Technology

Politics

International

Drawing

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

lg_C159_TSUROIYA.jpeg

md_C159_TSUROIYA.jpeg

sm_C159_TSUROIYA.jpeg

thumbnail_C159_TSUROIYA.jpeg

C159_TSUROIYA.jpeg

C159_Tsuroiya.pdf

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

lg_C158_JONES.jpeg

md_C158_JONES.jpeg

sm_C158_JONES.jpeg

thumbnail_C158_JONES.jpeg

C158_JONES.jpeg

C158_Jones.pdf

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.

1.jpg

2.jpg

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)



lg_Untitled design.jpg

md_Untitled design.jpg

sm_Untitled design.jpg

thumbnail_Untitled design.jpg

C158_Sheppard

C158_Sheppard.pdf

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

lg_C157_Davalia.jpg

md_C157_Davalia.jpg

sm_C157_Davalia.jpg

thumbnail_C157_Davalia.jpg

C157_Davalia.jpg

C157_Davila.pdf

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]

Salah S1.jpg

Salah S2.jpg

_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.

C157_Salah.pdf

Memory

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

lg_C157_Salah_T3.jpg

md_C157_Salah_T3.jpg

sm_C157_Salah_T3.jpg

thumbnail_C157_Salah_T3.jpg

C157_Salah_T3.jpg

Composition: give up your own

sm_Mercer_BUNDL_April 15-May 15, 2025_mobile.jpg

thumbnail_Mercer_BUNDL_April 15-May 15, 2025_mobile.jpg

Mercer_BUNDL_April 15-May 15, 2025_mobile.jpg

lg_Mercer_BUNDL_April 15-May 15, 2025_banner.jpg

md_Mercer_BUNDL_April 15-May 15, 2025_banner.jpg

sm_Mercer_BUNDL_April 15-May 15, 2025_banner.jpg

thumbnail_Mercer_BUNDL_April 15-May 15, 2025_banner.jpg

Mercer_BUNDL_April 15-May 15, 2025_banner.jpg

Mercer 1

thumbnail_TheNewGallery_Web1_JanAprilJune2025_SizeB.jpg

TheNewGallery_Web1_JanAprilJune2025_SizeB.jpg

lg_TheNewGallery_Web1_JanAprilJune2025_SizeA.jpg

md_TheNewGallery_Web1_JanAprilJune2025_SizeA.jpg

sm_TheNewGallery_Web1_JanAprilJune2025_SizeA.jpg

thumbnail_TheNewGallery_Web1_JanAprilJune2025_SizeA.jpg

TheNewGallery_Web1_JanAprilJune2025_SizeA.jpg

New Gallery

thumbnail_CONTACT_April14-May14_SizeB.png

CONTACT_April14-May14_SizeB.png

md_CONTACT_Apr14-May14_SizeA.png

sm_CONTACT_Apr14-May14_SizeA.png

thumbnail_CONTACT_Apr14-May14_SizeA.png

CONTACT_Apr14-May14_SizeA.png

Contact 1

thumbnail_CMAG_IF2025_2.png

CMAG_IF2025_2.png

md_CMAG_IF2025_1.png

sm_CMAG_IF2025_1.png

thumbnail_CMAG_IF2025_1.png

CMAG_IF2025_1.png

Images

md_Movil_CEP_Digital-Ad-2_20250319 (1).jpg

sm_Movil_CEP_Digital-Ad-2_20250319 (1).jpg

thumbnail_Movil_CEP_Digital-Ad-2_20250319 (1).jpg

Movil_CEP_Digital-Ad-2_20250319 (1).jpg

md_Movil_CEP_Digital Ad 1_20250314.jpg

sm_Movil_CEP_Digital Ad 1_20250314.jpg

thumbnail_Movil_CEP_Digital Ad 1_20250314.jpg

Movil_CEP_Digital Ad 1_20250314.jpg

Movil

lg_C160_Cover.jpg

md_C160_Cover.jpg

sm_C160_Cover.jpg

thumbnail_C160_Cover.jpg

C160_Cover.jpg

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

lg_155_EURICH.jpg

md_155_EURICH.jpg

sm_155_EURICH.jpg

thumbnail_155_EURICH.jpg

155_EURICH.jpg

155_Eurich.pdf

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. 


