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C’s Chorus issue marks the beginning of our new print look, shaped by Hwa-Jin Jun, where we also ask what becomes possible if we embrace changing physical formats and materials as an ethos. We think of chorus as a collective noun: for voices, noises, expressions (of rage, solidarity, and otherwise). This issue embraces polyphony, or simultaneity, a chorus that does not dissolve distinction within the collective. From voice as infrastructure, a way of rehearsing coordination and collective power amidst spreading fascist logics, to the dispersal of seeds, anti-colonial cosmologies, melancholic sound in the colour blue, attuning to ancestors in museum collections, and the subtle accumulations in working-class time, we bring a cacophony of grievance and desire.


Chorus

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Storytelling

Education

Api’soomaahka and Christina Battle engage seeds as tools of ecological restoration, cultural continuity, and community exchange. Through a dialogic format extending from their panel at MacKenzie Art Gallery in partnership with Remai Modern, their practices situate seed work within broader discussions of climate change, Indigenous knowledge, and environmental justice across the Prairie region.


Sharing Seeds

Sharing Seeds (with Lillian O'Brien Davis)

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

The peak afternoon sun in Ocala, FL, was rapturous. The green fragrance of freshly cut grass screamed in the heat in my Grannie’s backyard. I was four years old, catching small brown lizards. My escape from the thick humidity was the air-conditioned living room where I would sprawl on the couch for a moment and then return to my hunt outside. My step-grandfather, whom we called Uncle Willett, kept an eye on me. He grew up in Guyana, so, unlike me, he was used to the intensity of the heat. He sat on a lacy wrought-iron chair as he peeled the woody layer from sugar-cane stalks to prepare them to be juiced. He called me over from across the backyard and asked if I had ever tried sugar cane. I was prepared to lie and say yes, as I was an extremely picky eater, but he assured me it was sweet and I should treat it like a popsicle. I remember the sound of the hot air, the smell of the sun hitting the grass, Uncle Willett’s booming words of assurance, and an intense feeling of belonging—something I couldn’t quite articulate at the time. The taste of sugar cane is a portal to this memory. It creates a moment of cross-temporal intimacy and kinship, a feeling that is difficult to capture or articulate.

Tao Leigh Goffe writes that “food is an archive of global desire,” [^1] implicating both our consumption and the past and present realities of its production. Sugar cane, similar to other edible goods produced on plantations by indentured and enslaved labourers, is inscribed with poetics of suffering, kinship, loss, and refusal. Sugarcane, when consumed, has the potential to cultivate an intimacy with these poetics, a closeness with past people and places separated by land masses and oceans. Sugar cane connects me to Grannie, Uncle Willett, and my father, but also to entangled colonial histories.

María Magdalena Campos-Pons’s performance _Agridulce_ was part of her 2016 exhibition at the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, MA, titled “Alchemy of the Soul.” In her performance, Campos-Pons dressed in the style of a 19th-century enslaved woman. She wore a floor-length long-sleeved dress with patterned tendrils of foliage, meant to evoke sugar-cane fields. Her hair was wrapped in fabric in the same pattern, with the ends of her locs poking out of the wrap. Her skin was painted white, its application inconsistent with flecks of her deep complexion poking through her spectral guise. The white paint draws upon the Afro-Cuban religion Santería, a creolized version of Yorùbá rituals and practices carried by enslaved people through the Middle Passage. Embodiment is essential in devotions and rituals enacted by Santería practitioners. Practitioners would use sugar as a component in their devotionals, as it was more widely available than honey, which was
previously used by the Yorùbá. [^2] Santería practitioners would infuse edible parts of their rituals with aché, and once consumed, the sacred energy would imbue a person’s body. As Campos-Pons walked through the atrium of the Peabody with a stalk of sugar cane in one hand and a knife in the other, she would extend small chunks to audience members and say, “Try it. It’s sweet.”[^3]

