Drawing

Film

Politics

Memory

Letter

Editorial

Feature

Interview

Artist Project

Column

Review

Writer

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

Almanac

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

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

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

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

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



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Language

Body

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

Composition: Crepuscular Rhythms

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Kink

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

One Thing: Tracing Fragments of Queer Desire

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

##### “Always a flower planted on this body made of layers of shadows”<br/>

> ##### —etel adnan [1]

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

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

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

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Composition: give up your own

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Plural

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Mackenzie

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



>###### _Resistance_ 

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

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

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

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

>###### _Radical Care and Collectivity_ 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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


Codes

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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

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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

Sofía Gallisá Muriente is a Puerto Rican visual artist and cultural organizer. Her work employs text, image, and archive as medium and subject, exploring their poetic and political implications.

Lara Mimosa Montes is a writer, editor, and teaching artist whose practice and experiences span the fields of alternative publishing and experimental writing. She was born in the Bronx.

> **Lara Mimosa Montes:** Your films explore the space between narrative and image, poetry and memory. For example, in _Celaje_ (2020), which I caught at The Whitney last spring, [^1] Puerto Rico appears as a collage of interwoven fragments that pairs the real alongside the written. The textures of the sea, the palm trees, and other fauna in combination with poetic language, voice-over, and the score with the coqui depicts a Puerto Rico that feels more dreamlike than documentary. When I write, I try to induce a similar state where a reader can inhabit the images in a poem by becoming attuned to the poem’s rhythms. How does writing fit into your process as someone who works with moving images outside of traditional narrative frameworks?

**Sofía Gallisá Muriente:** I’ve had cameras since I was a little girl, so images have been important for me throughout my life mainly as a way of documenting life and remembering. As I started deepening my artistic practice, I started thinking more about what the camera can’t capture, what is outside the frame, and all the images we’ve lost to time and climate, and how to make the invisible visible, conjure or account for it somehow in the combination between image, sound, and text. I also grew concerned with the automatic, mindless ways in which we consume images and how to slow that process down: interrupt, complicate, and disturb it in some way, so that whoever is watching has to make sense differently.

I film in very intuitive ways, so sometimes I need to interpret what I’ve done afterward, in the editing process. Words can be helpful to articulate those intentions, even in coded ways. Often the text or narration in my work is a collage of thoughts, references, things I overheard or that friends shared with me; and my work is to document and connect those ideas. I’m interested in layering meanings and ways of looking to explore the complexity and multiplicity of Puerto Rico. It’s a way of pushing back against the colonial gaze that insists on imaging us as just a big beautiful beach.

> **LMM:** Those techniques done in post-production generate a new atmosphere for meaning to circulate between word and image. This weekend,
I read “Interview With an Empire” (2003) [^2] —thank you for sharing it with me—and I keep returning to this idea that M. NourbeSe Philip introduces, that she handles language as if it were a “foreign anguish.”

> At the centre of Philip’s poem “Discourse on the Logic of Language” is a mirroring that happens between the words “language” and
“l/anguish.” [^3] This doubleness, a sense of being both of and outside English, tradition, the culture of the colonizer, the mainland… feels so Caribbean to me. The foreign anguish is this blank, a space of contradiction, silence, mourning; it’s a source of madness, or locura, for me. I have a hard time describing this to others because the anguish is both historical and preverbal. Do you experience a version of this—foreign anguish? Doubleness? The histories of colonialism scrambling your senses?

**SGM:** Of course! First of all I have to thank Nasrin Himada, a dear friend and curator, for sharing “Interview With an Empire” with me recently in Toronto, in
the context of Open Secret, a beautiful dialogue she generated between a group of artists mostly based in Canada and largely from immigrant backgrounds. [^4] It was interesting to read the text with them because we were all subjected to English as a colonial, imperial language, and we were sharing our ideas and works in part as a way of negotiating hybridity and experimenting with forms of visual language that can act as a counterweight. Relying on English in a context like that is very different to me, because it’s simply a mechanism of communication based on a common set of codes, but we are all standing outside the logic of that language.

I was excited that Philip is from Trinidad and Tobago and invokes the Caribbean experience in her writing. Visiting Port of Spain some years ago to do a residency with the brilliant folks from Alice Yard absolutely altered my experience of the English language. Creole English sounded and felt so different from the American English that surrounds and drowns me (culturally, professionally…). I understood it as a separate Caribbean thing, almost unrelated to the language of my colonizer.

That being said, the anguish of doubleness is definitely present for me as well. As much as I try to refuse the pressure to make myself understood in Imperial English, it’s an inevitable part of standing in the in-between, living and working in Puerto Rico while supporting myself economically and maintaining an artistic career thanks to opportunities in the United States. Negotiating that positioning in relation to communication is a constant struggle, but I am decidedly rooted in the Caribbean and in Puerto Rico; the US is not my mainland.

> **LMM:** I wonder if you could speak more to this decision, to be rooted where you are, in the Caribbean, in Puerto Rico.

**SGM:** Puerto Rico is the place where I was born and raised, where my deepest affections and allegiances are, where I feel there’s the most work to be done, where my work has the most at stake, and where it’s most personal. I had to leave New York after nine years in order to find my artistic voice because all the work I wanted to do was home. I was holding on to a clip of a newsreel for years after finding it in the National Archives in Maryland, of when the mayor of San Juan brought snow to Puerto Rico in the ’50s. It was like an apparition, because this is a mythical story but I had never seen images of the event, and it immediately complicated what I imagined it to be. I came back to PR as a fellow of Beta-Local, [^5] wanting to make something with that clip that was unlike any work I had done before. I wanted to experiment with multichannel video art and push myself to commit to art-making, and once I was here and energized by my community and the sense of infinite possibility, I was able to finally produce _Lluvia con nieve_ (2014).

As a diasporic Puerto Rican, your experience of navigating doubleness and of being rooted in a Caribbean or Puerto Rican way of thinking and writing must be very different. You said something wonderful about how Caribbean people have an innate relationship to speculation and a different relationship with time; do you sustain that within your writing practice? How do you do it while living physically disconnected from Puerto Rico or your Puerto Rican community in New York, without trafficking in nostalgia, like you mentioned you resisted?

