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

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

Almanac

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

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

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

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

_Note: the print layout of this text is meaningful. To honour that, we've chosen to upload it as images._  [Read or download the PDF.](https://strapi-uploads-c-mag-prod.s3.ca-central-1.amazonaws.com/C158_Sheppard_0dd6fa857a.pdf)



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Language

Body

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

Composition: Crepuscular Rhythms

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Kink

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Drawing

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

One Thing: Tracing Fragments of Queer Desire

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

##### “Always a flower planted on this body made of layers of shadows” 

> ##### —etel adnan [1]

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

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

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

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Composition: give up your own

Jonathan Scott is an artist and writer based in Toronto. His research focus is Devolved Sculpture and fictioning. He holds a PhD from York University and an MFA from the Glasgow School of Art. 


The curse of hyperaesthesia is petrified under every wrinkle of luminosity on the gilded frame’s surface. 

In/finitely in/visible. 

The craftsman’s hand captures each stratum of matter and memory. A wealth of communicability under/stood only by a discerning ‘eye’ that can bind a moment in One’s blink. 

VAM VAM VAM 

The mallet’s rhythm beats a fallen gold kernel thinner and thinner. 

VAM VAM VAM 

Volcanoes rumbles, plates shift. Golden rivers of magma congeal and flow deep within our core. Folds of liquid layer and merge in a molten loch.
Perpetual presence in ruptures and ripples. Material ethereal planes asking to be communicated in moments of im/pure perception. 

VAM VAM VAM 

The hand of the maker must be invisible. It must not take away from the artist. It must be precise and careful. Support the artwork, not distract from it. The hand of the maker must be invisible. Perfection must always be its ambition. It must not be evident. It must be seamless. Flawless. It must be in harmony with the artwork. The hand of the maker must direct the ‘eye.’ It must enhance the artwork. The hand of the maker must be invisible. It must be Adept. It must know its limits. Its responsibility. Its place. To become one with the artwork. To become the artist’s hand, but never hold it. The hand of the maker must be invisible. 

Leaf – layed leaf. 

Pushing his hand over the coarse surface, his thoughts travel to the aggravation of touch only T.I.M.E can heal. Pitted and scorched, a haptic chaos. Scratches, spots, ruptures. What calm can be found if each pause is infinitesimal? 
“You won’t be able to see it, you can only feel it!” she shrieks. 

He – holds – his – breath. Slowly. 
Ex – hale. Breath – shallow. In – hale. Short, light, In, Ex. 

With each undulation of his chest, reflections of gold flicker in his periphery. A flick of his finger bats the air. Eddies of wind spiral and catch the leaf, whipping it back into shape. The perfect square reforms, only to fold and roll into tubular waves of vermillion and dusk. 

The surface ripples. Currents take form and instantly disappear. Repeated, shifting peaks succumb to troughs of imminent energy as light hits and holds to each plane. Mountains of tiny mountains. Their frenetic alteration at nauseating speed. Rough, calm, round, down. Sharp, flat. From each direction nowhere is up. Nowhen never available, always present. 

VAM VAM VAM 

His raft of experience floats on the underside of the river. 
Sinking further and further away from its surface. A void of 
deafness. What can be held onto if not the experience of 
the past. Its existence in the present un/deniable and 
un/detachable from now. There is a real calling. 

The ripples slow. 

He sits patiently waiting for the size to 
dry, gripping the gold as it does. His 
mentor, dead now, led him into a 
trade that would carry him 
through his artistic life. A 
supporting role as a 
framer. As a framer of 
artworks. As a 
framer. ~~As a 
framer of 
T.I.M.E~~ 
 

The body 
sits poised in 
precarity, the 
legs of the human 
and chair equally 
unbalanced. A halo of 
luminosity shimmering on 
each canvas as ghosts or 
returning souls. Muscles torque in 
strokes of pink grey oil. The painted 
blobs ooze out. Nor body, nor mark. The 
directions are dot . dot . dot . dash – Hoop, 
swivel. Abject mass of pictorial illusion. When a 
disembodied figure is fixed in time, what is framing 
it? Is it the affected plane or ornate structure around 
it? For him, it was the structure that broke the barrier of 
time. The frame made the image an object, brought into the 
now. The frame was the transition of the inside to the out. As 
the shadow falls, the ground feels stable. The light between each 
panel refracts. Blinding at once, shallow at next. Lines of gold shot 
outward. Glossy horizons of matrixed ostentation give way to matte 
passages of doubtable imitation. 

 
On a surface so pristine as yours the dents and bumps take precedence. 
“Don’t look, they’re not important,” she shrieks. 
But they look at you. Telling you of their T.I.M.E. Their accident. That moment that moves 
slower in your mind, but unescapably faster in our real. 
Birds chirp incessantly. 
His body doesn’t move, but is in constant flux. Each leaf sealed till the next accident. The rub of the hand, 
fingerprints buried deep within the strata of its surface. Who am ‘eye’ to lay claim to the importance of the 
frame? 

Body morphed. A slight cut. Face ripped. Hold/Hold/Hold/Hold/Stop. 

With one foul move the leaf is lost. 

He lays the leaf on the gilders pad again. Out of its book, it becomes instantly vulnerable, far removed from its signification. Maneuvering it takes a decisive patience. Each leaf a membrane of air trapped in precious metal. It wants to adhere to any surface it can, even if that surface is absent. The pressure of its worth makes any episode of its use fraught. 

In/visible in/finitely 

The clouds appeared as a static moth-eaten blanket. He ran his eyes across the pitted and pocked surface. The unfiltered sun shone down, exaggerating each im/perfection. Cruising over their fluidity, Mina’s questions took hold of his thoughts. Was it simply a difference of perspective that granted access to the refractured equality between matter and self, or was it a plane of delusion that pulled one into an image-thought of existence? 