lg_155_BOAKYE.jpg

md_155_BOAKYE.jpg

sm_155_BOAKYE.jpg

thumbnail_155_BOAKYE.jpg

155_BOAKYE.jpg

155_Boakye.pdf

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.




spirit-flesh-soul-icon

​​​​​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.


lg_Untitled (2000 × 1500 px).jpg

md_Untitled (2000 × 1500 px).jpg

sm_Untitled (2000 × 1500 px).jpg

thumbnail_Untitled (2000 × 1500 px).jpg

C_OR_DEFREITAS_4

Psychology

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Community

issue-149-p45-50.pdf

Critique

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

Ongoing Legacies of Transmisogyny

TJ Shin is an artist and writer based in Los Angeles. Their writing has been published in Active Cultures, Asia Art Archive, _Mousse Magazine_, Vera List Center for Art and Politics, and more.

Composed of six photographs, Yong Soon Min’s _Defining Moments_ (1992) connects crucial moments in political history to key dates in her life as a South Korean–born American artist, curator, organizer, and professor emeritus at the University of California, Irvine (UCI). The coinciding dates are: 1953, which marked the end of the Korean War, establishing the division of North and South Korea, the death of Joseph Stalin and a shift toward liberalization in Soviet leadership, and Min’s year of birth; April 19, 1960, the date of major student-led demonstrations in the First Republic of South Korea that led to dictator Syngman Rhee’s resignation, events that Min witnessed as a child; May 18, 1980, the Gwangju Uprising and massacre of South Korean students demonstrating against martial law, which Min describes as an “awakening of her political consciousness”; and April 29, 1992, the Los Angeles uprising and unrest in Koreatown after the beating of Rodney King by the Los Angeles Police Department, which happened around the same time as Min's birthday. [^1]

The political events Min names and defines, varied and disparate in geopolitical regions and cultural histories, propose a conjunction between historical time and lived experience of the Cold War that is simultaneously discrete and distributed in terms of its spatial contours and diachronic outcome. In _Specters of Marx_ (1994), a series of lectures presented at the University of California, Riverside in 1993, philosopher Jacques Derrida describes a “ghostly presence”—a _spectre_—that haunts Marxist thought and history. In the wake of communism’s collapse, the rise of liberal democracy and the expansion of global free markets in the post–Cold War era led many to perceive these developments as what political scientist Francis Fukuyama called the “end of history”—the final stage of communism, where freedom became increasingly equated with the marketplace. [^2]

Challenging the foreclosure of Marxism, Derrida argues that the Marxist inheritance is not simply a historical event or perspective one is given, but an invocation to name and disavow the histories that exist “as much _in front of us as before us_.” [^3] This appeal to forgotten pasts as much as to the futures to come forms a political pact to which we are pledged—a process of injunction—that establishes the present scene as a newly founded _place_ and _time_. In other words, this injunction renders historical time contingent and politically indeterminate, creating the conditions for it to be reimagined and reconstituted. _Defining Moments_ can thus be understood in doubled terms: definitive moments representing a historical reality, or a proposition to insist on the moments yet to come, defining what follows in history.

The spectre—the haunting of unresolved ideological presence—returns across disparate places and disjointed times, reappearing in the strange lapse between generations and effects, even if its institutional form dissolves in the purported “end of history.” Its repetition is, therefore, never self-identical and its visitation is always different in appearance. What historical scenes did Min revisit in her work, invoking this repetitive return? What does her frequentation of the past reveal about that experience of convocation and the task it carries? Min’s posthumous exhibition _KISSSSS_ (2024) at the UCI Contemporary Art Center (CAC), on view from October 5 to December 14, 2024, explored such questions of inheritance and its effects. It presented her past works and last commission: _Both Sides Now_ (2018), featuring five print collages; _Still/Incessant_ (2018/2024), comprising five handbound artist books alongside an archival mural print; and _KISSSSS_, dated as “unfinished” due to Min’s passing before its completion.