> **LMM:** Ah, but nostalgia is so seductive! My mother recently told me that she had intended for me to be born in Puerto Rico. I couldn’t believe it— it wasn’t until we were in this community garden in Loisaida, this historically Puerto Rican neighbourhood in New York, that she thought to express to me this fantasy of self-determination. I ended up being born in New York, but I never imagined this aspect of my identity to have been the result of a very personal and ideological compromise she had made. I imagine in the ’80s, the more fluid terms some of us habitually call upon now to think about identity, relation, diaspora, and belonging may not have been so available to her. So my mother may still hold on to a speculative hope that even if I was not born in Puerto Rico, I _might_ yet be a Puerto Rican.

> Receiving this story shed light onto this speculative relation to self that haunts my writing. In my poems I repeatedly return to questions like “Who is speaking?” and “What am I? _When_ am I?” I don’t call upon nostalgia to work through these because any nostalgic feelings I may have about the island are what my mother would have tried to stoke in me. The nostalgia is not exactly my own; it is hers. She and I will likely spend the rest of our lives disentangling this. Talk about non-sovereignty!

> For now, I can recognize the moods my writing often pays tribute to are those of disorientation. Sometimes it comes out as a kind of linguistic locura, and I feel the resonance with the work of other Puerto Rican writers, especially when I read and hear the poetry. The poems of Lydia Cortés, Edwin Torres, and Urayoán Noel come to mind. The connection is reactivated whenever I hear our voices and see our work—this extends even to Bad Bunny. That the monolingual, colonial publishing and distribution networks of American literary culture don’t know how to recognize, translate, or theorize any of this is the compromise I accept to publish in the States. I also pessimistically accept the “neither here nor there” designation of the commonwealth status. Doing so allows me to identify with the sea, that which is inbetween, or at least that’s what I tell myself. How do you relate to the speculative or the non-human?

**SGM:** After the passing of Hurricane Maria in 2017, I was really drawn to thinking deeply about how climate conditions memory in the tropics, and how invisible forces like salt in the air and humidity impose impermanence all around us. For my series _Assimilate & Destroy_ (2017–2020), I started to work with film and biodeterioration, training myself to trust the process more and surrender to the elements by using expired film, burying film in wet soil and brine, or hand-developing film with native medicinal plants. As a result, the developing process made itself visible through the different artefacts that it provoked, but these effects were also new images and messages that I conjured through an act of transmission or mediation with my context. This process of thinking and making has evolved in a lot of different directions through my work these past few years, driven mainly by a desire to learn to observe nature and read my surroundings differently. Also, I need to be able to make work about colonialism, imperialism, memory, grief, and other heavy topics using fresh language and logics of time to reframe them and move away from tired discourses. We are so entrenched politically, and so many words have been instrumentalized and emptied of meaning, that I’m looking for communication strategies to think and feel through this world that’s on fire.

In Spanish, the word for “lagoon” (laguna) refers to both the coastal ecosystems as well as lacunae—absences or gaps in archives that signal to oblivion. I’ve been using this homonym as a departure point for a lot of the work I’ve been doing as part of an umbrella project I call _Lacuna Observatory (Observatorio de lagunas)_. I’ve spent a lot of time in lagoons throughout Puerto Rico, as well as working in formal and informal archives. In the process, one of the most beautiful things I’ve learned came from a conversation with a biologist in Laguna Grande in Fajardo. He was explaining to me the transformations in the lagoon driven by climate change that they’ve been monitoring, and suddenly he said “but there might be things happening that we can’t see or measure that might save it” and it blew my mind. We ended up talking about chaos theory and how to always count on what we don’t know that we don’t know. This take on the uncertain and unknown as potentially life-saving really made me trust the speculative in a new way, and be a little less pessimistic about the future.

How do you relate to the future?

> **LMM:** That’s incredible. I enjoy the different layers of materiality you work into the narrative process. The weather, the salt, and the sea make contact with the film and create this new texture, particularly in _Celaje_. I love to dwell in these zones of possibility—especially when they’re the result of a process that involves analogue technologies, natural elements, the reality of devastation. In this kind of situation, the only constant is change and you have to accept there’s only so much in your control as an artist. Maybe I relate to the fatalism in this.

> I believe this speculative way of working with matter, time, and the immaterial is also a way of making contact with the future. The synthesis of the metaphysical and the biochemical is a form of alchemy, and this is what I want to tap into when I sit down to write. Change, transformation, and destruction are not only essential but sacred parts of the creative process, so I try to make a habit of inviting chance, accident, and ruin into my practice as these feel like forms of speculative thinking. This is an intuitive thing, yet I am also self-conscious about it. As a teaching artist, I feel compelled to theorize the intuitive, but I find it to be a challenge: how does one describe to others through the language of practice what also feels innate?

**SGM:** Another part I love from the text by Philip is when she says, “The struggle is to reduce the gap between the experience and the expression of that experience.” [^6] That resonates _deeply_ with my work. It’s a struggle. Yet here we are. The struggle goes on. Everyday.

[^1]: See: “no existe unmundo poshuracán: Puerto Rican Art in the Wake of Hurricane Maria,” [https://whitney.org/exhibitions/no-existe](https://whitney.org/exhibitions/no-existe)
[^2]: M. NourbeSe Philip, “Interview with an Empire,” in _Assembling Alternatives: Reading Postmodern Poetries Transnationally_, ed. Romana Huk (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 2003), 195–206; see also: [https://www.are.na/block/1979981](https://www.are.na/block/1979981)
[^3]: M. NourbeSe Philip, “Discourse on the Logic of Language,” in _She Tries Her Tongue, Her Silence Softly Breaks_ (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 2015), 29–34; see also: [https://www.womensrepublic.net/english-is-a-foreign-anguish-m-nourbese-philip](https://www.womensrepublic.net/english-is-a-foreign-anguish-m-nourbese-philip)
[^4]: Curated by Nasrin Himada, Open Secret is a series of screenings, conversations, and workshops that take place at Agnes Etherington Art Centre (Kingston, ON): [https://agnes.queensu.ca/participate/talks-tours-events/open-secret-sofia-gallisa-muriente](https://agnes.queensu.ca/participate/talks-tours-events/open-secret-sofia-gallisa-muriente)
[^5]: Beta-Local is an artist-run organization in PR dedicated to fostering knowledge exchange and artistic practices.
[^6]: Philip, “Interview with an Empire,” 197.