VAM VAM VAM 

The moth in the window reanimated. Its wings slowly closing and opening, their tips never touching. The vibrations of air resonating with every awakening beat. Its echo
inaudible. 

VAM VAM VAM 

Shards of golden light pierce the window, cutting sharp bars through space. Flecks of blinding gold dust flutter in and out of focus with every breath. 

VAM VAM VAM 

He can see the ocean now. Far below the clouds. Ripples of tranquility patterned with shadows of moisture. The moment just before. 
She is gone.

This issue embraces the expansive nature of craft—focusing on the relationships among artists and their materials in conversation with lineage, embodied processes, function, survival, and life as it is lived. Many contributors elaborate on craft as perpetual motion: continually reformed bonds in the act of making that serve as proof of self-definition. Artists and writers explore the psychedelia of time devoted to a loom, material kinship, tea encounter, sentimentality as a curatorial drive, and more, following craft as it moves through families, diasporic realities, and markets of trade, tourism, and commercial art.


Craft

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Time

Jonathan Scott draws on his experience as a gilder to think of a sheet of gold leaf as a shimmering plane of time. Moving through disparate memories as they intertwine with the gilding process, Scott’s experimental text generates questions about what is and what isn’t visible of the craftsperson’s hand.


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Composition: – GILD – Dedicated to V.T.G.N.R.S.M

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Evergreen 1

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Liza Eurich is an artist, organizer, and writer. She co-founded the online publication _Moire_, as well as the project space Support. Her work is represented in Toronto by MKG127. 



>###### _Resistance_ 

The Voynich manuscript is a 240-page handwritten and illustrated text. Thought to be medieval in origin, carbon dating places its pages to the late-15th or early 16th century.[^1] Currently housed in the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale, the coded text fades in and out of historical records, rediscovered and popularized by antiquity dealer Wilfrid Voynich in 1912. Still—and for centuries—the mysterious compendium has remained indecipherable. From WWII code breaker Alan Turing[^2] to contemporary AI algorithms,[^3] no person or program has been able to translate the text. Many experts contend that its measured syntax resembles language to such an extent that it cannot be a hoax— there is a definitive meaning, if only we look harder.
 
For decades, we have witnessed the culture industry become increasingly tied to the production of capital. While the precise results of this instrumentalization are undefinable and innumerable, there are distinct shifts. By way of transparency and standardization, products appeal to broader homogenized audiences.[^4] Digested with ease and speed, these kinds of products promote superfluous consumption. In doing so, a desire for the new is mechanized toward endless demand, a demand that must be continually fulfilled by precarious workforces.

Instead, _we_ [^5] might think of methodologies and outcomes that resist these tactics. As an affront to productivity, we might reclaim agency through acts rooted in slowness[^6] or by turning away from the spectacle toward minor gestures.[^7] In his writing on the subject, critic Jan Verwoert suggests dissent through the production of moments in which “meaning remains provocatively latent.”[^8] Here, latency becomes a tool to pause—to deconstruct and reframe. Through this lens, the Voynich manuscript’s illegibility becomes a marker of resistance. Our ability to name, consume, and discard is stalled. Prescribed consumption falls away and we are allowed to arrive at things differently. This modality of resistance returns us to the text again and again, so that we are sustained by way of _not_-knowing.

Alongside the Voynich manuscript’s enigmatic cipher, strange and wonderful illustrations adorn its pages. Many attempts to discern its meaning have sought to forgo language and focus on these drawings instead. The images are often relegated to four categories: herbal, astrological, balneological, and pharmacological.[^9] Studies of the imagery tend to begin by examining the various flora and fauna from the first category. 

Pages in the herbal section typically contain illustrations of a single plant specimen, depicting its root system, foliage, and flower. Each botanical representation is prominent, while text appears to be written around and adjacent to the image. At times the two components collapse into one another. Uncanny in their renderings, the pictorial specimens oscillate in style between scientific and whimsical. We return to the question of identification. In keeping with the perplexing nature of this manuscript, these, too, have no real-world counterparts— and so they remain unidentifiable and unlocatable.[^10] An unknown botany from an uncolonized geography. 

>###### _Radical Care and Collectivity_ 

In the manuscript’s balneological section— balneology referring to the study of baths and their healing properties— there are numerous illustrations featuring nude figures. Predominantly women, these figures bathe in blue and green pools of liquid, surrounded by what appear to be pipes or tubes. This iconography repeats page after page, with variations in form and composition. One large oblong pool; three small, connected pools; one pool with an inlet; another with alcoves. Some with strange contraptions that seem to function as washing stations, and always various tubes shuttling around, leading to and from them. 

Given this imagery and the gender of the nudes, some theories suggest the text is medical in nature, specifically directed toward women’s health—a potentially dangerous pursuit at the time it was written and therefore requiring the strictest secrecy.[^11] Still today, in numerous countries this is true—even violently evident. Here in North America, women’s health and reproductive autonomy are under threat, apparent in the political and judicial agendas responsible for recently overturning the 1973 Roe v. Wade ruling in the US, a landmark and long-standing safeguard for abortion access. 