Collected during her travels to the Joint Security Area (JSA) in South Korea and North Korea in the ’90s, _Both Sides Now_ features tourist postcards that present the two perspectives of the Korean border. The two images are systematically spliced and reassembled into a singular reconstruction, resulting in a perspectival fullness characterized by a distended landscape or dispersed timescale. Subjects appear disbanded in protest; national guards encircle the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ); a ceasefire treaty remains perpetually in negotiation—suggesting how war, and its exceptional violence, increasingly occupied by spatial and temporal logic, becomes a habitual or "temperamental" condition in the context of the Korean War, where North and South Korea are still technically at war. [^4]

The backs of the two postcards together feature the phrase “post/post/card/card,” but this could also be read as a double entendre: a “post-post” condition or a late-stage periodization of war, echoing what scholar Jodi Kim calls the “_protracted afterlife_ of the Cold War.” [^5] The splicing pattern of the photo collage is reminiscent of SMPTE colour bars, used in analogue video production in the ’60s to early aughts to test the standardization of picture and sound in broadcast transmission. This structure, created to meet the demands of global distribution and immediacy beyond their sites of production, underscores the sense of “now” reflected in the work’s title. The perpetual state of the Korean War, combined with the demand for its image circulation, highlights the limits of translatability and communicability whereby partial and disputed perspectives are redirected and spliced to form a dyadic image of North and South Korea.


One of the postcards—an image of the negotiating table in Panmunjom where the 1953 Korean Armistice Agreement was signed by representatives of China, North Korea, and the United States, putting into force a ceasefire and cessation of hostilities—serves as the sole subject of the book _Still/Incessant_. The image is repeated across the pages, with each successive page becoming progressively redder until the contours of the negotiating table gradually merge with the background, until the object and landscape unify into a single red image. The final spread features a fully realized red backdrop. 

Scholar Christine Hong describes, via cultural theorist Raymond Williams, the longue durée of the Korean War as a “structure of feeling” [^6] whereby peace itself is “agnostic—profoundly militarized and perilous.” In _Still/Incessant_, Min analyzes the consequences of this conceptual elision of “peace” and “state violence” on representation, as an organizing structure of aesthetics of politics that regulates what is visible and invisible. This delimitation of perceptual and political experience operates through modal distinction—variations in intensity and degrees of resemblance to a determined object or concept—where sense and meaning _incessantly_ extend like a sequence of cause and effect or a progression of one degree of red to a second degree of red. Consequently, the affective-aesthetic distinction between the negotiating table, the demilitarized zone of Panmunjom whereby peace is enacted and war is waged, and the red backdrop dissolves as historical norms intensify and conceptual differences fade in this representational order.

Whereas _Both Sides Now_ and _Still/Incessant_ examine the limits of historical representation and periodization that accrete the present into geopolitical convention or genre, Min’s last and unfinished work, _KISSSSS_, produces a different social reality. This multimedia installation features 14 photographic prints, two documentary photographs, and seven brick stations with research notes. The prints on the wall depict two or more figures embracing and kissing, their heads wrapped in international flags including those of China, South Korea, North Korea, the Soviet Union, the UN, and the United States—international bodies involved in the division of Korea and other proxy conflicts in the Asia-Pacific Cold War. The flags disguise the lovers’ identities. Referencing René Magritte’s _The Lovers II_ (1928), in which two figures kiss while their faces are veiled in cloth, the prints re-enact this intimate pose, but with different flag pairings and combinations presented in the photographs. 

In _The Inoperative Community_ (1991), philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy writes that if communism is the “unsurpassable horizon of our time,” we should recognize its exigency and trace “an entirely different line” of community. [^7] Traditional forms of community, Nancy argues, are conscribed around identification with a predetermined origin, structure, or institution. While these communal forms may provide the possibility for unification, they also operationalize the political collective through the enforced representativity of work and efficacy, risking totalization in the form of national sovereignty, nostalgic yearning for a supposed lost past of an imagined nation, and a presupposition of unity within any state, party, or productive workforce. 

In opposition to communities as “productive or operative projects,” Nancy introduces the concept of an “inoperative community” characterized by the jouissance that emerges through the shared experience of exposition that does not aim to resolve differences or work in a productive sense. Rather, the inoperative community exists in the moment of its sharing, to make visible to the other its own finitude, and recognize the limits of its presence.