Speaker

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Time

Lara Mimosa Montes and Sofía Gallisá Muriente discuss their respective writing and filmmaking practices, which image a Puerto Rican time and poetics characterized by intuition, contradiction, and linguistic locura (madness).

In the Lacuna

Christiana Myers is a curator, writer, educator, and cultural policy analyst based in Menahqesk/Saint John, NB. Her practice often explores physical, environmental, or institutional systems, and her PhD research in Art History through the University of Glasgow examines representations of contagion in contemporary artistic and curatorial practice.

Vampire lore typically utilizes one of two approaches to mirrors: since vampires have no souls, they can have no reflections, or they are reflected in their monstrous rather than human form. A common rationalization for this canonical device is that mirrors reflect truth rather than perception.

In his shapeshifting exhibition “VampSites” (2018–2024), Halifax-based artist Mitchell Wiebe noted the power of using fantasy and whimsy to gesture at the chaos and surrealism of real-world dynamics. “VampSites” was a parasitic funhouse that toured from the Confederation Centre Art Gallery, where it was curated by Pan Wendt, to the MacKenzie Art Gallery, The Reach Gallery Museum Abbotsford, and the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia. Complete with dark lairs, hypnotizing paintings with fantastical characters in psychedelic landscapes, and documentation from the artist’s studio and practice, it set out to do as vampires have been known to do—seduce through illusion and offer transformative passage to an uncanny future. A three-by-four-inch painting, present in varying ways in each iteration of the maximalist installation, perhaps best encapsulates Wiebe’s method: “Vampirical paintings hang from the wall to display future forms of reverse magic realism.”

Categorical characterizations and symbolism like “vampirical,” which are frequently seen in fantasy, horror, and science-fiction genres, have continuously evolved in societal contexts to serve different narratives. Often these monstrous metaphors were first invited into the domains of linguistics, visual culture, and science as a method of uniting reason with imagination to better understand, or create meaning within, the surrounding environment. Given that humans tend to reflect meaning through the lens of their own experiences, it is reasonable that intense emotions such as joy or fear would be characterized as transformed images of human likeness. These figurative depictions then multiply and distort like refractions in a hall of mirrors—itself a metaphor for evasive truth.

A foundational example of anthropomorphic symbolism in Western art history is the framework of the body politic—the metaphorical alignment of a state with an anatomical body, including when its systems are under threat of infection by elements like political unrest. The body politic metaphor has been expanded and leveraged by prevailing cultural, religious, and scientific paradigms, such as theories surrounding the origin and purpose of disease, to many ends and in many fantastical ways. In _Illness as Metaphor_ (1978) and _AIDS and Its Metaphors_ (1989), Susan Sontag outlines the many associations between physical vulnerability and social disorder, how eras of pathogenic paranoia have played into polarized politics, and how treatment has been conflated with the restoration of balance to society as a metaphorical body. Depending on cultural context, for example, vampires have emerged as shadowy icons of contagion: the feared foreigner, sin, sex, capitalism, and modernity, to name a few.

There is much to explore regarding the transmission of biological and social symptoms through symbolic representation in an era still being defined by a widespread health crisis. Contemporary rhetoric and the art that mirrors it attest to an increase of imaginative imagery consistent with Sontag’s observations. However, even if the threat of disease to the social body is both metaphorical and viscerally literal, which may compromise the membrane between truth and perception to the point of rupture, the role of illness in the body politic remains an effective example of the trajectory from fear to figurative representation to fantasy. In other words: the _rabies to raving-human-animal-hybrid to werewolf_ pipeline.

The 2022 Venice Biennale, largely curated prior to the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic but experienced by audiences with its reflection present in the frame, explored the concept of transformation in a climate of fear and centred the representation of metamorphosis among bodies, technology, and the environment. Curated by Cecilia Alemani, “The Milk of Dreams” was titled after a book by surrealist artist Leonora Carrington that describes a magical world where otherworldly characters undergo a variety of transformations. The biennale prominently featured portals to other dimensions, such as Alberta Whittle’s installation _deep dive (pause) uncoiling memory_ presented by Scotland + Venice that included a tapestry symbolizing an open portal to mortal transformation, healing from historical trauma, and resistance against anti-Blackness. Also frequently featured were works that hybridized the human form with animal, mechanical, or ecological characteristics, and that emphasized the metamorphical qualities between historical legend, future myth, and surrealism. Inuit artist Shuvinai Ashoona’s coloured-pencil drawings comprised humanoid animals, consistent with Indigenous narratives, interacting with elements of contemporary Inuit life, acknowledging the fine threshold between realities, ways of knowing, and planes of existence; while the Danish pavilion’s dystopian installation _We Walked the Earth_ by Uffe Isolotto featured hyperrealistic transhuman centauric figures.

Similarly, expanded varieties of chimerical characters, mythological stories, and portals to other worlds have populated Wiebe’s artistic practice for decades and featured prominently in “VampSites” as well as in his recent and coinciding artist-curated group show, “Third Elbow” (2024), at Saint Mary’s University Art Gallery. “Third Elbow” also featured artists Kayza DeGraff-Ford, Craig Stuart Love, Cliff Eyland, Johanna Steffen, Pam Corell, and Adam Myatt. While “VampSites” felt deeply immersive and encapsulating, “Third Elbow” seemed to take a step back, and audiences were invited to exist in two worlds at once. Paintings spilled out of their frames, a mirror frame stood as both a door and a looking-glass, and the furrowed surface of a floating plastic membrane distorted the works behind it, aside from when holes allowed the “true” image to show through.