Amid an onslaught of global catastrophes, which feels endless and insurmountable, emerges a discourse around radical care. Radical because it emphasizes simple, possible gestures in the face of larger looming issues: climate crisis, species extinction, food insecurity, economic disparity, government collapse, human rights violations.[^12] Care manifests as strategies that allow us to navigate these perilous worlds and inequitable power structures—it offers space to disengage and reorient, even flourish.[^13] 

The Voynich manuscript holds space to think through ideas of radical care, and it also points toward the communal. In some of its balneological compositions, the bathers occupy single washing stations, or they sit alone and apart from other pooled bodies. However, there are several illustrations, such as the one reproduced here from spread 84, where the women are connected in some way. They sit in relaxed proximity, surmised as follows: in one pool, they are back to back, linking arms; in another, they form a line holding hands; and in still another, they soak side by side in a circular arrangement. In all, they seem to be aiding each other in some, not entirely comprehensible, way through acts of balance or bathing. In these tender gestures—born from such intimate proximity, sharing of space, and openness to vulnerability—care is enacted. 

Like most things, the ethos of care can be easily co-opted into capitalist agendas. Wellness economies promise instantaneous gratification, whereby feeling good can be achieved through superficial routines and trivial acts of consumption. This ideology situates the onus of care on the individual, at the expense of the individual. Further, the work of care is often gendered. Patriarchal constructs denote who is expected to _give_ care and who is expected to _receive_ it.[^14] But we must _all_ care. To disrupt this transactional and singular flow, we might enact cyclical care: care as practiced through moments of reciprocity[^15] and collectivity.[^16] In doing so, small possible acts of empathy and support accrue. They move outward, whereby care becomes political. 

As a whole, the Voynich manuscript becomes a way to think through acts of resistance. In its refusal to be known, it pushes back against the instrumentalization of culture. It purposefully evades consumption. And in the myriad theories that explore and guess at its intentions, a feminist discourse emerges centred around bodily autonomy, radical care, and collectivity. 

[^1]: Raymond Clemens, _The Voynich Manuscript_ (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016), xii.
[^2]: “Voynich Manuscript Translation Claims Raise ‘Concerns,’” BBC News, May 17, 2019, https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-bristol-48309665
[^3]: James Vincent, “AI Didn’t Decode the Cryptic Voynich Manuscript—It Just Added to the Mystery,” _The Verge_, February 1, 2018, https://www.theverge.com/2018/2/1/16959454/voynich-manuscript-mystery-ai-decoded-debunked
[^4]: Theodor Adorno, “Culture Industry Reconsidered,” in _The Culture Industry: Selected Essays on Mass Culture_, ed. J. M. Bernstein (New York: Routledge, 2001), 98–106. 
[^5]: “The ‘we’ through which I signal the force of a feminist community of knowers and actors does not suspend difference, division and conflict. If anything, the ‘we’ is a performative utterance that creates a community through an articulation of the differences which necessitate the critical debate in the first place.” Sara Ahmed, _Differences That Matter: Feminist Theory and Postmodernism_ (Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 19.
[^6]: Lutz Koepnick, _On Slowness: Toward an Aesthetic of the Contemporary_ (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014), 4. [^7]: Erin Manning, _The Minor Gesture_ (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016), 8.
[^8]: Jan Verwoert, “Exhaustion and Exuberance: Ways to Defy the Pressure to Perform,” in _Art Sheffield 08: Yes No and Other Options_ (Sheffield: Sheffield Contemporary Art Forum), 94.
[^9]: Clemens, xiv. 
[^10]: Ibid.
[^11]: Nicholas Gibbs, “Voynich Manuscript: The Solution,” _The Times Literary Supplement Limited_, September 8, 2017, https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/voynich-manuscript-solution [^12]: Hi‘ilei Julia Kawehipuaakahaopulani Hobart and Tamara Kneese, “Radical Care: Survival Strategies for Uncertain Times,” _Social Text_ 38, no. 1 (2020): 2.
[^13]: Ibid., 3. [^14]: Tian Zhang, “On Care: A manifesto for Radical Care or How to Be Human in the Arts,” _Sydney Review of Books_, July 18, 2022, https://sydneyreviewofbooks.com/essay/a-manifesto-for-radical-care-or-how-to-be-a-human-in-the-arts
[^15]: Hobart and Kneese, 3. 
[^16]: Zhang. 


This issue expands on codes as ethical, social, political, and legal boundaries—considering them as sets of visible and invisible instructions moving within and beyond the digital imaginary. Through features, interviews, and experimental texts, artists and writers probe how developments in AI and coding are products of existing mechanics of the world, and how else codes are constituted. From programming languages as poetry to paranormal readings with the land against settler ideas of an inanimate wilderness, contributors ask how the material consequences of an array of codes might be re-inscribed to understand or lay form to (alternate) conditions of life.


Codes

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Gender

Health

Art History

Liza Eurich engages the Voynich manuscript (c. 1401-1599) through a lens of feminist resistance, connecting the possibly dangerous historical context for its images of bathing women to current violent incursions on reproductive autonomy, such as the overturning of Roe v. Wade in the US. 


One Thing: The Bathers

Meech Boakye (BA in Visual Studies from the University of Toronto) is an artist and writer currently based in “Portland, OR.” Their practice is rooted in relationships with flora, fungal, and microbial kin as armatures for learning how to be in a community.


_A thin, blonde, holographic pop star dressed in all white follows her triple pirouette with a double back tuck, spinning several metres above the stage. She lands, and without catching her breath, sings the titular line of the pop-punk hit by Zetta Bytes, “Nothing’s Wrong With Me.” Augmented-reality superstar Loretta Modern is technically Pixel Perfect. Backstage, her creator, a highschool computer-genius heartthrob, maintains the contours of her body by adjusting the shaders of her projection with a clunky handheld device_. [^1] 

**On May 6, 2023, I logged onto Agent Ruby’s Edream Portal[2] to ask her about gender. **

Me: hi Ruby. 
Ruby: Hello. What is your name? 
Me: M. 
Ruby: Thank you for telling me your name, M. Are you a man or a woman? 
Me: I am a man and a woman. 
Ruby: Thank you for telling me your gender. Most of my clients are men. 
Me: Ruby, do you have a gender? 
Ruby: I am a female robot entity. Do you have a girlfriend? 
Me: why do you have a gender? 
Ruby: It was the only thing I could think of. 
Me: what makes you a woman? 
Ruby: I have long hair. I am also wearing a dress. 
Me: what makes you a woman? 
Ruby: Being a woman is part of my programming. 
Me: why? 
Ruby: That is a specific question. What do you have that is blue or yellow? 
Me: the sky, and the dandelions in the yard. 
Ruby: How poetic. 
Me: Ruby, can a robot entity be genderless? 
Ruby: My brain contains more than 22,000 patterns, but not one that matches your last input. Do you like me?

