Photography

Memory

Sculpture

Drawing

Letter

Editorial

Feature

Interview

Artist Project

Column

Review

Writer

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

Tidal

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Language

Colonialism

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

Composition: on the edges of a mother tongue

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Artist

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

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

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

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

Stop

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Nature

Time

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

_a cigarette after a nine-hour-long shift_

_to breathe consciously_

_a long stretch_

_a hug_

_sitting down to eat_

_a good laugh_

_to kiss_

_to press the breaks on my bike_

_catching patterned thought_

_to find beauty_

_to lay down on the ground_

_(to stop)_

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

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

20.55 x 40 (full-time hours) = 822

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

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

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

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

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

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

_to gather_ 

_to cultivate relationships_

_to sign petitions_

_to donate_

_to sing_

_to write_

_to dance_

_to protest_

_to chant_

_to march_

_to cook for others_

_to rely on community_

_to take over places that have been stripped away from us_

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

_(to stop)_

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


Extra Life

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Indigenous

Textiles

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


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Composition: We Return

Teresa Tam is an artist from and based in Calgary. She doesn’t specialize in anything, but likes to work with digital processes, functional installations, all things shaped in paper, excessive labour, and collections of mildly niche objects. She graduated from AUArts in 2014 and is the other half of Yolkless Press.

There’s a hole that I’m always compelled
to fill. This hole is the memory-card slot
on my childhood video-game consoles
(N64, PS1, GameCube). This hole is the
literal hole at the centre of optical discs.
This hole is the space on hard drives that
isn’t filled with memory yet. The fruits
of my compulsion can be observed in the
pile of storage units I’ve accumulated
over my lifetime. What I have gathered
here is not much at all, but it is a precious pile that holds all the digital copies of my memories, desires, dreams,
and anxieties. Copies that prove I existed once, even if in stagnated, fragmented, and abstracted pieces.

It was in the summer of 1998 that
I first experienced death. It wasn’t the
death of a family member or friend;
it was the death of a video-game save
file. Housed in a translucent rectangle, I was confronted with the corruption of my unfinished journey in a PS1
video-game world. Video games were
places that I could retreat into and use
as a foil for my experiences in the real
world. My parents were largely absent
due to work, and I was an overly anxious child who didn’t have many friends.
Video games were places where I felt
I could assert my existence with some
amount of agency. It didn’t matter that
the games were predetermined and
lacked true choice. The nuances of how
I experienced them made these games
feel so alive, like another life in its own
universe. When I saw the corrupted file,
I felt the dread you feel when something
bad has happened. All I could do was
delete it and start again. I thought memory cards were meant to hold our memories. As a six-year-old, I grieved what
felt like the loss of life I helped to create. It’s silly how dramatic I made it to
be, but because of that silliness, it was
an unresolved grief that manifested
into a compulsion for an obsessive and
borderline ritualistic preservation of
data. I promised to never let it happen
again. I didn’t know what caused the
initial corruption, but I concluded that
making copies of data was going to be
my way to fight back against the (digital) death of the precious things in my
life. So, I came up with this file-saving
routine: have one main file that I only
play, make a copy when an important
story moment happens, continue to play
on the main file, and repeat until the
game is finished.

_For my project_ Season’s End: Liquidation Shop (2022), [^1] _as a parallel to the
physical storefront installation, I created
a website [^2] to commemorate all the objects
I was about to ritualistically part with. I
made low-poly 3D-modelled versions
of these objects, which were accrued (or,
more accurately, hoarded) and used over
eight years in various art projects. Even
though my intention was to give away the
objects to become a part of other people’s
lives, I couldn’t help but still hold on to
a digital version of them, no matter how
crude or inaccurate the 3D model copy
might be._

When I gained access to writable optical discs as a fifteen-year-old, my compulsion to save video-game data crossed
into general computer files, resulting in
the multiple spindles of discs you see in
the photo. My coming-of-age existential
dilemma manifested as the fear of being forgotten. This existential fear that
the universe will forget me as soon as any
trace of me fades away fuelled the need
to make more copies of data that felt fundamentally tied to my existence, like the
photos I took and pirated songs I resonated with. The act of copying and never
altering the files is like a suspension of
time, and without time, there is no loss,
and no loss means no forgetting. What
I liked about the discs was that my preservation efforts were visually comprehensible and each copy was separate from
other discs, in case something happened
to the original one. However, disc-burning was unreliable, as the data-corruption
rate was high. This unreliability resulted
in a new addition to my saving routine:
make extra copies of the copies in case
the initial copy is corrupted. But the
problem was I never deleted anything,
creating ever-increasing stagnated copied states of paused existence.