Wiebe’s “reverse magic realism” is defined by using the fantastic to access the real. [^1] This suspension of belief stretches over documentation and direct commentary to expand art’s capacity to critically engage through the imagination inherent in its creation and contextualization. Contemporary artists may be drawn to use fantastical imagery because they recognize that other realms can be accessed by inviting legacies of meaning to reveal themselves—where these characters and narratives offer a semiotic shorthand to communicate complex ideas. It may be the acute awareness that what is produced at a given juncture will be revised and reinterpreted at ever-increasing rates—that no matter what, the viewer’s reflection on the work will be warped, so there is no reason to constrict representation. Or it may be the constant navigation of moral complexities in horrifically (sur)real and interconnected scenarios that causes efforts to tell it like it is to be, at best, flattened by literalization, and, at worst, to cause further harm. Regardless of individual motivations, if the truth that art has for so long ventured to reflect is invisible, distorted, or monstrous, then there is little to gain by attempting to measure its strangeness against fiction.

[^1]: “Painting, Performance, and the Fantastic Collide in Mitchell Wiebe’s Art,” NSCAD University, July 12, 2024, [https://nscad.ca/painting-performance-and-the-fantastic-collide-in-mitchellwiebes-art](https://nscad.ca/painting-performance-and-the-fantastic-collide-in-mitchellwiebes-art)

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Supernatural

Illness

Christiana Myers explores the vampiric as a symbol for contagion in her consideration of Mitchell Wiebe’s maximalist shapeshifting exhibition “VampSites” (2018–2024), alongside other recent chimerical imagery. 

A Vampire Walks Into a Funhouse

Karice Mitchell is a photo-based artist whose practice seeks to situate the vintage erotic publication _Players_ as a crucial marker of Black cultural production. Concerned with how the Black female body has been historically and colonially exploited, Mitchell is invested in finding restorative ways to engage with and respond to archival erotic material. She received her BFA at York University in 2019 and her MFA at the University of Waterloo in 2021. She resides on the unceded and traditional territories of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh First Nations where she is a Black Scholar Assistant Professor at the University of British Columbia.

Furqan Mohamed is a writer and educator from Tkaronto interested in all things culture, kinship, and abolition. Her work has been featured in publications such as _Canthius, This Magazine, Maisonneuve,_ and _The Local_. She is presently a graduate student at the University of Toronto.

I do not need an invitation to invoke June Jordan, but Karice Mitchell’s works as part of “Please be gentle,” a 2023 group exhibition curated by Laura Carusi at the plumb in Toronto, served as the perfect kind. Playing with visibility and obstruction, the images, lustrous and even insolent, beckon to us. I wasn’t aware of _Players_, the softcore magazine nicknamed “the Black _Playboy_,” which ran from 1973 to 2005, until seeing Mitchell’s work, much of which is rooted in this archive. But I was familiar with the wink and nod coming from Mitchell in “Please be gentle,” and throughout her work; the “iykyk” that stems from representations of Black women appearing as their authentic selves. They are Black, alive, and looking back at us. [^1] The work is both a mirror and a portal, and part of that lies in Mitchell’s invitation of the “glitch” during different stages of working with found images, providing opportunities for meaning and re-meaning to enter these photos. Using a combination of scanning, cropping, and digital effects, as both the artist and sometimes subject in the work, Mitchell refuses restrictive and shallow interpretations of Black femininity and sexuality and invites us to consider and rejoice in self-expression, reclamation, and acts of adornment and self-care.

Mitchell, now an assistant professor at the University of British Columbia, discovered the flatbed scanner toward the end of her undergraduate studies and, while developing her own Black feminist politic, was taken by the fact that a seemingly mundane office object could be the bed of so much possibility. We chatted over Zoom, with Mitchell in Vancouver and me in Toronto, and discussed her process, sourcing her archive, the work and power dynamics of looking and consuming, especially when there are competing translations of an image, and seeing ourselves in public.

**Karice Mitchell:** I used to make trips to the BMV at Dundas Square [in Toronto]. I’d go to the back, where it’s all 18+ stuff, and go through vintage magazines, thinking a lot about collage and how I could integrate that into my work. I stumbled across this one particular magazine, _Players_, and started cutting them up. I wasn’t aware of the historical significance of this publication in particular, until the tail-end of my master’s. I had been conscious of the rhetoric around the dangerous hypersexualization of the Black female body, and something within this publication was challenging me to think more broadly about representation, about what a Black feminine sexuality could look like. I was intrigued. Flipping through the pages, the images felt familiar and familial. There was amazing beauty, and this kind of agency that felt alive in this publication.

> **Furqan Mohamed:** During my visit to the plumb, _Untitled (Woman in Gold)_ (2022) evoked that familial quality for me. She looks like my aunties, comfortable in her living room. It appeared to me as though she had a child in her lap, with your signature digital manipulation perhaps inviting me to see what I wanted.

**KM:** _[Gently corrects with a small, knowing smile.]_ It’s a doll! That’s an image that surprises people. They’re like, “That’s an image from an erotic magazine?” She was a centrefold model in one of the issues. She has her natural hair in this bun. The pearls, the gold. And there’s something about the interior design in some of these images, the gaudy, tacky furniture in the back that’s comforting. I was [also] thinking a lot about how blurring could be this device to disrupt a particular gaze.

> **FM:** Do you arrive at an image first and think, “I want to play around with this,” or is it the tool of the scanner that drives you, and you want to see what you can do with it?

**KM:** I think it’s a combination of both. Whatever I’m considering at the time will probably yield a particular methodology. With the work specifically at the plumb, I was motivated by ideas of adornment and beauty. So looking through images, I was trying to isolate these moments: cropping as a device to make something small, or to—theoretically or conceptually—make it really, really big. With _Intimacy Is_ (2023) [my installation at BAF Gallery, Vancouver], glitch and process were more at the forefront of my mind. “I like this tool, how can I, materially, play around with it?” So it’s a dance of both. What does this body of work require? What am I thinking about?

> **FM:** _Intimacy Is_, to me, exemplifies this, and all the considerations you’re making when exhibiting these images. In terms of methodology, I’m really intrigued by using blurring as a kind of refusal, as a tool of disruption. How did you move from more defined outlines or close-ups of a body to more illegible images?

**KM:** I was having difficulties in my practice, and I think that body of work was a way to negotiate some of the concerns that were being voiced intra-communally. I was thinking a lot about who was in the gallery space. Who is looking at these women? We know that [art] institutions are historically colonial, white spaces. I had this level of anxiety about these images sitting in Vancouver, where there aren’t as many Black people to receive them. What are the ethics of a found image? When you’re making these women anonymous, are you maybe reinforcing something, or is that working against some of your ideas around agency? Can you even negotiate agency within the field of image-making?