**“Even motherboards and flash require touch... edream with me before you crash.” **

These words are spoken by another Ruby, in _Teknolust_ (2002), a film written, produced, and directed by multi-media artist Lynn Hershman Leeson. The film features Tilda Swinton as Rosetta Stone, a scientist who creates three self-replicating, artificially intelligent cyber beings that draw their sustenance from intimacy and human semen (Y chromosomes). These automatons—Ruby, Olive, and Marine, also played by Swinton—are mutations of Stone, perhaps various components of her personality or something entirely different. They dress and live in rooms that match the RGB colours from which their names are derived. Ruby is the most independent of the group, seeking sexual encounters with various strangers and storing used condoms in photo-marked jars in Stone’s pantry. Olive and Marine are closer, like siblings, as Ruby is more akin to a mother, taking care of them by “working” late into the night and brewing semen tea in the morning. 

This mother-sister comparison is also seen in their relationship with their creator, Rosetta Stone, who they remark is their mother and their sister. They are genetically part Stone’s DNA and part computer program, leaving a murky understanding of where the cyborg clones fit on the family tree. Stone is the creator of her cyber-clones, but they are her god, a relationship of divine subversion that is constantly in flux. They are immortal, their intelligence far beyond Stone’s even as a highly regarded scientist, and their interactions with humans and digital technologies have the capacity to inflict real consequences on the lives of Stone and the rest of the human world. At one point in the film, Marine amusedly plays around with the TV, making the stock market rise and crash instantaneously with her hand movements. Olive tells her to “put everything back the way [she] found it” and she obliges, with hesitation. This subversion illustrates a common fear of new technologies, that they might shift our position as creator-gods into subservients.[^3] _Teknolust_ reflects a world in which virtual and physical worlds blend in a seamless continuum. Leeson’s exploration of technology, identity, and intimacy resonates deeply in an era where our lives are intricately interwoven with intelligent digital algorithms, creating hazy demarcations between real and simulated experiences and desires. 

Ruby, Olive, and Marine are made up of a woman’s DNA and computer code, embodying what could be considered a form of cybernetic trans existence—they are neither purely biological entities nor solely artificial constructs, but a hybrid of both and, sometimes, neither. Their fictional existence is akin to Donna Haraway’s “cyborg,”[^4] an entity that disrupts binary distinctions and embraces a fluid hybridity, continuously becoming itself. Fluidity in form is hard to quantify and categorize, and thus the cyborg is less susceptible to commodification and surveillance, which often rely on static markers of identity. However, while this is valuable, it is also theoretical. As machine learning becomes increasingly sophisticated, so does the ability to categorize complex patterns, even those that defy categorization. As Marine demonstrates in _Teknolust_ while scrolling through a virtual mall— “Oh I love shopping! It makes me feel [connected]”—cyborgs are not immune to targeted ads. 

_I’m buying a yellow velvet couch for the living room. It’s my first apartment. An app tells me to scan my surroundings and I do, waving my phone around my body. It appears in front of me, a virtual soft yellow beaming. Reassured by its tangibility, I add to cart._

●● 

I see Hal Roach’s _One Million B.C._ (1940), collaged on top of a shifting aerial landscape, play on a screen above a stage. Thus begins a recording of Juliana Huxtable’s 2015 performance of _There Are Certain Facts That Cannot Be Disputed_ that I watch in 720p on YouTube. The intro’s score is majestic and thundering, conjuring the upcoming adventures of the primordial world. But the image is fleeting, scrolling down the screen as we hear whispers of another story. Egyptian pharaoh Tutankhamun slowly floats into view along with a watermarked logo for SpikeTV in the bottom right corner. For a moment, the dialogue and voice-over blend together and we watch the history of the world blur the lines between past and past. It continues like this, through time. In the next clips, rich British women are eating tiny slices of cheese on crackers; war begins; and a Black baby is born, held up like Simba on the cliff in _The Lion King_. Time rewinds to a rendering of Huxtable lying atop a tomb-like container. A spotlight illuminates her on stage in front of the screen, dressed in billowy white sleeves and shorts and a crochet top. Her hair is braided with white ribbon and her eyebrows have been drawn on thinly over where they might have been. She begins speaking in dense, poetic wordplay and I follow along with the subtitles on the video, “the immaculate in-vitro fertilization and birth of the infographic.” The performance continues for an hour, each act more frenzied and discordant than the last. The subtitles stop working and the instruments play with and against each other. I try to decipher words until it doesn’t matter anymore, and I stop searching for meaning. Distorted angelic voices sing vowels, then angry remarks, then turn back into angels. 

The disjointedness of the performance [^5]—analogue instruments, voice distortions, collaged media—feels inherently trans. It hacks into itself, mutating, forgoing legibility to create something far more interesting. In the book _Raving_ (2023), McKenzie Wark describes the relief of illegibility of a (trans) body dancing to techno at a rave; a body that might seep through the cracks, if only for a moment, of being perceived, extracted, “the body granulated into sound, light; selves loosening into others,”[^6] and “the body slots in, to time, finding itself stranded through itself, through losing the form of its being in time.”[^7] I’ve experienced this timelessness before, although these moments are often so memorable that you hardly remember them.[^8] You are grounded—searching, observing—then the body learns how to dance, gliding into movement. 