_Inoperativity_ presents itself in KISSSSS as a series of unworkings of community. Instead of expressing communion or the consolidation of international polities, the lovers, suspended between repressed desire and failed intimacy in the folds of the flags, expose ideological confusion and insecurities between: inside/outside, domesticity/diplomacy, polity/dissent, and Eros/destructive drive. Some of the photographs stage the kiss in front of a white backdrop in a living room, yet the cropping of this domestic environment transforms the dramatization into something more official and sanctioned. Following scholar Amy Kaplan’s notion of the domestic as the private sphere of the home and of the nationalizing projects that then extend into the _foreign_ or “out of doors,” the kiss exposes the process of domestication that enables the nation to be imagined as a home, and the home to be excluded from the war waged _over there_. [^8] The kiss of the lovers “exposes the unworking and therefore the incessant _incompletion_ of community. It exposes community _at its limit_.” [^9]


The seven brick stations in _KISSSSS_, arranged in chronological order, represent official events in the Korean War spanning from 1945 to the present. Each station holds one or two sheets of paper that form a collection of research—archives, newspaper clippings, scans, and email correspondence between Min and her collaborators (notably including C. Ryu, as referenced by footnotes and annotations). The compiled state-sanctioned narratives and fictions of North and South Korea reveal the shifting consolidation between the domestic and the foreign, armed conflicts and minor wars. [^10] In exploring the non-linearity of historical events and their impact on collective consensus, the installation likewise informs the archival practices of Min and her collaborators. Rather than imagining documentation as a mode of recovery, adaptation, or revisionism that seeks to reconcile differences into a diachronic representation of nationalist historiographies, it assembles the stakes, effects, and contradictions of historical disjuncture, as well as Min’s unfinished work, into a multiplicity of knowledges. 

At the breach of these formal boundaries, Min reveals the community that holds together the disparate. Two documentary photographs from _KISSSSS_ show Min’s collaborators in her home assisting in the production of the photo series, unveiling them as the masked lovers. The press release identifies her extended collaborators as Yun Gi Ahn, Patty Chang, Young Chun, Albert Kyu Hyun Choi, Yaeun Stevie Choi, Luka Fisher, Chuck Sung Hohng, Weiwei Huang, Peter Kalisch, David Kelley, Kristina Klochok, hannah lee, Candice Lin, Audrey Min, Erin Min, Gina Osterloh, Jordan Ruffin, C. Ryu, Connie Samaras, Kayla Tange, and Jungmok Yi. One segment of the _KISSSSS_ public programming brings together several of these collaborators—her students at UCI, participating artists from curatorial projects, roommates, friends, and mentees—who reflect on the pedagogy, curatorial projects, and organizing Min shaped and influenced. In the second public program, contemporary artists, scholars, and curators Simon Leung, Sunny Xiang, Steven Lee, and Amy Kahng extend the project’s legacy through a critical analysis of _KISSSSS_ in relation to their respective art and research practices.

If an inoperative community is a community at its limit, its incompletion allows the inhabitation of plurality within a single injunction. _KISSSSS_ and its multiple propositions contend with a material present arising from manifold Marxist traditions and historical contingencies—the spectral non-events of unacknowledged conflicts, minor wars, small revolutions, unsanctioned insurgencies, and overlooked rebellions that are endlessly differing and deferred. Likewise, _KISSSSS_ reckons with the naming of events as disclosure of one concept of history, exposing the structural gaps and the frequentation of spectres preceding or following the present. 

What binds the forked lapse between the two—event and non-event, and all the possibilities in between—Min suggests, are lovers and communities gathering toward political imperatives and radical disjunctures, where the present remains an open, unfulfilled promise. The incomplete community, organized around a shared reality without predetermination or operativity, becomes the shifting contours of the moment that crystallize the multiplicity of demands into a _coming_ of events. In other words, the political and historical indeterminacy of our inheritance draws together the inoperative community and the conditions for its recurrence. Whereby the community we invoke and unwork affirms the spectre and transforms the invisible, the absent, and the departed into knowledge, we inherit the very thing that allows us to bear witness to it—_the kiss of Yong Soon Min._