> **FM:** Your questions were in some way answered last year, when you faced a level of censorship during the 2023 Capture Photography Festival. You’re also acutely aware of the limitations of photography in representing Black life, like with Kodak, for example, and the origins of film and its relationship to Black skin.

**KM:** The site that I was originally meant to show at [for Capture] is owned by BC Hydro, and they didn’t want to do it. While that was happening, I was thinking about my motivations and being drawn to _Players_, to this archive of images.

I took images of myself using a lens filter attached to my [film] camera, replicating some of the mediation and process- driven work that I do with my digital work. I thought, using my own body as a means to deflect gaze, or implicating my body in a similar process, what potential does that have? That filter, for me, provided the opportunity for intervention. I was being censored while putting my own body into my work. So I thought, “Well, you know what, I’m not going to give you anything then. I’m going to abstract these images so you get nothing.” I think that was a way to take up some agency within image-making and have some sort of control, maybe, over the way that people are receiving the imagery; whether you are able to make out anything, that’s all you’re going to get. I was reading _Glitch Feminism_ by Legacy Russell at the time and was heavily influenced by this work, and wanted to establish visual “failure” as an aesthetic praxis and methodology. [^2]

> **FM:** _take care_ (2021–2022), another public installation, is one of your only works to feature any text, which you thought necessary given its prominent placement on the side of the Hamilton Artists Inc. building. The image, featuring red nails against dark skin with a kind of red under-garment to match, feels intimate.

**KM:** I can’t just put these images in public without underscoring my intention of what I’m trying to do. I thought, well, what if I use text to be that tool to call in people. It is an intimate image. Having darker skin in a public space was really important to me.

> **FM:** I always come back to the nails. And that emphasis on care just had me thinking, you know, whenever I’m not feeling like myself, I just need to get my nails done. I’m not depressed… I just need my hair done.

**KM:** Beauty… it’s not without cultural or political significance. As a Black woman, it’s crucial for my sense of being, and I do think about what certain visual cues signal, when I’m in certain spaces. I’m the only Black woman in my department. I dress in all black and my go-to is these loud, click-clacky nails. Visually, I do take up a particular space. It does something for me. And it does something to people.

Around the beginning of the pandemic, there were conversations around isolation. We were separated from each other, and it was important to me to have this call to Black people, Black women and femmes. To ask how communal care translates to care for the self, intimacy for the self. Audre Lorde says self-preservation is a political tool, an act of political warfare. [^3] We’re in these systems that literally don’t want to see us alive, that don’t value our lives. We need to reclaim these narratives, to be very intentional in our sensibilities around care.

> **FM:** Beauty is not this frivolous thing. I think because we’re used to capitalism narrowing our scope and our view of what’s possible, people often reduce beauty and beauty practices to an individual practice, but they’re linked to this collective history. It’s not a luxury, as Saidiya Hartman says, “it is a way of creating possibility in the space of enclosure, a radical act of subsistence, an embrace of our terribleness, a transfiguration of the given. It is a will to adorn, a proclivity for the baroque, and the love of _too much_.” [^4]

**KM:** That will to adorn… Adornment is a way to exercise subjectivity, to reclaim agency. [^5] It’s deep and it goes beyond superficiality. We feel it, and when we encounter some of these images, we recognize it. I think a lot of other Black women can look at these images and recognize the significance—what it means to adorn oneself, but also to see the range of skin tone, texture, and hair.

They felt like my grandmother, my mother, my aunties. These women [in _Players_] would wear really long acrylic nails, that would curve, and pearl jewelry, gold, bamboo earrings. And that always stuck out to me, this authentic way of Black women adorning themselves.

My grandparents were born and raised in Jamaica, and they moved to the UK. When a lot of our people are displaced, or move, gold is the thing they pass down. My grandmother kept her gold jewellery. Black babies are born into these rituals of adornment, of affirmation. When you’re born, you get a necklace with your name on it. I was thinking a lot about these rituals when looking at and responding to these images.

> **FM:** When I was at the plumb, I was taking photos of the work and realized I could fully, literally see myself reflected in the frame. And I thought about the more figurative ways I saw myself, in the close-ups of these women. As someone who veils, who wears a hijab, I’m also playing with access, I think. You don’t see me all of the time. I looked at some of the women in the images and thought, “Oh my god… twin!” Which may be a little funny to some, a hijabi identifying with the art whose source material is a softcore magazine. But the frame that holds that close-up is an extension of the work. And like a hijab, it’s a limit, a boundary. It says, “You can’t go any further than this,” which invites some questions, naturally. “Where is the rest of her? Am I entitled to that? Why?”

> Tina Campt, who also approaches images with a level of intimacy in her writing, tells us in _Listening to Images_ (2017) that we can’t ignore the context in which images are produced, and to think about what’s happening outside the frame. [^6] Your diptychs, like _Untitled Diptych (Woman in Pink Bikini)_ (2022), especially with the brightly-coloured frame, suggest these questions for me.

**KM:** I love that invoking of the hijab. These are the considerations I’m making with the frame, or the way the images exist in space. Plexiglass is shiny; it has a kind of seductive quality. I want the images to take on a visual seduction, and plexiglass has this commercial quality too. The frame is coloured, and along with the glass, it serves as a means of redirecting and disrupting gaze. I’m always thinking about access, and access to these images, because they’re no longer in production. There is a scarcity, but I’m not sharing the entire image. That’s a way to mitigate consumption, and to maybe try to dictate the way that these images are being consumed. You can have this image, but only so much. That’s what we’re willing to give within this institution or in this gallery space. The diptych form, for me, did come from thinking about what you said, and about “the emptiness” between two images. What is the potential there? What could be read between them? With my exhibition last April, [“matter of becoming”] at Franz Kaka in Toronto, I set out to consider diptychs more, thinking about what pairing images could do, particularly bodies and landscapes.

An image of a body paired with [an image of] a body of water may not immediately make you think they should be placed together, but by doing this, I am calling to and referencing a particular history. A lot of the spreads in _Players_ happen in these public, natural spaces. On a beach or in a forest landscape, with the natural world positioned as a background for forging a kind of subjectivity. I was drawn to these images, thinking about landscape and the role it plays in my life, being here on the West Coast and close to a body of water and again, what potential that has to do with my own subjectivity.