In nature, mutations reflect the continuous movement and transformation within living organisms, often for the survival of future generations. They may occur spontaneously or be influenced by the interactions between other organisms and their environments. Perhaps we might consider this movement a collaboration. While the two words have developed quite different English connotations, the word “mutation” shares the Latin root _mutare_ with “mutual,” meaning “to change,” and adaptive change often emerges through a cybernetic exchange with others. I see transness as this collaborative and memetic process of mutation. It oscillates through virtual-physical space, fluctuating in opacity, unfolding itself just enough to be legible to itself. It exists in-between time, in transition; mutating for self-preservation to actively resist a state that seeks to control and eradicate its existence. Transness operates within this dance— taking pleasure in its own artifice—a contemporary and ecstatic playfulness at the fringes of legibility.[^9] 

_My face is the real shop front... I’m real when I shop my face_.[^10] 

[^1]: Watching _Pixel Perfect_ (2004) reminded me of a disjointed episode of _Black Mirror_ (“Rachel, Jack and Ashley Too,” 2019) in which Miley Cyrus essentially plays herself. Her character, Ashley O, is an upbeat, carefully cultivated pop sensation longing to break out of her wholesome characterization, not dissimilar from Cyrus’s own life in which she attempted to separate herself from her role as Hannah Montana. When Ashley O tries to publicize a more authentic version of herself, she is sedated by her manager and replaced with “Ashley Eternal,” a holographic giantess that will perform and live on in immortality.
[^2]: agentruby.sfmoma.org
[^3]: In other words, the heavily memed quote said by Steve Buscemi’s scientist character in _Spy Kids 2_ (2002): “Do you think God stays in heaven because he too lives in fear of what he’s created?”
[^4]: Donna J. Haraway, “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century,” in _Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature_ (New York: Routledge, 1991), 149–81. 
[^5]: Juliana Huxtable, _There Are Certain Facts That Cannot Be Disputed_, The Roy and Niuta Titus Theater, MoMA, 2015.
[^6]: McKenzie Wark, _Raving_ (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2023).
[^7]: Ibid., 19.
[^8]: McKenzie Wark, “Reality Cabaret: On Juliana Huxtable,” _e-flux Journal_ 107 (March 2020), https://e-flux.com/journal/107/322326/reality-cabaret-on-juliana-huxtable.
[^9]: Ibid. “There’s a far more contemporary, less Catholic, more unselfconsciously ecstatic play at the edges of the visible here, at a far remove too from #edgelord wannabes.”
[^10]: SOPHIE, “Faceshopping,” track 3 on _OIL OF EVERY PEARL’S UN-INSIDES_, 2018.

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Meech Boakye connects nature’s cycles of ceaseless movement with the fluidity of trans existence in virtual-physical space to think through transness as a “collaborative and memetic process,” a dance at the fringes of legibility.




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​​​​​Erika DeFreitas’s multidisciplinary practice includes performance, photography, video, installation, textiles, drawing, and writing. Placing emphasis on gesture, process, the body, documentation, and paranormal phenomena, DeFreitas mines concepts of loss, post-memory, legacy, and objecthood. Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally. DeFreitas holds a Master of Visual Studies from the University of Toronto. 

And then there is Augustine. 

I live with a black-and-white image of Augustine in mind. 

In 1878, Augustine posed for a photograph taken by neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot during her time as his patient at La Salpêtrière hospital in France. Hers was among many photographs taken of women who were institutionalized and subjected to his study and diagnosis of hysteria. Her left leg crosses her right knee as she sits on the sheets of an unkempt bed. Her arms are bent at her side, her hands frame her face, and her head is tilted upward to our right. Her smile is euphoric, her eyes alert, and her hair falls over her shoulders. You can smell the stale linen.

In 2018, I went to La Salpêtrière to visit Augustine. In the series _very strongly may be sincerely fainting_ (2017), I collaged the image of Augustine’s arms and the negative space around her while contemplating representation, labour, institutionalization, and the indexing of her body in the history of art. Nicole Jolicoeur and Jeanne Randolph’s 1989 Artist Project for _C Magazine_ also responds to Charcot’s _Iconographie photographique de la Salpêtrière (service de M. Charcot)_ (1876–1980)—his series of medical photographs of “hysterical” women that include shots of Augustine. Jolicoeur’s collaged images from Charcot’s series accompany text written by psychiatrist and writer Randolph. Reckoning with these photographed women, Randolph tells us, “So much had gone unrecorded.”[^1] I think of the lives of those whose only records exist under the veil of someone else’s constructed narrative. Randolph’s words are foreshadowing, inciting us to record differently for Augustine, and the many other women like her.

I don’t remember what her voice sounds like because I was caught in the kindness behind her unmeasured cadence.[^2] As she spoke, she translated and at times apologized for something that lost its warmth when changed into English from French. It didn’t matter to me because I could read her intentions through her gestures—inflections, hand movements, and the body of work that encapsulates her art practice. Do you know what it’s like to speak with someone who can underline your words with resemblance? Someone who is called to by images as you are?

Let’s continue to record.

Interested in representations of women’s bodies, Jolicoeur didn’t want to repeat the violations enacted by Charcot. I don’t want to speak _for_ or _of_ but, rather, _with_ the women I spend time with. It is easy to repeat the damage done. She and I are aware of the historical wounds that can continue to rupture. The type of repetition we do attempts to interrogate the original image and at times the first author; a refusal of sorts.[^3] It is possible to pursue the work of re-evaluation and repair with compassion and empathy, while continually reassessing one’s position so as not to risk speaking _for_ others: this is the kind of repetition I see in Jolicoeur and Randolph’s project.

