Photography

Memory

Sculpture

Drawing

Letter

Editorial

Feature

Interview

Artist Project

Column

Review

Writer

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

Tidal

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Food

Race

Colonialism

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

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One Thing: A Gastropoetics of Sugar Cane

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

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Language

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

Composition: on the edges of a mother tongue

Jasmine Sihra is a researcher and emerging curator born and raised in Tkaronto/Toronto. Currently, Jasmine is a PhD candidate in the Department of Art History at Concordia University. Her curatorial, academic, and written work revolves around themes of sustainability, pollution, community-oriented initiatives, and artistic practices.

When my friend and artist Natalie Ashley showed me _resting my moccasins_ (2024), her latest project featuring a pair of beaded moccasins filled with bearded lichen, I wondered what it would be like to slip my feet into them. I wondered about the feel of the furry lichen between my toes. The unwieldy and beautiful chaos of the lichen is paired with Natalie’s delicate and meticulous bead-work. The lichen is soft and fragile, easily squashed between fingers, while each bead is hard, shiny, and strong enough to withstand a needle and thread pinning it down to the surface. Bead-work and lichen come together as the artist reflects on her Cree lineage, and the various life forms surrounding her. Now, it’s hard to imagine what the moccasins would be like without the bearded lichen. The moccasins make me want to stop. Slow down. Feel the lichen.

For Natalie, bearded lichen, or old man’s beard, is medicine for pain, struggle, and transition. Years ago, a Nuu-chah-nulth elder told Natalie that most people walk around lichen so as not to disrupt it. Similarly, if you keep some lichen in your pocket, it can help you seek space from others. Natalie returned to this lesson when working on a large exhibition at an institution. During the exhibition, she struggled to balance the needs of the artists, her personal values of care, and collaboration with institutional standards and pressures. Overwhelmed, she paused. She took a bath, a space she calls her place of meditation, and asked Creator for a solution. Later, she went for a walk with her husband through a forest after a storm, and she was surprised to see an abundance of bearded lichen on the forest floor. Creator seemed to have answered Natalie’s question. She picked up some lichen and put it in her pocket
and offered a piece of herself in the form of a freshly plucked eyebrow hair back to the Earth. Natalie brought the lichen to her co-workers, who also put the old man’s beard in their pockets, and the opening of the exhibition ran smoothly.

For Natalie, lichen offered a way to think through and navigate a contradiction she felt in an institutional setting. Lichen itself is a bit of a contradiction—not quite algae and not quite fungi, but a symbiosis of both. Algae are aquatic and photosynthetic creatures. They account for about 50 percent of the photosynthesis that occurs on the planet, [^1] producing the oxygen we need to breathe. Fungi are a diverse group of organisms, and they can be found in wet and dry areas. Fungi break down and decompose other organisms, contributing to soil biodiversity. [^2] The combination of fungi and algae creates lichen, allowing it to thrive in conditions where fungi and algae wouldn’t normally survive on their own. In fact, there is still debate around how algae and fungi come together in lichen, but regardless, the symbiosis allows for both organisms to exist. [^3]

Symbiosis shows up in Natalie’s beadwork, too. Her moccasin patterns weave together the old and new. She was inspired by her Kokum Avalina’s beaded floral design on a buckskin suit coat owned by her father, Michael Ashley. Natalie’s father was living in Blackfoot Territory in the ’70s and ’80s, when many Indigenous men wore buckskin suit coats with beaded patterns, as a visual form of resistance against threats on Indigenous sovereignties like the 1969 White Paper. [^4] Introduced by the federal government led by Pierre Trudeau, the policy paper essentially sought to abolish the Indian Act and previously signed treaties. The White Paper would remove Indian status and Indigenous rights to land, by phasing out treaties. The formation of the policy occurred under the guise of achieving social equality by recognizing Indigenous peoples as “citizens,” rather than as having a distinct legal status. After large-scale public protest (such as the Red Power movement), the Canadian government withdrew the White Paper in 1970. Indigenous activism around sovereignty and treaty rights would continue into the coming decades. [^5] In response to this history, Michael asked his mother, Avalina, to make him a beaded pattern based on the wild rose, which is native to Treaty 8 territory. Avalina beaded the rose, and Natalie’s mother, Pearl Graham (a white settler), sewed the coat.