> **FM:** Black people and water…

**KM:** Black people and water! It’s a site that is so fraught, right? It’s filled with this horror, and at the same time, because UBC is right on the coast, there’s a beach that I’d go to after being in my studio. I would go for a swim and just float in the water. When I first started, I had this anxiety, and then it would sort of fizzle out, eventually, and there would be this peaceful moment. Being within this vast sea of water was kind of hypnotizing. Being in Vancouver, there aren’t a lot of us Black folks here, but there is something keeping us here. It’s made me curious, and a lot of people have mentioned the landscape, access to the coastline, to water.

When I was in Los Angeles recently, I saw this one exhibition at the California African American Museum (CAAM) that used archives to trace Black people’s history partaking in leisure at the beach. There are these historical all-Black beach clubs, and archival images of Black people just having a good time on the beach. These communities were essentially policed out and pushed out. Access to leisure, access to taking up this kind of space, on coastlines, by bodies of water, is a political thing. And tracing those histories are really important, so going to Los Angeles and seeing that exhibition confirmed that for me. There will always be this call to the water—it’s fraught but it’s also healing.

> **FM:** My family is from Somalia, and back home, water is a part of everyday life. You see yourself in it all the time, but here, water or access to water is a treat or vacation. It’s often pricey, very policed, or there are tickets, permits, rules, and regulations. So we’re separated from it, and there is this foreignness or exoticness attached to it.

> Some of the work you exhibited at Franz Kaka features frames that are pitch black, and other works are close-ups of women’s bodies between or beside bodies of water. We know that land is often reflected back to us as feminized. Black women, Black feminine bodies are also often portrayed as “exotic.”

**KM:** Coming off my work for Capture, after facing censorship, I was sitting with these messages, that Black women needed to be policed out of public space, that Black women showing up for the sake of themselves does not belong in public space. Even though we did end up with an alternative venue for the work, it still left me with this worry that people would continue to respond to the work in that way. But there’s no other way for me to exist. Looking at these images, Black women were existing in this almost utopic, beautiful way in public spaces and their subjectivity isn’t hindered by the fact that they’re in public.

> **FM:** The one work with the woman in a pair of pleasers, paired with the concrete building and tree, is my favourite from “matter of becoming.” You can make her out, wearing those shoes, of course, but it’s clear it’s also just as much about the cityscape she’s in.

**KM:** I was thinking about the “glitch” and legibility, about the Black form emerging and retreating, and emerging again within public space while considering my own role within the institution. We often negotiate, as Black people, how much you emerge, through things like code-switching in the way you speak and dress, in order to survive. Featuring a body that is emerging, through this glitch, to me, is a visual example of this negotiation.

Glitch and legibility, in my mind, work together. There are so many images and caricatures of Black people that have no depth, no substance. What’s really important about the “glitch” is that it’s an opportunity to have a multiplicity of self as it relates to marginalized bodies, [^7] and is so crucial in countering historical contexts that try to flatten marginalized bodies.

With the handheld scanner, you don’t know what the result is going to be. You’re working a little with the unknown, doing this kind of experimental thing, and you have to fail. You sometimes get error codes that pop up, and I was leaning into that, playing within those moments of error. You roll the scanner over something, and then have to go back and forth, but that suggests something, too. It’s that “failure” that allows for images to be read within other framings, other possibilities.

[^1]: June Jordan, “Who Look at Me,” in _Who Look at Me_ (New York City: Thomas Y. Crowell Co., 1969); see also: https://www.junejordan.net/from-who-look-at-me.html
[^2]: Legacy Russell, _Glitch Feminism: A Manifesto_ (London: Verso Books, 2020), 17–37.
[^3]: Audre Lorde, _A Burst of Light and Other Essays_ (Ithaca: Firebrand Books, 1988).
[^4]: Saidiya Hartman quoted in Christina Sharpe, “Beauty Is a Method,” _e-flux_ 105, December 2019, https://www.e-flux.com/journal/105/303916/beautyis-a-method
[^5]: Library of Congress and sponsoring body American Folklife Center, “The Will to Adorn: Reflections on African American Identity and the Aesthetics of Dress,” recorded on January 30, 2013, video, 1:01:20, https://www.loc.gov/item/2021689026
[^6]: Tina M. Campt, _Listening to Images_ (Durham: Duke University Press, 2017).
[^7]: Russell, _Glitch Feminism_, 17–37.

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Photography

Race

Sexuality

Furqan Mohamed writes of Karice Mitchell’s photographs as both a “mirror and a portal”—in conversation, the two consider how Mitchell’s tools of formal intervention, like flatbed scanning, cropping, blurring, filters, and digital effects, seize the visual negotiation of Black femininity, sexuality, and adornment, to disrupt consumptive and censoring gazes.

Black, Alive, and Looking Back at You: In Conversation With Karice Mitchell

Joshua Segun-Lean’s writing has appeared in _Republic Journal, The Brooklyn Rail_, and elsewhere.

Tiffany Sia is an artist, filmmaker, and writer who was born in Hong Kong and currently lives and works in New York. Her films have screened at TIFF Toronto International Film Festival, MoMA Doc Fortnight, New York Film Festival, Flaherty Film Seminar and elsewhere. Her essays have appeared in _Film Quarterly, October_ and _LUX Moving Image_. Sia’s first collection of essays _On and Off-Screen Imaginaries_ was published by Primary Information in 2024.

The following is an edited conversation with the filmmaker and writer Tiffany Sia, whose short film _The Sojourn_ (2024) had its Canadian première at this year's Toronto International Film Festival, as a part of the “Wavelengths” program. Our conversation considers Hong Kong cinema’s relationship to resistance, history, and place in and through the experience of exile—themes Sia explores in her most recent book, _On and Off-Screen Imaginaries_ (2024).