A common thread between my memory in Florida and Campo-Pons’s _Agridulce_ is their ephemerality. There are photographs that depict Campos-Pons’s performance and my four-year-old self at my Grannie’s house, but the images do not capture the sensuous qualities. At one point in highschool, I bought sugar cane from a man selling it out of his trunk in Kensington Market to refacilitate the indescribable feeling, but I was only
able to catch a glimpse of it. Despite the impossibility of capture, taste forges an intimate relationship between the past and present. Taste can situate me in the past, which disrupts the Western-colonial expectation that historical truth is only a material condition. In the case of gastropoetics, a field of study developed by Parama Roy, the alimentary tract becomes a way to question colonial appetite and consumption. [^4] Roy proposes that “the alimentary tract is a boundary, a fiercely policed and hotly trafficked one,” [^5] that determines “who eats and with whom, who starves, and what is rejected as food are fundamental to colonial and post-colonial making—and unmaking.” [^6] Roy considers the
embodied affects of colonialism and how they manifest through alimentation. However, through my personal anecdote and Campos-Pons’s performance, I also want to consider alimentation as a process that interrupts the expected hypervisibility and scrutiny of Black histories. The histories activated through my consumption of sugar cane cannot
be reproduced. They are opaque, covert, and intimate, sustained through my mouth and stomach.

In the wake of destroyed material objects and the mass death of people, enslaved people were left with their embodied and sensuous memories. The Hold was a place that permanently altered enslaved people’s attunement to their sensuous realities. Stench was attributed to Black people by slave-holders and white Americans through the vile reality
of sickness and death in the Hold. [^7] Further, the spiritual and medicinal properties of shea butter were reconfigured, [^8] and as mentioned previously, Santería practitioners had to reorient their taste for honey toward that of the sugar they were forced to produce. The boats that traversed the Middle Passage and the Caribbean Sea facilitated the metaphorical and literal consumption of Black life, attempting and often succeeding at casting abducted Africans into objecthood. Despite the consumption of Black life through murder, shoddy record-keeping, and torture, the immaterial archives [^9] constituted through gustatory, and even olfactory, processes endured. The processes of tasting, chewing, and digesting became an embodied way of engaging with autobiographical and broader colonial Black histories. While I focus on sugar cane, these processes can be facilitated through rum, tobacco, coffee, and salt. Food, particularly goods with cultural significance and with connections to plantation labour, often cultivate this gustatory phenomenon that unsettles the Western expectation of visible and indexable history.

One of the first times I recounted my sugar-cane encounter with my father, he reminisced about times in his childhood when he ate it to cool down. My grandfather would do the same. There is a cross-temporal connection between all of us, obviously constituted through our blood, but fortified through our stories of eating sugar cane. I learned that my grandfather had an incredibly strong sweet tooth as a child in Guyana, and he would sneak spoonfuls of sugar after dinner just to satisfy the craving. These stories, triggered through our encounters with sugar cane, cannot be unbound from the terrible realities of enslavement and terror—however, they are maintained through joy, humour, and kinship. They cultivate a kind of intimacy despite their colonial inscription.

[^1]: Tao Leigh Goffe, “Sugarwork: The Gastropoetics of Afro-Asia After the Plantation,” _Asian Diasporic Visual Cultures and the Americas_ 5, no. 4 (2019), 39.
[^2]: Elizabeth Pérez, “Crystallizing Subjectivities in the African Diaspora: Sugar, Honey and the Gods of Afro-Cuban Lucumí,” in _Religion, Food, and Eating_ in North America, ed. Benjamin E. Zeller et al. (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014), 177.
[^3]: Adriana Zavala, “Blackness Distilled, Sugar and Rum: María Magdalena Campos-Pons’s Alchemy of the Soul, Elixir for the Spirits,” Latin American Visual Culture 1, no. 2 (2019), 29, https://doi.org/10.1525/lavc.2019.120003
[^4]: Parama Roy, _Alimentary Tracts: Appetites, Aversions, and the Postcolonial_ (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010), 24.
[^5]: Ibid.
[^6]: Ibid.
[^7]: Mark Smith, _How Race Is Made: Slavery, Segregation, and the Senses_ (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006), 6.
[^8]: Hsuan L. Hsu, “Olfactory Politics in Black Diasporic Art,” in _Olfactory Art and the Political in an Age of Resistance_ (New York: Routledge, 2021), 17.
[^9]: A term developed by Jenny Sharpe that, for her, is constituted by “affects, dreams, spirits and visions” (3) carried by enslaved Black people from Africa into the Caribbean and passed on to their descendants. A significant part of my MA research at Concordia University was to expand Sharpe’s notion of immaterial archives in arguing for the significance of taste and smell in activating them. See: Jenny Sharpe, _Immaterial Archives: An African Diaspora Poetics of Loss_ (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2020).

