley Ertaskiran, Montreal.

Header

C Mag

Issue 162

Tidal

Credits

Letters

Letters

Editorial

Editorial: TIDAL

Explore Issue by Images

Features

Wheel and Come Again: Cow Pastor Revisited

Calcifying Bodies: An Interview With Alvin Luong

Recounting, Retracing, Recording: In Conversation With Chipo Chipaziwa

All Floods Lead to Rome: Watery Repetitions of Resistance Against Empire

What Happens When the Light Shifts?: Chiedza Pasipanodya's Perceptual Flickering

Open Hearing: Dreaming in Dark Times, Dispatch II

Notes on Paper: Spiritual Healing for Artists and Other Humans

Artist Projects

Portraits in Time by Bushra Junaid: Text

Columns

One Thing: A Gastropoetics of Sugar Cane

Composition: on the edges of a mother tongue

Reviews

“String Games”

“Public House” — Margaux Williamson

“The past tense is always longer” — Nadia Belerique, Myriam Dion, Joyce Joumaa, Lotus L. Kang, Gabrielle L’Hirondelle Hill, Berirouche Feddal, Kyle Alden Martens, Jeneen Frei Njootli, Sheilah ReStack, Michaëlle Sergile, Ingrid Syage Tremblay

“A Smile Split by the Stars” with m. nourbeSe philip, Katherine McKittrick, Nasrin Himada, Juliane Okot Bitek, Trish Salah, Cora Gilroy-Ware, Chloé Savoie-Bernard, Yaniya Lee, Sameen Mahboubi, Aaliyah Strachan, Muna Dahir, Cristian Ordóñez, Roya DelSol

“BEDROCK” — Nour Bishouty, Dawit L. Petros, Karen Tam 譚嘉文

“Still Air” — Diyar Mayil