> **Joshua Segun-Lean:** In “Phantasms of Dissent,” the second essay in your recent book _On and Off-Screen Imaginaries_, you discuss two films by the Hong Kong Documentary Filmmakers— a filmmaking collective that has stayed anonymous since 2019, in resistance to the Chinese government’s censorship. These two films, _Inside the Red Brick Wall_ (2020) and _Taking Back the Legislature_ (2020), document the 2019 Hong Kong protests. In your analysis, you emphasize the affective and somatic dimensions of the protests, highlighting the moment when the sense of collective power generated by occupying The Hong Kong Polytechnic University—as seen in _Inside the Red Brick Wall_—becomes one of collective vulnerability, as protesters suspect that they’re being trapped. I’ve been thinking about this scene in relation to political theorist Hagar Kotef’s writing on the relationship between mobility and political spaces—specifically how “the moving individual body often serves as a metaphor, a symbol, and a substitute for the body politic.” [^1]

**Tiffany Sia:** “Phantasms of Dissent” points less to the body as a collective symbol, representative of a nation or ethnic identity, and more to how bodies become animated by the spirit of politics and History (with a big H), through their spatial relations to state power. It is what these bodies do and where they are. It is in halls of governance and legislative spaces where sovereignty expresses its power through ritual, pageantry, and performance, and how the protest attempts to derive its power by taking back such architecture, interrupting public order and radically deforming state rituals. In describing this, I am referencing the Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm, who, in _The Invention of Tradition_ (1983), writes about how so much of revolution, in its inversion of political pageantry, is itself part of the political ritual of state power.

In _Taking Back the Legislature_—as protesters occupied Hong Kong’s Legislative Council Complex—these spatial relations are extended virtually, captured on camera and circulated to a live audience. Similarly, in _Inside the Red Brick Wall_, images of dissent become powerful sites of public memory. Yet, as you mentioned, a fundamental paradox takes place—one that is perhaps inherent to postcolonial history and its deadlocked futures. Even in taking back these legislative halls and other spaces of state power, after arriving at a necessary and hard-fought turning point, the group is left to question, “What now in a place like this?” They realize they are trapped. These same halls—and the fortress of the university campus—hold colonial legacies and become the very architecture that ensnares them into the asphyxiating embrace of a police kettle. While such acts enter a repertoire of revolution, the protesters’ siege is used against them.

Remaining masked and anonymous, the Hong Kong protesters appear as a phantasmic, collective protagonist. When captured on video, their “porousness” (to use Marshall McLuhan’s term for thinking about the mediated body in the digital age) only heightens their vulnerability, as evidenced in the risk of revealed faces, and the broader concern over the films’ circulation under the gaze of the surveillance state. These images live on to haunt their subjects. What lives on in state narratives co-opts and perverts their legacy.

The theme of revolution at the heart of state rituals reveals the construction of national memory. As policies and lawfare globally target dissent and repress social movements, national anthems like those of the US and China are paradoxically premised on revolutionary change and civic engagement from the battlefield to the streets. Such restless pasts are not easily put to rest. If revolution is cyclical, perhaps it mainly returns in an attempt to resolve itself over and over again. Put differently, revolution’s indeterminacy, its history of failure, lull, retreat, creates the conditions for its recurrence.

> **JS:** Further on in your book, your interest in how revolutionary pasts become foundational to state narratives is worked through cinema’s own relationship to pastness—to the encumbrances and escapes nostalgia makes possible—as well as cinema’s often complex relationship with the state. But you also show how, specifically in the context of contemporary Hong Kong cinema, both the past and the state as seemingly stable phenomena are brought closer to, and complicated by, “minor” histories. These histories, marked by synthesis, diffusion, and impermanence, reveal “aftermaths and recollections that cannot be put to rest.” [^2] To what extent are these residues a function of, on the one hand, the desire to mourn Hong Kong (as you explore in your 2019 publication _Salty Wet_) and, on the other, the inability to locate the exact moment in which Hong Kong, either as abstraction or concrete reality, became an object of loss? You also take up the latter function in your _Too Salty Too Wet_ (2020) publication.

**TS:** Part of this desire to escape from a past-bound, or even object-bound, position is a desire to cease mourning a place as lost, to stop being undone by it all, and to no longer be caught in the dead ends of looking back. Instead, for _On and Off- Screen Imaginaries_, I became interested in what historical events and cinema share: contingency. This contingency forces a reckoning with multiplicity and contradiction, with the unstoppable and complicated flow of events. While this interest may be born from a sense of personal loss, it gestures to broad political realities, and how politics and history are never discretely compartmentalized in how we live them. These shapes of loss appear in one’s personal life or one’s family history, though I do not really go into any of that in my work—save for a few recent exceptions. I will not even touch the personal publicly (at least not until I’m older).

These emotional currents surrounding my work guide their sensibilities and their ethics, but I also don’t think the personal needs to be explicit to properly elucidate its relationship to politics. I think we need to go further than merely accepting the aphorism that the personal is political. We need to demonstrate the different forms this relationship takes. So many of my aesthetic decisions arrive at the modulation of what is shown and what isn’t, but despite this obscuring and exposing, it’s amazing how much certain motifs and feelings are absolutely undeniable, and are felt no matter how hard I might try to stop myself from communicating them. They find their way. They are always informing the stakes of the political, atomizing and shaping our lives in difficult ways. As an artist interested in visual rendition as a kind of historiography, I am interested in tracing what affect accompanies events and histories—this is the most elusive yet perhaps most critical project of rendering historical time in aesthetic form.

Cinema as a context and a form became an interesting way for me to think about the cathection of desire, of politics, and of the personal, as an at-once shared feeling, projected image, and political unconscious. It is on-screen that nostalgia is at its most convenient. Consider, for instance, Hong Kong through its golden age of cinema, which (depending on the generation you ask) spans the distinct eras of the ’80s to ’90s, or the ’60s to ’70s. These periods are the most coherent and cohesive in film—tragically and tantalizingly calcified. Looking back upon them will not change our present, nor will it help us understand that time. In reality, history’s shapes are harder to pin down, and its events elude any single telling. It is as film theorist Bill Nichols— via Fredric Jameson—elaborates regarding the use of re-enactment in documentary and non-fiction filmmaking:

> Questions of magnitude are always questions that run not so much against the grain as beyond it. […] They signal, through hysteria on the one hand and bureaucratic numbness on the other, the radical difference between discursive system (language) and experience, or its aggregation, history. “History is not a text, not a narrative, master or otherwise. […] History is what hurts, it is what refuses desire and sets inexorable limits to individual as well as collective praxis.” A magnitude of excess remains. It is a specter haunting what can be said or written. [^3]

There is a tendency to turn to aesthetic forms to rediscover the spirit of a period, as we often do when we look back at Hong Kong cinema’s golden age(s)—or to draw on a more widely known example, French cinema of 1968. We seek, in these, a historiography that fulfils our desire for narrative cohesion. A cohesion that idealizes the past and obscures its continuity in the present. But, as Nichols says, there is a magnitude of excess that remains. It will always resist the tropes ready-made through nostalgia. This is at the very core of my practice and was certainly at the heart of _On and Off-Screen Imaginaries_.