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. <br/>

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)_

C161_Rangel.pdf

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

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Innas Tsuroiya is a writer living in Indonesia who works across poetry, criticism, translation, fiction, and divination. She has written for _C Magazine_, _e-flux Criticism_, _TANK_, _The Stinging Fly_, _Poetry Wales_, _Protean Magazine_, _ArtReview_, _Artforum_, _ArtAsiaPacific_, and more.


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. < br/ > 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. < br/ > 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. < br/ > 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

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

Daniella Sanader is a writer and reader who lives in Toronto. 

This past October, nine Toronto art spaces collaborated to present “Everything & Nothing,” a retrospective survey honouring the work of Kelly Mark, who received medical assistance in dying some eight months prior. Having lived in this city since the late ’90s, Mark became known for her wry sense of humour and her exacting view on the everyday labour of having a practice, both central features of her conceptually driven work. At the core of the retrospective was an exhibition of Mark’s video, sculpture, text-based pieces, and works on paper at Olga Korper Gallery, but beyond it, Mark’s work was widely dispersed across Toronto. (Other participating galleries included Art Metropole, the plumb, Joys, The Goldfarb Gallery at York University, goodwater gallery, MOCA Toronto, Vtape, and Pumice Raft.) As I moved across the city trying to take it all in, Mark’s practice began to expand and contract: finding its home across spaces large and small, commercial and artist-run, central and peripheral, physical and virtual, singular and multiple, indoors, outdoors, dispersed in the mail. Everything and nothing all at once.

I’ve been struggling to trace a clear line through all these contexts, through all of Mark’s varied modes of working, but perhaps that’s the point. With her own focus on repetitive accumulation and circular logics—take the text-based work _It’s Just One God Damn Thing After Another_ (2009) at Olga Korper, which arranges the titular phrase in a never-ending loop—Mark’s own thinking rarely marched in a straightforward line. Instead, she returned, again and again, to questions of time, labour, and valuation—to what it means to build a life through your work, and vice versa—particularly from a working-class standpoint.

So, in response to this citywide project for Kelly Mark, I’ve written a text that scatters along with her. It’s divided into separate fragments, nested in between other features of and contributions to this issue of _C_. Or, you can call it five essays for the price of one. Maybe that’s a deal she could have gotten behind.


##### TWICE AS BORING 

I’m standing in the dark enclosure of Joys, the lane-way project space off Lansdowne Avenue, watching Kelly Mark’s video _Trying to Remember, Sometimes Wishing I Could Forget_ (1996/2016). The split-screen video was made as a 20-year update to her earlier _33 Minute Stare_ (1996), and features two versions of Mark’s face, shown in tight parallel. In 1996, the artist stares directly, uncompromising, into the camera, as long as her eyes will allow; whereas in 2016, she seems to do everything but. Of the later iteration, Mark described that she was prompted by the effort of trying to recall details of how the earlier video was made: “I start off trying to remember where I got that camera from [in 1996] and then for 33 minutes, I try to remember everything else I may have forgotten since then.” [^¹] As her eyes flit back and forth, the work of remembering becomes laced with other unforeseen textures: “I was a little surprised by the amount of regret I experienced in response to some of the things I did remember.”

In Mark’s characteristically simple visual means, both works court inevitable failure, but in strikingly opposite ways. In 1996, she was bound to lose her staring contest with her recording device, regardless of how blank, how impassive she attempted to be. In 2016, Mark’s lack of emotion was replaced with an abundance of it—seemingly surprising, for her—as she worked through 20 years of memory. For viewers, the differences are subtle, impenetrable on her otherwise static face(s), but if you’re patient, they start to make their presence known. Given that “Everything & Nothing” offered a survey of Mark’s prolific, decades-long career across multiple mediums and forms, _Trying to Remember_ is a fitting microcosm for that collective curatorial effort: a seemingly direct view on her practice, but one that can only gesture at how much more there is to say.

During my visit, Joys curator Danica Pinteric tells me an anecdote about the two videos, shared with her by artist Anthony Cooper—Mark’s long-time friend and the primary organizer of “Everything & Nothing”—one he would corroborate later. Cooper came to know Mark while working at Diaz Contemporary, and on one such workday, she told him about the early stages of planning _Trying to Remember_ as a follow-up to _33 Minute Stare_. His response: “So, you want to make it twice as boring?” Someone else might have been bruised by his dry humour, but Mark loved it so much she incorporated the comment into the gallery’s wall didactic.