_resting my moccasins_ honours the contrasting legacies of beading and textile work from Natalie’s Cree and settler ancestries. Natalie beaded moccasins with the wild rose pattern, though hers were quite different from her kokum’s. Her background in painting and drawing influenced her interpretation of the pattern, and her engagement with the tactility of beads and threads. She also struggled to replicate her grandmother’s bead-work, and her process involved stopping, restarting, and slowing down over the course of six months. The result was a beautiful symbiosis—of beads and lichen, of old and new stories.

If you glance too quickly, you might miss the lichen peeking out. But the work insists on slowness and curiosity. What Natalie’s moccasins teach me is that slowing down is part of how we confront conflict, and we need to reflect carefully to understand how opposing ideas can coexist, much like the symbiosis between algae and fungi. For Natalie and me, lichen is a reminder that we—like all forms of life—have to learn to live on this planet together.

[^1]: Deqiang Duanmu, Lu-Ning Liu, Wiemin Ma, Qiang Wang, and Bao-Sheng Qiu, “Editorial: Algal photosynthesis,” _Frontiers in Microbiology_ 13 (January 3, 2023), https://doi.org/10.3389/ fmicb.2022.1112301

[^2]: “Benefits of Fungi for the Environment and Humans,” The United Nations Decade on Ecosystem Restoration 2021-2030, https://www.decadeonrestoration.org/stories/benefits-fungi-environment-and-humans#:~:text=Some%20fungi%20are%20decomposers%20which,for%20plant%20development%20and%20productivity

[^3]: “What is a lichen?” The British Lichen Society, https://britishlichensociety.org.uk/learning/what-is-a-lichen#:~:text=The%20fungi%20build%20the%20structure,lichen%2Dfungi%20and%20their%20photobionts

[^4]: Canada. Indian Affairs and Northern Development. _Statement of the Government of Canada on Indian Policy, 1969. Ottawa, 1969_. https://publications.gc.ca/site/eng/9.700112/publication.html

[^5]: _The Canadian Encyclopedia_, s.v. “The White Paper, 1969,” September 24, 2015, https://thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/the-white-paper-1969

Natalie Ashley is an interdisciplinary artist born in Calgary, Blackfoot Territory, and a member of the Driftpile Cree Nation (Treaty 8) through her father. She is currently based in Lkwungen lands. Her art is shaped by family lineage—her mother’s textiles, Kokum Avalina’s bead-work, and her uncle’s carving—seen as a generational language.

Artist

This issue of C Magazine considers what it might mean to stop. Rather than denote absence, the stop offers an opening for something else to emerge. Across these pages, contributors explore stopping in: forms of rest, blockades, town halls, and critiques of the temporality and archives of empire. From blockades on Wet’suwet’en land to an underground hub in Jakarta, from moccasins cradling lichen to Lebanon’s El-Mina port, each work gathers its own form of interruption. 

With contributors: Whess Harman, Hung Duong and Grace Samboh, Svetlana Romanova, Fan Wu, Meagan Christou, Mitra Fakhrashrafi, Emma Steen, Charlene K. Lau, Dot Tuer, Joyce Joumaa, Ali El-Darsa, Kay Rangel, Jasmine Sihra.

This issue considers what it might mean to stop. Rather than denote absence, the stop offers an opening for something else to emerge. Across these pages, contributors explore stopping in: forms of rest, blockades, town halls, and critiques of the temporality and archives of empire. From blockades on Wet’suwet’en land to an underground hub in Jakarta, from moccasins cradling lichen to Lebanon’s El-Mina port, each work gathers its own form of interruption.

With contributors: Whess Harman, Hung Duong and Grace Samboh, Svetlana Romanova, Fan Wu, Meagan Christou, Mitra Fakhrashrafi, Emma Steen, Charlene K. Lau, Dot Tuer, Joyce Joumaa, Ali El-Darsa, Kay Rangel, Jasmine Sihra.