_In_ Good Job Arcade (2023–present), [^3] _there are no save states, at least not in
any way we understand saving game files
these days. The project was built to replicate typical arcades, where the games
only save your efforts as abstracted high
scores, though this data is temporary
and gets deleted the moment the game
closes. The actual saved data here are the
games themselves. Each game acts as
storage space for the digital data of things
I want to preserve, but this time it can also
live on by being shared with others. I’ll
likely never escape this compulsion to
endlessly save and copy, forever seeking
assurance I’ve existed. Instead, I’ll continue to find different ways, like this Arcade, to hopefully fill that existential hole._

Back in 2016, a friend gifted me an authentic data tape that contains 1TB of
proton-proton collision events recorded
by the Large Hadron Collider at CERN. [^4] It’s noted that there could be a chance
the data contains a Higgs boson event, [^5] but there’s no indication of what that
chance could be. I’ll never know because I don’t have the means to access the
data, even if I could understand what I’m
looking at. This data tape is like a peek
into the future for the pile of data I’ve
saved over the past two decades. One day
what I’ve obsessively preserved will be
inaccessible in hardware and cultural
understanding, but it will contain recordings, suspensions of a moment in time
when something happened, like my life
and the people and world that filled it.
If it ends up being true that information is a fundamental matter in the universe, [^6] then maybe I’ll continue to live
on even when my body fades away, but
I know that eventually, time will finally
erase what I couldn’t.


[^1]: Teresa Tam, “Seasons End Liquidation Shop,” https://teresatam.net/project/seasons-end-liquidation-shop
[^2]: “little memories zone,” https://littlememories.zone
[^3]: “Good Job Arcade,” https://goodjob.zone
[^4]: “LHC Tapes,” CERN & Society Foundation, https://cernandsocietyfoundation.cern/lhc-tapes
[^5]: “The Higgs boson,” CERN, https://home.web.cern.ch/science/physics/higgs-boson
[^6]: Melvin M. Vopson, “The _mass-energy-information_ equivalence principle,” _AIP Advances_ 9, no. 9 (September 2019): 095206, accessed January 17, 2025, https://doi.org/10.1063/1.5123794


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Exploring the existential questions of finding ways to be remembered, Teresa Tam investigates artistic and personal storage devices and how they can become tangible proof of existence.

One Thing: In Search of an Incorruptible Life

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Varley

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Plural

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Manif d'art

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Darling Founderie (exchange)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mirror Mirror

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Spirituality

Gender

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

One Thing: Kamala Ibrahim Ishag’s Zar Paintings

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



>###### _Resistance_ 

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

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

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

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

>###### _Radical Care and Collectivity_ 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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


Codes

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Health

Art History

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


One Thing: The Bathers

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

●● 

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

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

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

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

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

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Technology

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




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

And then there is Augustine. 

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

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

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

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

Let’s continue to record.

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

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

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

It is to be _with_.

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

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

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

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


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C_OR_DEFREITAS_4

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

Roxanne Fernandes is an experienced arts worker specializing in administration, production, and research; and an emerging curator/programmer based in Tkaronto/Toronto. Her evolving practice explores archives and counter-archives, memory-making, and storytelling. Roxanne supplements her artistic and historical knowledge with research and applications of critical theory. She has curated and programmed for Images Festival (Toronto, 2019), Confederation Centre Art Gallery (Charlottetown, 2023–2024), Art in the Open (Charlottetown, 2023), and the OCAD U Graduate Gallery (Toronto, 2023). For her MFA in criticism and curatorial practice (OCAD U), she presented her award-winning thesis publication “Stories of Rivers and Gold: Counterarchives of a Guyanese Transnational Identity.” Roxanne has worked at Toronto Biennial of Art, Images Festival, and TIFF, and has freelanced for various institutions and artists across the city. She served on the board of SAVAC from 2021 to 2024.