> **JS:** I’m reminded of a few passages early in the book in which you describe the immediate aftermath of the passing of Hong Kong’s National Security Law in 2020. Intended to curtail forms of expression deemed “threatening” by the state, the law creates an increasingly unnerving climate of suspicion and panic among cultural workers, many of whom are your peers. You go on to describe how in order to determine levels of personal exposure to surveillance and criminalization, artists and filmmakers keep tabs on each other, judging their relative safety by the relative safety of others. There is a sense here of how exceptional circumstances sometimes demand new modes of assessing and sharing risk, and of communicating with each other when everyday speech becomes fraught. Strange, portentous gaps appear between what is said and what is understood. Language is displaced by, to return to Nichols, a magnitude of excess. I wonder if this displacement, and perhaps a distrust in what can be conveyed in language and in acts of translation, informed your decision to leave much of the Mandarin in your recent film, _The Sojourn_, without subtitles?

**TS:** Two nights ago, I went to the cinema. Johnnie To was there in person to introduce _Exiled_ (2006), the first film in his retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art. He spoke in Cantonese and was accompanied by a translator. Upon stepping up to the podium to introduce his films, To said something along the lines of: “These films are a testament to my immense affection and respect for cinema.” I went to the cinema alone, the way I like it. And though it was full, it felt incredibly intimate to share the open secret of a common dialect within an English-language space. In a joke, he alluded to the possibility that there were state informants likely present among the audience that evening. That observation—in its sardonic nuance, at once warning and mocking—went over the heads of most of the New York audience once translated into English.

Something came over me when I heard him speak on-stage in Cantonese—I wept. Accompanying him in the room was this sense of a place that I knew, of a Hong Kong that is either painfully distant to me or does not exist anymore. That notion suddenly felt palpable in the cinema. And it was through language, and his physical presence as one of the most important auteurs of cinema (and especially of Hong Kong cinema), that in that moment, I became overwhelmed.

Despite its title, To’s _Exiled_ is not a political film. But perhaps true to that generation of Hong Kong filmmakers, To speaks volumes through euphemism and allusion. He is also more direct than the peers of his generation (especially when speaking in person). And the decision to open a retrospective of his through a film titled _Exiled_ says more than he could or was able to explain in words on-stage or even on-screen.

I had a similar experience when I watched Chan Tze-woon’s _Blue Island_ (2022) in the same theatre. Tze-woon and I are friends, and when I saw him outside the cinema, I burst into tears and walked away because I couldn’t face him. I don’t cry often! But perhaps in the absence of return, Hong Kong has remained vivid, or perhaps was only ever vivid, in cinema. I feel most connected to it in the cinema.

I grew up in a multi-dialect home, a fact that perhaps marks the “no place”- ness of my family. Besides Cantonese and Mandarin, which I understand, my parents speak Shanghainese and Hokkien but never taught them to me. These were the dialects my parents used to shield their adult secrets. Unlike Mandarin and Cantonese, Shanghainese and Hokkien are colloquial and have no standard written forms. They are alive mostly in sound. Even when these dialects are written with Chinese characters, their distinct patterns can only be approximated, leaving out an excess of meaning that instead persists in the domains of flirting, hustling, clever quips, sarcastic one-liners, whining, or other forms of casual conversation. It is difficult to translate all their tone, humour, and nuance. Dialect, and its ongoing improvisations and customs, resists formal rendition.

_The Sojourn_, in its idiosyncratic subtitling, pushes toward this unknowing and ambiguity. I wanted the viewer to rely on the sound of someone’s voice, to watch for hand movements and small shifts in facial expressions. The English intertitles burned upon the image offer only a translation that emphasizes its own partiality.

> **JS:** Do you think cinema’s capacity to preserve these forms of familial and cultural memory—that are, for many displaced peoples, bound up with vanished or disjointed pasts—is related to its capacity to hold, or conjure, imagined futures? In other words, does cinema have, for you, a utopic quality?

**TS:** It’s so interesting you brought up utopia—this came up in a separate conversation just a week ago. I think the promise of utopia is dangerous, and often about concealment, diversion, and obfuscation. For the diaspora, the draw of the return to the homeland is a constant fantasy: a vessel for belonging, unification, and restoration that is fraught, and whose tacit implications obscure the violence of willing that vision into reality. It’s no coincidence that the fantasy of the homeland is often materialized as an ethnonational political project. This impossibility of return can only realize itself through violent means. Cinema’s utopic quality should also be approached with caution, for different reasons. Sure, it is a place for a kind of collectivity that sutures loss and memory, but these moving images are temporary. They are projected. They remain as light. We can orient ourselves to them, but we do not enter them. This—the tantalizing nearness of film’s utopian promise, its elusive political horizon—is the tragic irony of cinema. Yet, in contrast to nostalgia or utopia, it is the ineffable and the elusive already present in vernacular forms, in dialect, and in everyday life that I am interested in getting closer to.

[^1]: Hagar Kotef, _Movement and the Ordering of Freedom_ (Durham: Duke University Press, 2015).
[^2]: Tiffany Sia, _On and Off-Screen Imaginaries_ (New York: Primary Information, 2024), 110.
[^3]: Bill Nichols, _Representing Reality: Issues and Concepts in Documentary_ (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991), 231.

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Joshua Segun-Lean and Tiffany Sia discuss a Hong Kong cinema of dissent against the paradox of state narratives that use nostalgic cinema to project revolutionary pasts at the same time as they brutally surveil protestors’ images and bodies in the present. 

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