Stop

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Nature

Time

Jasmine Sihra’s reflects on artist Natalie Ashley’s _resting my moccasins_ (2024), which features beaded moccasins filled with bearded lichen. Sihra draws connections across the materials Ashley engages. In particular, Sihra attends to how the medicinal and symbiotic nature of lichen, and the tactility of beads, evoke slowness and contradiction.

One Thing: Feel the Lichen: On Natalie Ashley’s Moccasins

Kay Rangel is an emerging writer, curator, and artist from the hot and dry lands of Atizapán de Zaragoza, México. Currently based in Toronto, Rangel works with archives, navigating erased history to bring visibility to contemporary artistic practices, particularly those rooted in her homeland. She has a focus on theories of place, nature, and feminism.

_Note: the print layout of this text is meaningful. To read it as intended, [view or download the PDF.](https://strapi-uploads-c-mag-prod.s3.ca-central-1.amazonaws.com/C161_Rangel_39ce5e2e47.pdf)_

##### Resistance can only be truly achieved if one believes that the force to be resisted, powerful and omnipotent, is real. One can then stand in front of the hurricane and gently push it away without using one’s hands.

##### — Margarita Athanasiou, Nouns, 2018

The city _goes and goes and goes_, and the rigorous, thorough, exhaustive system in which we live _goes and goes and goes_, and the daily homicides _go and go and go_, and one screams and jumps and cries and one has had enough. hazlo parar. To cease what seems perpetual,


The Power of The Big Old makes me feel trapped in this enormous, wet,
gruesome beast. Hierarchies, yes. Everything comes back to hierarchies. One cannot address “No” without addressing Power.

_Basta ya, I don’t like it when you pull my hair._ From an early age—perhaps at recess—you begin to learn, or at least try to, the consequences of mimicry
and the silent observation of abusive patterns. [The Author Would Like To
Stop Here And Briefly Mention The Definition Of “Recess” From The Google Dictionary: _a period of time when the proceedings of a parliament, committee,
court of law, or other official body are temporarily suspended._ Time To Stop.] At
recess time, the little Mexican girl who thinks that she’s better than you because
she is blonde _dictates_ to you and tells you that _you will do_ whatever she wants
you to do because _she says so_. And thus, you will be the dog, and She will be the
Mom in this game that she came up with on a Tuesday in March at playtime in
school, exactly the day that you have mustard stains on your shirt. _Y te aguantas_,
you _tolerate_ it, and you obey, and she treats you poorly because you’re the dog,
and it appears that she wasn’t taught at home that dogs should be treated nicely.
You cry and appeal, but she “can’t hear” you because _she doesn’t speak dog_.

_a cigarette after a nine-hour-long shift_

_to breathe consciously_

_a long stretch_

_a hug_

_sitting down to eat_

_a good laugh_

_to kiss_

_to press the breaks on my bike_

_catching patterned thought_

_to find beauty_

_to lay down on the ground_

_(to stop)_

In 2024, the Canadian Union of Postal Workers (CUPW) went on strike from
November 15 to December 17. I did not receive that new credit card in the
mail before I flew home to Mexico for the holidays. Was I affected by it? Sure.
Did I _die_? No, I was busy; I was feeling my mother’s hands on my skin for the
first time in seven months.

In late July 2023, 3,700 workers at 27 Greater Toronto Area grocery stores be-
gan what would be a month-long strike that halted operations at one of Can-
ada’s three grocery giants. Prior to a wage increase of $4.50, in result of the
strike, full-time workers had been making $20.55 per hour.

20.55 x 40 (full-time hours) = 822

822 x 4 (weeks in a month) = 3,288

Zumper, a site for Rental Market Trends, as of May 2025, estimates an average
of $2,315 of rent for a one-bedroom apartment in Toronto. Income minus Rent
leaves us with $973 in Subject A’s bank account. Let’s call Subject A Mariana.
Mariana has to get groceries to sustain herself, so subtract $400 a month. She
has to move around the city too, so she’s decided to purchase a monthly transit
pass—minus $156. Mariana has $417 to her name by the end of the month.