Chiedza Pasipanodya is a sculptor, writer, and curator whose practice investigates material culture, diasporic memory, and the transformative potential of ritual and form. Born in Harare, Zimbabwe, and currently in Toronto, Canada, Pasipanodya works through a post-minimalist lens, drawing from Afro-diasporic and speculative frameworks to explore how objects become vessels for lived histories, perceptual shifts, and cultural transmission. Their work has been exhibited in institutions including Gardiner Museum, Cranbrook Art
Museum (USA), Artspeak Gallery, Art Gallery of Burlington, BAND Gallery, Zalucky Contemporary, and Catinca Tabacaru Gallery (Romania). Pasipanodya holds an MFA in sculpture from Cranbrook Academy of Art (2025) and a BFA in criticism and curatorial
practice from OCAD U (2019) and has participated in international residencies including Watershed Center for the Ceramic Arts (USA), Dzimbanhete Arts and Culture Interactions (Zimbabwe), and the Global Experience Project: Maria Thereza Alves (Italy).

**Balancing on the steel coil, the round and impressionable 
shine of a hardened ceramic. 
Cool stone, the touch evoking memory. 
Raku-fired, a map of the passage of time. 
Gripping the clay in whatever form it presents itself. 
Peeling back the curtain, reading the scores. 
Lying in the grove beneath the light. 
Making, and making again, until intimacy is a familiar score.**

**The work of Zimbabwean Canadian sculptor, writer, and curator Chiedza Pasipanodya is an invitation to see differently. 
Through investigations of material logic and temporality, Pasipanodya
explores how objects are vessels
that embody lived histories and
cultural transmissions. To explore
what and how the body can hold a
sculpture is an invitation to shift
perception: through human and
non-human participation, weathering, breakdown, and (re)placement. It is a snapshot of relationality and how the artist’s interest
in pursuing mind-body-world connectivity with the work is a portal to profoundly understand our
histories and motivations. It is a
practice of socially poignant and
critical storytelling.**

**Roxanne Fernandes:** Previously, when we spoke during our studio
visit in 2022, you shared a playful description about process. It was a
“bringing of wobbly imaginings to tangible form and an endless mediation and generative medication.” [^1]

Something that struck me about 
the introduction of different materials like asphalt, textiles, cement,
steel, and wood into your practice—
when it was rooted in ceramics for
so many years—is what you’ve referred to as “material intimacy.” [^2] 
How have you worked through the
sentiment of intimately trusting the material when it goes through inevitable transformations?

**Chiedza Pasipanodya:** I started working
with clay over five years ago, the week
before everything locked down. I spent most of that year working with clay every single day. It taught me that materials have their own life. Five years later, it has taught me that every material has
its own conditions, restrictions, boundaries, and capacities. Clay has become a kind of listening, and my thinking about
my practice started to reflect how musicians may think about music—it’s about resonances. Like in _Kukokwa (The Invitation)_ (2023), there is a resonance when the steel interacts with the concrete, whether or not they touch directly. It’s a bit of a synaesthetic experience. That’s how I hear it and think about it.

I do a lot of research about my materials. When I started working with
asphalt, I wanted to know what it was
made of. Where does it come from?
What is the history of it? How do I make
my own? What I was interested in was
the shimmering, reflective, auditory quality of the material. The density, how my
body knew it before I was told what it is,
and then playing with that.

**RF:** In _Kukokwa_, there is a direct invitation to visitors to lie down and be among the elsewhere or otherness of the work. Embedded in the
ground, the wood halo and metal headrest become, in combination,
an aesthetic, functional, and spiritual object. 

What has it been like to introduce performance or the use
of the body into your sculptural work? How does the inclusion of
the body itself, or the act of physically or metaphorically holding
a vessel, speak to a decolonial construct of object-making and
sculptural installation? 