##### HOMER SIMPSON EPIPHANY
In a 2000 interview with Eileen Sommerman, Kelly Mark described the act of counting salt grains in a thimble. (There’s 423,628, if you’re curious.) “That was a Homer Simpson epiphany,” she explained, claiming she felt like god counting the stars. “That’s what I live for.” [^²] Finding meaning in the diligent (or, foolish) accumulation of mundane things was a central feature of the artist’s practice. Take  _Knife Collection _ (1995–2002), which consists of some 100 unique butter knives, each “collected” (as in, stolen) from various restaurants and homes. (Mark began the piece while working as a server after the culmination of her BFA.) At Olga Korper, the knives are carefully arranged in groups of 10 on magnetic strips, coming to resemble the ubiquitous tally marks (four vertical lines, one horizontal) the artist would tattoo on herself, adding one line for each year of life—time passing as another mundane form of accumulation.

Other works in “Everything & Nothing” also find their logic in the build-up of seemingly disparate parts. The meandering epic montage film  _REM_ (2007), screened at the plumb, was produced by collecting clips from 170 movies and TV episodes, pulled from four months of Mark channel surfing through the offerings of Canadian cable. Its dreamlike plot—which loosely follows a mysterious hitchhiker navigating various states of pursuit, confusion, and confrontation—feels held together by the associative will of both Mark and her viewers, our shared need to trace a narrative thread between otherwise unrelated faces, gestures, and locales.

The video documentation of Mark’s month-long performance  _Hiccup #1_ (2000), shown at Joys, seems to apply the same thinking in reverse: shared causality becoming obscured, private, somehow random once again. Seven video channels show the same scene on different days. Mark is across the street, sitting on the front steps of Central Tech high school in downtown Toronto, from 8:45 to 9am. She looks around, sips a coffee, smokes a cigarette, underlines a passage in a novel. On any given day these gestures would feel ordinary, unremarkable, but Mark carefully choreographed them, responding to precise cues from an accompanying audio track in her ear. Seven days shown side by side in video form, the world around her changes, but Mark—her movements, her rhythms—remains the same.

This exacting performance of the mundane connects to Mark’s other dictum, “Everything is interesting,” which was distributed on postcards and buttons throughout the city of Birmingham for her 2003 exhibition at Ikon Gallery. It’s another Homer-like epiphany, caught in its own perpetual cycle of negation and justification. If everything is interesting, then of course, nothing can be: the distinction implied in the term is flattened out. But if nothing is interesting, then, as your mind begins to wander, you might be surprised by the otherwise ordinary details—a solitary woman lighting a smoke, the gleam on the handle of a butter knife—that catch your attention.




##### GOOD NEIGHBOURS 
I’ve also been looking for Kelly Mark’s presence elsewhere. Take this magazine. Alongside the numerous times that Mark’s work was reviewed and discussed in  _C_, she also participated in a curatorial project organized by Claire Christie showcased in issue 75, from Fall 2002. Inspired by the 1985 Absolut Vodka ad by Andy Warhol, Christie prompted Mark (alongside artists Tom Dean and Marcel Dzama) to produce advertisements for businesses and products of their choice. The results were scattered among _C_’s typical ad revenue—nested between the usual promotions for galleries, museums, and arts-related enterprises. Mark’s ad featured a full-page image of the façade of Toronto’s Quality Meat Packers Ltd., all greyscale and somewhat ominous, shot from behind the industrial building’s chain-link fence. “Good Neighbors…” the copy announced, introducing the meat-processing facility located just a few steps away from Mark’s Niagara Street studio, “still better than another CONDO!”

Another version of the story of Mark’s practice could be structured according to the indignities of Toronto real estate. People will often reference her beloved, semi-legal space in the Coffin Factory—one of the city’s rare affordable loft complexes for artists, adjacent to the galleries at Niagara and Tecumseth streets—where she lived for two decades, its lack of windows contributing to her idiosyncratic working hours. Mark moved to Scarborough in 2012, anticipating the city’s redevelopment of the Coffin Factory into a condo. (Its final tenants were evicted in 2019.) The neighbouring abattoir building—which once suffused the surrounding streets with the “sad smell of shit-scared pigs,” [^³] according to one 2014  _blogTO_ article—was also announced for condo redevelopment in 2017 and demolished in 2022. There’s a bitter joke to be made here, about Toronto’s increasing hostility to the living and working conditions of its artists, but of course Mark already made it. The sarcastic enthusiasm of her “ad” for the abattoir, where she announced her preference for the stinky industrial building over the encroaching landscape of luxury condos, feels all the more biting in today’s housing crisis.