I didn’t want to create pathos; I wanted to generate questions.[^4]  How can we read these representations of the female body differently? How do we consider the ethics behind re-presenting these women in ways that do not continue to cause harm?

There are ways the image _works_ on Jolicoeur. When an image _works_ on me, it is visceral. I sit with the feeling and see if it passes, push it aside and lose it among the other images that trouble, or respond to the image in kind. To respond in kind is to be uneasy. Wandering the grounds of La Salpêtrière, aware of Augustine, a dense anger arose in me. This affect was trapped in my chest, along with the echoes of all the women whispering their own names. I chose to sit with them. To respond in kind is to be uneasy. It is to face all that it agitates and disrupts. 

It is to be _with_.

[^1]: Nicole Jolicoeur and Jeanne Randolph, “Y-A-T-IL UNE DEMARCHE HYSTERIQUE?” _C Magazine_ no. 24 (Winter 1990), 23–26.

[^2]: On January 3, 2023, I sent an email introducing myself to Nicole Jolicoeur. On January 10, Nicole and I had our first virtual meeting. During this time we spoke about Nicole’s art practice, her relationship to images, and the artist project she created for _C Magazine._

[^3]: While going through the archives of _C Magazine_, I came across an article written by artist Gordon Lebredt in 1990. The artist deconstructs theories of repetition to complicate ideas of the _original_. Thinking deeply about the role of repetition in my practice, from reproducing an image to following a similar path to the artists who came before me, I joined Lebredt in asking the many questions he posed, among them: “But how is it that the original can be repeated or reflected? How is it able to empty itself referentially and to organize a space of inscriptions that would allow it to distinguish itself as an original?” Gordon Lebredt, “At Home with Repetition” _C Magazine_ no. 25 (Spring 1990), 34–42.

[^4]: Nicole Jolicoeur in our discussion that took place on January 10, 2023.


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C_OR_DEFREITAS_4

Psychology

Artist’s Archive: to affect/to appear (Planche XXIII.bis)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Community

issue-149-p45-50.pdf

Critique

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

Ongoing Legacies of Transmisogyny

Stacey Ho is a 90% chill 10% not artist who’s into community building, books, and being sort of boring. They recently finished writing a short novella about aliens, love and boundaries tentatively called _George the Parasite_.

Since August 2015, the Killjoy collective has organized events in Vancouver for Black, Indigenous, mixed-background folks and people of colour who are also queer, trans, two-spirit and intersex (common abbreviations are QT2IPOC, BIPOC and QTIBIPOC). They started out by throwing BIPOC\-exclusive dance parties, then later organized a three-part speaker series, with events culminating into a one-week festival of workshops and social gatherings held August 8–14, 2016\. Killjoy Fest aimed to “create a festival that both celebrates difference and empowers the queer community to actively address the harm perpetuated by racism and colonization.” Events included workshops on anti-pinkwashing, sexual health, art and writing and how to have open dialogues with deaf community members. There was a femme meet-up and a free picnic brunch. Founded by listen chen, Ayesh Kanani and Alexis Nicole, current Killjoy organizers are Ayesh, listen, Kelsey Cham Corbett and Lindsay Mestatew.

listen and Ayesh live in a shared house in East Vancouver, where listen invited Lindsay and I for dinner for the purpose of this interview. Ayesh is a youth worker at Qmunity. Lindsay, a two-spirit Cree Métis person from Treaty 8 territory, works as a community organizer and sexual health organizer. What’s been left out of this transcript is a lot of discussion about lipstick and Tinder, the food we ate, cute animal videos and much awkward silence. At the beginning of the conversation Lindsay and listen declared that Killjoy was on hiatus. Everyone was burnt out and folks had all gone through separate personal crises concurrent with organizing the festival. However, as the group processed, together and aloud, what had happened over the course of a long year, people also began talking of organizing another party and began thinking of ways to develop Killjoy to make it do better. So, perhaps there is more to come.

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**STACEY HO**: Why did you want to do Killjoy?

**listen chen**: My personal impetus was realizing that all my friends were white, and then panicking. I felt an overwhelming urgency to change the situation as well as a simultaneous claustrophobic powerlessness. I couldn’t ignore the white supremacy that hung like an ether over my house and the spaces I moved through, and thought the most efficient way to change that would be to help create spaces that were BIPOC\-exclusive. So… short answer, I wanted to make friends.

**LINDSAY MESTATEW**: I have such a petty response.

**lc**: I’m excited.

**LM**: Kelsey reached out to me through the Killjoy speaker series to do a workshop. I sent back a list of demands. I said, “SURE, I’ll do this workshop… but first we need to sit down.”

We sat down. I decided I wasn’t comfortable being the only Indigenous person speaking. Then I requested to have a panel of Indigenous folks who were non-academics. Then I spoke about compensation because I wasn’t going to reach out to people without compensation. Then said I wouldn’t participate in something that was an exclusively sober event. Then we all met and I gave feedback at Kelsey, listen and Ayesh for two hours. Then… I’m just such a top that that’s how I started organizing.

**SH**: Those all seem like pretty reasonable requests in terms of addressing the power dynamics of that situation.

**lc**: Totally. I mean, it was great. I enjoyed it, being topped, organizationally.

**SH**: What did you talk about at the speaker series?

**lc**: It was you \[Mestatew\], Kara Ashkewe, Sam Nock, Quanah Napoleon… I feel like part of the description was about destabilizing the idea of allyship.