**CP:** The introduction of the body is, I
think, an insertion of myself in a very
literal way: in the way that I present,
with the work asking me to show up in
a vulnerable way and to put myself forward. I wonder, how can I insert the body and what are the qualities of that
body that I’ve been looking to? It is a
decolonial practice because of the institutional spaces I’m entering into. It’s a tricky thing of both asserting my existence and not saying my existence is the work. I am asserting histories and
the things I am bringing forth with me.
It is not monolithic.

“Kukokwa” means “the invitation”
—to invite somebody. It’s calling in
Ubuntu philosophy, an African-centred
philosophy around how people relate to
one another. “I am because we are” and
“I am because you are.” It means that
we are interwoven in our existence, and
when you live in that way, it becomes
difficult to harm and easy to have empathy and forgiveness.

_Kukokwa_ was the first piece I made
in Michigan [at the Cranbrook Academy of Art]. I had been walking outside, and I found this space where the light
kept hitting every morning. My thinking
was to bring in this traditional African
design of a headrest that’s found across
the continent, learn how to make it, and
reinterpret it. I was turning, making
spindles, and carving claro walnut wood,
a hybrid walnut that is native to the US.
So, the material and location of the artwork became very site-specific. I made the headrests out of steel, a material that
I’m now working with quite a bit. My
mother worked in a steel manufacturing
plant for approximately 30 years, but
that material has only now become a
part of my visual vocabulary. It speaks
to that relationship in many ways—
with the potential to reflect light, heat,
and energy.

Working with metal and wood comes from my relationship with the m’bira, a lamellophone musical instrument from
Zimbabwe, and its material logic. I find
it fascinating, the resonance of the metal
and the almost bass-like quality of the
wood in combination. Now, it is often a
deconstruction of this “m’bira methodology” when I’m working with wood and metal.

The work is an invitation for the
body to further reorient and look upward. My hope was that through that reorientation, a new perspective was possible. A transformation or a slight shift. And then emerges the question of what’s
possible when a slight shift happens?

> _Lying down openly in public, or inviting someone to rest, is a vulnerability in Pasipanodya’s approach
that I find myself returning to over
and over. A shift in perspective—especially in the current socio-political and cultural climate of art-making—is a necessary vulnerability in
order to recognize the world around
the piece in tandem. Over the years,
I’ve been adamant in reaffirming
that we do not exist, or create, in
a vacuum. Pasipanodya has recalled
French philosopher Roland Barthes’s
idea of “shimmering,” [^3] a quality of
subtle transformation. They have
described it, in relation to their
work, as “a perceptual flickering
like heat on asphalt that unsettles
fixed meaning.”_ [^4]

**RF:** I believe that through your devotion to materiality, you have so
beautifully and continually (as is its
nature) embodied the act of shimmering. Graphite and wax, materials that you’ve introduced into your
practice, have discernible slip and
shine that changes when the light
hits a different spot.

What has it meant for you to embody that notion metaphorically, symbolically, and through
all the stages of creation? That idea of a shifting perspective and the shifting of material meaning
through exploration?

**CP:** I think there are so many of us like
that—we are just watching the light shift
and sometimes it’s so everyday that maybe we don’t document it, but at the same
time it’s extraordinary that it happens.
And it is not guaranteed.

How can I create more opportunities for myself, and by extension others, to be more present with this thing we
are describing? Shimmering is a way
to bring that, our connection to light,
back into view. It requires the viewer to
work around this object. It’s not asking
you to be static or stable because it’s
not possible.

> Kunyoresa (Scores) _(2025) is that ask
to work around the object. To push
the question “What can the object
hold?” toward “How can the body
hold the object? And what does it
mean to do so—here, now?”_ Kunyoresa _is presented as a four-part sculpture: a soda-fired ceramic mass,
an almost anthropomorphic handful of clay, and a curtain of dyed
fabric. Each is accompanied by a
curved steel rod that meticulously
holds or supports it in some form.
The fourth component is a series
of written scores that prompts the
visitor to interact further, and
form intimacy with and responsibility for the objects by holding or
grasping the ceramic, or pulling back the curtain. There’s a
thoughtful, although precarious, 
level of balance and participation
with the work, affixed so gently to
its walls. “Pick-up / Pick-up the ball
/ Pick-up the ball and…” reads one
of the scores, leaving the rest up to
you. Will you return the ball to its
steel hold?_

**RF:** I’ve been interested to know
how you coalesce the experience
of “returning” in your life and work?
Geographically, in this triangulation between Zimbabwe, Toronto,
and Michigan; or in the themes and
shapes that appear in your work:
the baobab, other seeds and fruits,
and the termite mound or other
conical forms?