Sure, it sounds like _it is just enough_ for leisure activities such as going to the
movies, grabbing a coffee with an old friend, or dining out, but Mariana could
have loans to pay, or family that depends on her. Her utilities might not be
included in her rent, and many older people (who built their economic wealth
during a different _time_) are telling her about the benefits and glory of saving
and investments.

It is extremely easy, so easy, the easiest, in fact, for me to walk to a different
grocery store 5 minutes further away, and I’m walking there, with _all the more
reason_, heavy stomps and a heavy head.

_There are some whose everyday rhythm is to crash into rocks and bleed; whole
lives are being dissolved—we must speak their names._

My friend Fariba has not been able to see their mom ever since they moved to Toronto and they will not see her in any near future, because The Government Fears that Fariba’s mom will stay, and so, denied her entry. The regular at the coffee shop who gets an iced Americano with a splash of almond milk is now unemployed because his research had to be “stopped” since, as the US government called it, he was focusing on studying _non-natural biology._ Last year’s Pride Parade was interrupted by pro-Palestinian protesters to demand that organizers _stop the abuse, stop the cycle_, of accepting major corporate funders that also invest in Israel’s weaponry and pipeline projects across Turtle Island. To Bring all this to a Halt that has been poking at me and torturing me ever since I learned _what was right and what was wrong_, and if I know a thing or two (these days I feel like I don’t know anything), it is that those hungry forces are pushing forward, _some_ people are cheering, and I feel miserable. Yet we persevere, we resist—we take action, we _stop_

_to gather_ 

_to cultivate relationships_

_to sign petitions_

_to donate_

_to sing_

_to write_

_to dance_

_to protest_

_to chant_

_to march_

_to cook for others_

_to rely on community_

_to take over places that have been stripped away from us_

_to stand in front of the hurricane and gently push it away without my hands_

_(to stop)_

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Kay Rangel’s _Composition_ probes the language of refusal. Beginning at a past childhood moment and ending at the present time, Rangel’s text traces the logics of power to demystify it.

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Composition: standing in front of the hurricane and gently pushing it away without my hands

Wanda Nanibush is an Anishinaabe-kwe image and word warrior, curator, and community organizer from Beausoleil First Nation. She recently won the Toronto Book Award for her coauthored book Moving the Museum. She is the 2025 Helen Frankenthaler Visiting Professor in Curating in the PhD Program in Art History at CUNY. She is also part of the curatorial team for Counterpublic 2026, a triennial civic exhibition in St.
Louis. In 2024, Nanibush was awarded The Hnatyshyn Foundation Mid-Career Award for
Curatorial Excellence. Nanibush founded aabaakwad, an international yearly gathering of over 80 Indigenous curators writers, and artists.

_This poem extends from Wanda Nanibush’s billboard project, which was co-presented by AKA Artist-Run, PAVED Arts, and the University of Saskatchewan Art Galleries and Collections (November 8, 2024, to February 28, 2025) and translated into Arabic by Mohammed Abu Laban._ We Return _will next take place from June 1, 2025, to May 30, 2026, at Hamilton Artists Inc. The current text appears meaningfully in Plantagenet Cherokee font._

_To respect the layout, we’ve chosen to upload it in images. You can also [view or download the pdf.](https://strapi-uploads-c-mag-prod.s3.ca-central-1.amazonaws.com/C160_Nanibush_a8bec9bfa7.pdf)_

Images by the artist: 
1. Palestinian _ tatreez_ pattern woven with Anishinaabe saddle bag pattern (above) 
2. Photograph of cacti from the Nakba village of Lifta, marked with the word Palestine (article thumbnail)

In this issue’s extended editorial note, Bracy Appeikumoh asks, “Was utopia, like extra lives, envisioned as a means of escaping death?” Among the haunting contradictions of living in the imperial core, whose violences seek their own immortality, to seize a different kind of “extra life” takes an extra real imagination. Across virtual game worlds, ancestral inheritances, unfinished revolutionary histories, artists’ data storage, and more, contributors to C160 reflect on extra life as a state both surplus and sacred—what persists in age-old cycles of decay.