None of these landmarks exist anymore. From my vantage point in 2025, Mark’s characteristically wry tone in the 2002 ad feels tempered by the cheeky resignation of her light box displayed outside the plumb, the artist’s final work. Its red text reads, “I DON’T WANNA PLAY THIS GAME ANYMORE I’M TAKING MY BALL AND I’M GOING HOME.”

The game of living in this city does, at times, feel exhausting, impossible. Mark chose to withdraw from this game on her own terms. It feels tempting, as a writer, to lapse into a romantic view of this earlier era of artistic life in Toronto, when rents were cheap(er), council grants were plentiful, downtown living was possible. It feels just as tempting to equivocate about the hard times had, both _then_ and _now_—as if nothing structural has changed in between. Neither stance is quite accurate; neither gets at the nuance of Mark’s relationship to this city, and the ways her practice continues to resonate with new audiences today. Instead, with her characteristic no-bullshit attitude, Mark brought a clear and uncompromising view of Toronto into her work, making visible the forms of precarity and the corporatized flattening out of culture she observed around her, conditions which would only continue to accelerate. _It’s just one god damn thing after another._


##### THANKFULLY IDEAS ARE FREE
Cumulatively, I have spent 34 hours and 41 minutes working on this text. I was thinking about Kelly Mark’s major work In & Out (1997–2025)—shown in a print-based version at Olga Korper as _Day In & Day Out_ (2018)—and I downloaded a timekeeping app on my phone. Some eight hours and 58 minutes were spent visiting the works at the various sites, another six hours and 33 minutes were spent researching, planning, writing emails, talking on the phone. I spent 19 hours and 10 minutes writing, seeking feedback, and revising drafts for publication. Once I forgot to turn the app off after a writing session, and inadvertently accumulated some extra 44 hours and 19 minutes of recorded time: walking back and forth, waiting for the subway, buying groceries, sleeping.

My timekeeping is a bit of a flat gesture, though—it doesn’t get at the real work of her work, its ongoing, structural influence on her life and practice. For _In & Out_, Mark used a factory punch clock to chart the eight-hour shifts of her studio labour, the time cards accumulating as a record of a life spent on the job. Studio work as shift work. The piece was originally expected to conclude in 2032, when the artist would have reached the retirement age of 65.

Mark was certainly fastidious about the value of her time. On more than one occasion, she negotiated with galleries to forgo her artist fee in favour of the province in question’s minimum hourly wage—calculated for the duration of the exhibition—which consistently amounted to more than the CARFAC-mandated rate. (This would result in her work _Minimum Wage_, from 2008.) Anthony Cooper also spoke to me with fondness about Mark’s arts council grants, which routinely allocated time in a project’s development schedule for less directly “productive” things like watching television. Her notebooks, a selection of which are shown at Pumice Raft, [^⁴] frequently feature lists of sums attributed to various collectors and art spaces, as she calculated the amounts she required to get by. The journals expose the administrative landscape of a working (and working-class) artist—handwritten iterations of her residency and grad school applications, supply lists, and to-do items—along with lecture notes from her undergrad days at NSCAD, and countless iterative plans for future projects. (And, of course, there is the occasional smart-ass detail, like a page of art world–related punny equations featuring the truly inspired “FART + BOREDOM = ARTFORUM.”)

I’m left thinking about what Mark needed in order to live, to work. Time spent with her journals shows that this was an ever-shifting concept—certainly financial but also structural, social, imaginative—but she knew exactly what it was; she was constantly reasserting its shape. “Thankfully Ideas Are Free,” she declared in 2008, the text printed on a series of square buttons. That being said, they were produced on the occasion of the Toronto International Art Fair (now called Art Toronto) and riffed on the initials of the event’s name—one where vast amounts of money exchange hands, where many artists’ livelihoods hang in the balance. More sarcasm on the underside of all that gratitude.

Dispersed through the magazine like the artist’s posthumous show was across physical locations in Toronto, Daniella Sanader captures the subtle folds of labour, working-class time, and accumulation at the heart of Kelly Mark’s work.

C Mag

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