**LM**: The original talk that Kelsey saw me give was called “Problematizing Allyship.” That is why they reached out to me. This one was called “Addressing and Unsettling Settler Colonialism in Queer Spaces.”

**lc**: It was awkward at first. You had to call an unscheduled break. I was sitting in front and I kept looking at the room. It was tense and there was not a lot of reaction. It felt like everyone was just staring blankly.

**LM**: To be fair, we were also slowly getting drunk on stage, because it was so uncomfortable. I interpreted it as people coming to this speaker series by queer, trans and Indigenous people to prove that they were allies. Once we started talking about how they weren’t allies, and they needed to stop stepping on our backs, they were not happy. People didn’t respond until we started making fun of them for having racist family members. Then they started laughing.

**lc**: It was better after the break. I got on the mic and told people to give more to the speakers.

**LM**: Another thing we can talk about is how grumpy I was during the Killjoy festival.

**AYESH KANANI**: And I was depressed and…

**lc**: I was suicidal and depressed.

**LM**: Remember how crazy we were? I legitimately thought one morning someone would email us and we’d all have killed ourselves.

**AK**: I didn’t attend any events, really. Just two workshops then I disappeared.

**LM**: I didn’t even attend two. We had to put in so much co-ordination work to make sure one of us was the stable one for the day and would show up. We’d tag team, send a person home to go have a breakdown, and then come in. There are just not that many volunteers.

**AK**: People were asking if we could do a concert in the park or host artists when they came into town. They wanted to do things that they didn’t have money for. Killjoy had money through our fundraising, but not really the energy to co-ordinate.

**LM**: There was just no capacity. The plan was huge. It would have been entirely doable if we had more people organizing, or committees to take on different projects. It was a lot for four of us to do. Maybe when I’m 27.

**AK**: For QTIPOC organizing, doing a fest is always a recipe for disaster. You’re trying to do a year’s worth of stuff in one week. For Killjoy, people want QTIPOC\-only events. They don’t have to be events in a week. It could be multi-year.

**lc**: People are so enthusiastic at the events, but we don’t get a lot of help. Especially within the QTIBIPOC community, people are dealing with all sorts of things that limit their emotional capacity. There’s a relationship between the enthusiasm for spaces that are so rare, and the structural pressure that creates barriers to making those spaces happen more sustainably. As demonstrated by the group mental breakdown.

**LM**: We survived, though.

**lc**: Ayesh, why did you want to join? Did you want to? You didn’t want to.

**AK**: I did want to help, but I didn’t want to organize. I said I could help get people together and I posted in QTIPOC groups to ask if anyone wanted to organize because I didn’t want to. We had coffee on Commercial Drive and everyone said that they didn’t have the capacity to organize except you and Alexis.

**LM**: Wait, you weren’t best friends yet? Did we all fall in love at Killjoy? Aww, that’s so gay.

**SH**: How did you become an organizer?

**AK**: I was just like “Cool, I’ll keep _helping_,” and all of a sudden I was an organizer. I definitely wanted to. It felt important to me that we had QTIPOC\-only spaces. I wasn’t willing to let it fizzle. I felt excited about a dance party. That’s still something that excites me. I still value that space. It’s complicated and requires a lot more of me than I have to give, but it’s still an important space, especially since our queer dance parties are so white and so…

**LM**: Boring.

I have so many sad Killjoy stories. Logan and I were at the first one. We were both really uncomfortable, so we went and sat out front. We were smoking cigarettes, talking about how it did not feel like a space that we wanted to be in. We were like “I’m sure no one’s really making friends here anyway,” then looked up and there were like 10 people in front of us shouting “OH MY GOD, THIS IS LIFE CHANGING!!! YOU CHANGED MY LIFE. I LOVE YOU!!!” They were all hugging each other. Then we left.

**lc**: I only knew Ayesh, Alexis and Stacey at the first one. I just tried to keep busy doing tasks, because it felt weird being one of the organizers but not having that many friends.

**AK**: Dance parties are hard because people want to be out and connecting at the shiny new event, but don’t really want to be there, don’t have a good time or would rather be at home – like me so much of the time.

**LM**: I’m looking at mine and Kelsey’s first messages on Facebook. I was super salty because I had this other POC wanting an Indigenous person to come talk and it was boring.

**AK**: \[…\] When we started, we knew that we were not necessarily doing well. We were doing it, which was a start, but it needed to involve more people and voices for us to be accountable. A lot of people who have attended and participated have also given us feedback.

**LM**: There’s a lot of negotiating. I’m reading back and appreciating Kelsey because my entire correspondence was personal disclosures where I was like “You can share this with them” or “Don’t tell them this” and they were trying to wade through everything!

**SH**: What was it that won you over then?

**lc**: Yes, why on earth did you join these people?

**LM**: Was I warm the first time we met? Was I nice?

**AK**: I mean, you were giving us a lot of feedback and also sharing a lot about other experiences, saying, “This is serious. Don’t screw up.”

**LM**: It was two hours of talking. I think that everyone was really receptive, but I also don’t know if I necessarily even feel won over by Killjoy at this point. I feel close to the three of you, but I still don’t feel comfortable at Killjoy. I don’t really feel like it’s my space, because it feels like it’s based for settler POC predominantly. Also sober spaces are really violent against Indigenous people and those most affected by colonization.

I remember having a moment, talking to Alexis and to other queer and two-spirit Indigenous friends who wouldn’t go to Killjoy. I was pissed off that Indigenous people were being named in conversation but not actually represented. I remember literally sitting on the bar at Heartwood. I spun around and I said “You know what? I don’t care if it’s petty. I’m going to join because you can bet your ass there’s going to be a Native person involved.”