Extra Life

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Indigenous

Textiles

In an extension of her billboard project at AKA artist-run centre (2024–2025), Wanda Nanibush relates Palestinian and Anishinaabe experiences of love, land, and children of the future.


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Composition: We Return

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Plural

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Mayworks

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Evergreen

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SAAG 2

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PEC 1

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Capture

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Manif d'art

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Images

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Innas Tsuroiya is a writer living in Indonesia who works across poetry, criticism, translation, fiction, and divination. Her work can be found in _Poetry Wales, MOLD Magazine, C Magazine, Protean Magazine, ArtReview Asia,_ and _Artforum_, among others.

Man’s perceptions are not bounded by organs of perception; he perceives more than sense (tho’ ever so acute) can discover.

—William Blake, “There Is No Natural Religion,” 1788 [^1]

In Islamic cosmology, creatures made of dust or soil (tactile material: human beings) and creatures made of light (be it “pure light” like angels or “ur-fire” like jinns: spirit[ual] beings) occupy different planes of existence with their respective sets of ethics. These worlds, however, sometimes converge under specific circumstances; an understanding of ontological plurality is therefore inherent in religious teaching. While humans only turn into spirit form post-mortem, it is easier for spirits to assume anthropomorphism due to their superior dimension. The embodiment can be for any purpose, whether for well-meaning assistance or as designated trickster, like the fabled Satan whispering into the human heart a worldly temptation. To the extent this interworld convergence becomes imbalanced or malicious, as in the case of jinn possession, the dynamics must be restored to prevent further consequences (e.g., severe ailment, madness, and so on). Broadly, since the burden of proof rarely lies with the possessed subject whose consciousness is being overtaken, the decision for a dispossession—by exorcism, zar ceremony, ablutionary ritual, or other cathartic means—is seldom up to the possessed subject’s discretion. Bearing witness to possession requires, at least, a special sensibility when the physical is not meant to perceive the metaphysical. In the crossway of religio-cultural life and art history in particular, the work of Sudanese artist Kamala Ibrahim Ishag manoeuvres this stratum: many of her paintings capture the merging of humans and spirits at its exact “time.”

Consider _The Seat - Zar Ceremony_ (2016), in which none of the figures in the oil painting are, per the title, actually seated. Instead, the figures seem to be standing and swaying, each pair of deformed faces overlapping the others (separately, there’s another tinier face on the floor) with misplaced mouths and crooked teeth, distorted limbs indistinguishable from one another’s. A foot turns into the leg of a table set between them, on which a likewise evanescing vase rests just as uneasily. Ishag paints The Seat in assorted shades of brown, the colour of clay that builds a human being, though these figures do not appear fully human. Despite the eerie scene, nothing suggests a touch of violence that may be usual with resolving possession.

Zar itself refers to the type of jinn possessing mostly women, ergo the demographics of the zar ceremony practiced regionally in the Horn of Africa and surrounding countries. Led by a female sheikh (sheikha), over the years it evolved into a form of social gathering and musical dance. Zar is less of a forceful cleansing than the exorcism commonly performed in Muslim-populated countries elsewhere: more of a conciliation of the jinn and an all-around healing rite. Ishag’s zar paintings represent this totality of communion, usually featuring feminine-presenting figures as a stand in for women and/or women-spirits. In _Preparation of Incense - Zar Ceremony_ (2015) she makes the imperceptible trance more evident by including greeneries, a spread of dancing foliage—some sprouting from heads—on a light-blue backdrop, amid the grotesque cohort in pallid garbs. An ecology synthesized from the encapsulation of converging worlds and an artistic imagination unique to her.