[^1]: Elaine H. Kim, “‘Bad Women’: Asian American Visual Artists Hanh Thi Pham, Hung Liu, and Yong Soon Min,” _Feminist Studies_ 22, no. 3 (Autumn 1996): 597.
[^2]: After the fall of socialist governments and rise of liberal democracies in Eastern Europe, highlighted by the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, American political scientist Francis Fukuyama argued in _The End of History and the Last Man_ (1992) that history, particularly communism, followed a linear progression. He claimed these events marked “not just the passing of a particular period of post-war history, but the end of history as such: the end-point of mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.” It is important to note that many of the key cultural events Fukuyama discusses frame the Cold War as a bipolar confrontation between the Soviet Union and the United States. 
[^3]: Jacques Derrida, _Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International_ (New York: Routledge, 1994), 19.
[^4]: Sunny Xiang writes in _Tonal Intelligence: The Aesthetics of Asian Inscrutability During the Long Cold War_ (2020) that “Because the cold war in Asia was a highly mediated regulation of norms, a temperature-controlled feeling of normal, it requires us to engage “war” as a temperament rather than a timeline.”
[^5]: Jodi Kim, _Ends of Empire: Asian American Critique and the Cold War_ (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010), 4. 
[^6]: Christine Hong, “The Unending Korean War,” _positions_ 23, no. 4 (2015): 598.
[^7]: Jean-Luc Nancy, _The Inoperative Community_, trans. Peter Connor (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), 8. 
[^8]: Amy Kaplan, “Manifest Domesticity,” _American Literature_ 70, no. 3 (1998): 581–606. 
[^9]: Nancy, _The Inoperative Community_, 38.
[^10]: The research attends to overlooked histories, such as the financial, military, and political support from United States, the Soviet Union, and their aligned countries; the surprise invasions across the 38th parallel by both South and North Korea; President Truman’s intervention, seeking the U.N. Security Council's assistance to condemn North Korea as an aggressor; the re-education of communist sympathizers; the military ceasefire agreement despite the absence of a formal peace treaty; the devastation faced by civilians; the solitary confinement and psychological torture of prisoners of war; the POWs who refused repatriation; the indiscriminate targeting of rice paddy workers; the exportation of South Korean adoptees; and the mourning of displaced families yearning for unification. 



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


Extra Life

lg_C160_SHIN1.jpg

md_C160_SHIN1.jpg

sm_C160_SHIN1.jpg

thumbnail_C160_SHIN1.jpg

C160_SHIN_1.jpg

History

TJ Shin surveys Yong Soon Min’s enduring legacy, written on the occasion of "KISSSSS"—her posthumous exhibition at the University of California Irvine. Shin contextualizes Min’s practice within the various “minor wars, small revolutions, unsanctioned insurgencies and overlooked rebellions that are endlessly differing and deferred.”


The _KISSSSS_ of Yong Soon Min

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

lg_C159_MONTES-MURIENTE.jpeg

md_C159_MONTES-MURIENTE.jpeg

sm_C159_MONTES-MURIENTE.jpeg

thumbnail_C159_MONTES-MURIENTE.jpeg

C159_MONTES-MURIENTE.jpeg

C159_MontesMuriente.pdf

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)

lg_C159_MYERS.jpeg

md_C159_MYERS.jpeg

C159_MYERS.jpeg

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. 

C Mag

Explore

Latest Features

The KISSSSS of Yong Soon Min

In the Lacuna

A Vampire Walks Into a Funhouse

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

Cinema, Nostalgia, and the Excess That Remains: A Conversation With Tiffany Sia

Explore by Subjects

Technology

Politics

International

Drawing

On the subject of Gender

One Thing: Kamala Ibrahim Ishag’s Zar Paintings

One Thing: The Bathers

spirit-flesh-soul-icon

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

Ongoing Legacies of Transmisogyny

Latest Columns

One Thing: Kamala Ibrahim Ishag’s Zar Paintings

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

Composition: Crepuscular Rhythms

One Thing: Tracing Fragments of Queer Desire

Composition: give up your own

Latest Reviews

“flipping through pages keeping a record of time” — Theresa Hak Kyung Cha and Jimmy Robert

"A bell I never hear" — Cindy Hill

“The Clichettes: Lips, Wigs, and Politics” — The Clichettes (Louise Garfield, Janice Hladki, Johanna Householder)

“Eat It Up” — Audie Murray and Nico Williams

"Quelque Show" — Nico Williams

Explore by Articles

Letters

Editorials

Features

Interviews

Artist Projects

Columns

Reviews

Sponsored

Explore by Image