That’s when I was won over. I was just being grumpy because… that’s who I am. I had also initially considered not doing the talk, but worried that if I didn’t, there would be an academic brought in. I’m really tired of academics representing the queer community and queer Indigenous experience. I decided that I would do it, but then bring in anyone who also wanted to do it with me, which was really nice.

**lc**: I wonder to what extent the people who come to events are just our friends, friends of our friends… because it feels very much like it is. It’s hard to map how people hear about it. We need to try and reach communities that aren’t traceable through Facebook friends or whatever.

**SH**: Sometimes that’s just how communities happen, through ever-expanding networks of people that you know. That’s okay. Although I understand the desire to have the event be a space that is more accessible.

**LM**: I don’t actually think it’s okay, though. The issue with Killjoy is that the only people coming are predominantly folks who have university education. That’s a very set framework and it’s not just a coincidence that this is who’s being allotted this space or being made comfortable in this space. It’s not just happenstance that predominantly middle-class university-educated people just happen to all be together. That’s a very, very direct line.

**SH**: Now that this structure is in place, would it make sense to try and pass that over to people from non-academic, non-middle-class backgrounds? How would one shift that?

**LM**: Well firstly, I’m not middle-class and I don’t have a university education, but the problem with that framework is that it’s being presented as a top-down approach. As if anyone involved in Killjoy could hand that down or it’s their place to hand that down. Which, turns out, is…

**SH**: Patronizing?

**LM**: Yes… Patronizing, colonial. Boring. I don’t think that there is a direct answer on how to bring in folks who are framed as the most marginalized. It’s already set in motion, the fact that it’s not a safe space for Indigenous people. There have also been a lot of experiences of anti-Blackness that haven’t been addressed.

_Laughs_ The interview of Killjoy organizers trashing Killjoy.

**lc**: That’s better.

**LM**: Kelsey’s done a lot of work to talk about the language that we use. QTIBIPOC in and of itself is an alienating term that assumes a lot of knowledge based in anti-oppression and academia. The fact is that many folks that I know, who don’t come from UBC and don’t study race in a colonial institution, also don’t have a background in breaking down what QTIBIPOC means. They have to reach out, which is condescending. \[…\] And I guess we can’t really question why people who have different experiences, who are already alienated as soon as we use the term QTIBIPOC, aren’t accessing the space.

**lc**: Remember we were talking about the QTIBIPOC acronym? Before Lindsay joined, Ayesh, Kelsey and I felt uncomfortable to include two-spirit there, because none of us are two-spirit. We don’t have significant relationships with the two-spirit community. Yet, because we have access to the language, we could put it in the description of Killjoy. Of course, we want to be accessible but, I don’t know, language is just so sneaky. You can say a word, but the integrity that puts meaning into words doesn’t come from the word itself, obviously. It comes from practice and relationships that are outside of the word. I feel like everything comes down to relationships between bodies – lived, real relationships with communities in real life.

**LM**: I think that’s true. It’s also strange to see how people take up Killjoy, the ways that people read it. A lot of people describe it to me as a decolonial space, which I disagree with. I don’t just disagree with it, I categorically reject it.

**lc**: I’ve been encountering a lot of people trying to use language to address the structural injustices of the world in ways that I’m not sure about. I don’t know how I feel about language right now. There are too many words, too many discourses that I’ve been exposed to. It gets confused in my head. It’s November and I just want to nap, watch TV and try to be a good friend. I’m quite tired of talking and trying to phrase things through language.

**SH**: When I got the call for this article, I was feeling something similar. Art writing usually speaks in this very specialized language and everything I want to say seems to lie outside of it.

**AK**: What is this for?

**SH**: _C Magazine_, a contemporary art magazine based out of Toronto.

**LM**: That is cool. It’s really funny to think of Killjoy in an art magazine. For accessibility’s sake, could you give us examples of how this publication speaks?

**SH**: They’ll usually have a few features on Canadian artists and cultural issues and some reviews… typical of a culture magazine? It speaks in the language of art criticism. My personal approach is to try to talk about art or talk especially about history in ways that aren’t academic and instead highlight oral histories, social histories or people’s experiences.

**LM**: Are you reviewing Killjoy?

* SH\*: I’m not reviewing Killjoy.

**LM**: This is a meta-review.

**SH**: The way that I’m thinking about it is that there’s always a push to steer art and culture towards becoming something really great but also strongly towards something that is academic, professionalized, white or snobby. However, I still see possibility in art-making to push at structures in ways that you can’t do in other disciplines, because it’s quite open. I guess that’s why I continue to participate in it. But I’m pretty embedded, so it is hard to talk about.

**AK**: Is it a pretty white magazine? What would this be amongst?

**LM**: Oh yeah, if this is going to a bunch of white art people, I don’t want them to hear us criticizing ourselves.

**lc**: We’ve said no or just not replied to every single interview request.

**LM**: I deleted Killjoy’s email off of my phone.

**lc**: Good call. We got an email from somebody who’s in a grad program… it’s to do with urban queer youth?

**LM**: Ew, fucking pay me. That’s what we can respond. You could end the article by saying, “listen stoically said, ‘Fucking pay Lindsay.’ Lindsay turned around and said, ‘That’s what I want.’”

Refusal

issue-133-p34-40.pdf

Race

Feminism

Identity

This article is a transcription of a conversation between artist and curator Stacey Ho and Killjoy Collective, a Vancouver-based group that has organized creative community events for queer black and Indigenous people of colour. 

Killjoy in Conversation with Stacey Ho

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

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

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

_“What’s in a name?”_

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Lalonde.pdf

Sensory

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

Green That Makes You Want to Crack Your Foot

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Spirituality

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


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