Ishag occupies a certain nexus in the Sudanese art constellation. For one, she was among the first women artists who graduated from the College of Fine and Applied Art in Khartoum in 1963, years later returning to her alma mater to teach. Between her training and teaching in Khartoum, Ishag embarked on a formative period of study at the Royal College of Art in London, UK, where she graduated in 1969—fortuitously at the height of conceptual art—and encountered William Blake’s oeuvre, frequently cited as her inspiration. The Blakean pull is perhaps most obvious in the crystalists, the movement she steered with the publication of a manifesto in a newspaper in 1976, co-authored with several former students. It begins: “Man himself is the endeavor and the subject of a crystal that extends endlessly within. This happens simultaneously in isolation from and in connection to other things.” [^2] “The Crystalist Manifesto” (originally published in Arabic) is a treatise on arts that, for the most part, longs to break free from the conventions of that time when major aesthetic inclinations in ’60s Sudan, less than a decade post-independence, were shaped by nation-building visions. The prominent artists were largely men, including Ishag’s peer, the painter Ibrahim El-Salahi, and largely influenced by Islamic art style. Ishag meanwhile emerged with new epistemology—deriving from a wide range of disciplines such as poetics and theoretical physics, in other words a true syncretism of ideals—and conjured on her canvas the subtle weaving of women and (super)natural phenomena.

Prior to the constitution of the crystalist movement, Ishag predated her fixation in the early work _Untitled - Zar_ (1973), which she painted on a square surface angled into a rhombus to approximate a crystal shape (this adjustment applies to subsequent works, e.g., _Preparation of Incense_). Brushed in sensuous earthy palettes, _Untitled_ strikes the observer as if, from a birds-eye view, a disfigured crowd is sealed inside a glass box. There are more obscure nodes than slightly distinguishable faces; Ishag’s meticulous composition evokes something imminent hanging in the air. How will everything unfold? Centred in this scene is a diamond-like gleam—one may reckon it as a crystal that refracts light rays passing through. It is a model for transcending the senses as well as a metaphor for perceiving multilayered realities. Through the chorus of Ishag’s interconnected subjects, one shall accept such an illumination.

[^1]: William Blake, _There Is No Natural Religion [b]_ (1788), I.
[^2]: Hassan Abdallah, Naiyla Al Tayib, Hashim Ibrahim, Kamala Ibrahim Ishag, and Muhammad Hamid Shaddad, “The Crystalist Manifesto,” trans. Nariman Youssef, in _Modern Art in the Arab World: Primary Documents_, ed. Anneka Lenssen, Sarah Rogers, and Nada Shabout (New York City: The Museum of Modern Art, in association with Duke University Press, 2018), 393–408; [https://post.moma.org/modern-art-in-the-arab-world-primary-documents-the-crystalist-manifesto](https://post.moma.org/modern-art-in-the-arab-world-primary-documents-the-crystalist-manifesto)

This issue of C Magazine looks through the mirror as a bleeding surface—a metaphor for acts of seeing, thinking, and creating that return your gaze. We recognize that the way we look in a mirror is also the way we tell a story, as a reflection of value systems and the stakes of lucidity and distortion, especially under colonial systems that would twist their subjects’ humanity. Many texts here, between artists and writers, take the form of dialogues, and think through persistent possibilities of visual revelation, language, and mourning. Formal and symbolic fractures are reflected through chimerical imagery, Hong Kong cinemas of resistance, Puerto-Rican space-time, physical and spiritual intertwining, and a real place to land for both joy and grief—the end of a rainbow, or its burning.

Mirror Mirror

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Spirituality

Gender

Innas Tsuroiya explores Kamala Ibrahim Ishag’s paintings about the zar ceremony, a social gathering and dance around the Horn of Africa. A founder of the crystalist movement, Ishag broke away from the nation-building aesthetics of post-independence Sudan in the 1970s.

One Thing: Kamala Ibrahim Ishag’s Zar Paintings

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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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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Technology

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

In the second entry to the Artist's Archive column, Erika DeFreitas engages with _C Magazine_'s archive, revisiting Jeanne Randolph and Nicole Jolicoeur's engagements with Jean-Martin Charcot’s _Iconographie photographique de la Salpêtrière (service de M. Charcot)_ (1876–1980)—a series of medical photographs of “hysterical” women. 

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

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