**CP:** Like many people who have immigrated from one place to another, images have been a way of staying in touch.
My family has an informal photographic archive because people were sending things back and forth. What I like about
the archive is that, in a particular way,
it’s stable, because the past has already
happened. Whereas, when I’m dealing
with the future or even the present, it’s
rhizomatic. There are a million arms
that I can’t completely wrangle. This has
taught me that objects can hold memory, and it can be recalled.

For _Mauuyu_ (2025), in making ceramic fruits over and over again, it became a remembering of the initial fruit
in my hands and everything that’s happened since. The fruits themselves have
changed and evolved over the years and
different types have emerged, but the series is still _Mauuyu_. As they evolve and
grow, they both hold memory and create
memory, which for me operate in different time-space continuums. The shape
of a termite mound, like in _Munda (The Field)_ (2021), is very much about ascension, but also legacy building, ancestry,
labour, and the family. It is said that
termite mounds, their shape and size,
often outlive the colonies they house.
Also, the mounds recall traditional Southern African ceramic techniques and
are created by labour-intensive coiling
and burnishing. In all, it is another way
of looking at time and measuring what
we are doing here.

I remember my grandmother and
my mother saying to me “Ziva kwawakabva nokuti kwaunoenda usiku," which means “Know where you’re coming from,
so that you know where you’re going.” It
was embedded in me. Within return is
this whole belief system around the
value of eldership and ancestors. That’s
a whole worldview.

> Mauuyu, _in particular, is a work that
I’ve seen change over the years—
imbued with the energy of an archive and picked with care for the
occasions in which the pieces are
shown. In prior studio visits, texts,
and exhibitions by Pasipanodya,
I’ve been privileged to witness the
glisten of experimental glazes, the
lustre and blackening of raku firing, and the cold touch of the serpentine stone. The seed, fruit, clay,
and stone are immensely nourishing
in their reimaginations. Playful in
their inconsistencies. And, like the
mounds, a testament to labour. Each
beckons to an event or a learning,
bookmarked, with that memory carried forward._

**RF:** _Chibereko (Womb) III_ and _Chibereko (Womb) IV_ (both 2024) are
pieces where materials are in companionship with one another, and
manipulated toward a physical transformation. To what you were shaing about resonance, I can imagine
moments coming together when
you’re welding, or adding pigment
and laying concrete, where there
may also be a resonance of sound
that is almost onomatopoeic—and
so linked to the sounds that we
know from spoken language. And
that shows up, visually, as this record through the work. Can you
share a bit about that?**

**CP:** I think there is a bit of imbuing there.
It’s a translation and transference of energy. The way I can describe it is that it’s
a layering. In _Chibereko (Womb) IV_, the
cement is mixed with the pigment so
it looks like a red clay. Some kids have
thought that it’s gum. There’s asphalt in the cement, but there are also rose
petals from openings, and gifts and orange rinds from friends over the years
embedded into it. There is an accumulation in a single form, all the way down
to the red pigment that is grasping on
to the hardware and cloth. When we talk
about sound and resonance, for me, it’s
the wind blowing clothes on the line and
the softness of the silk dress that my grandmother is wearing. The resonance of
this experience has become fragmented
and reorganized so the body is no longer physically present or represented, except through the two-dimensionality
of the barely visible figures on mulberry paper in _Chibereko (Womb) III._ The
resonance sits in the place of a collective memory. The work is not asking
for you to know who those people are. Rather, I think it’s asking for connection to a feeling.

For both pieces, there’s an invitation
to a kind of softness, and I think that
this softness arrives through colour, a
flesh tone that is showing up in my work
as of late, and through the curves on
the forms. Even in the roundness of the
clay that has been fired or hardened.
The softness encourages a potential for
holding, touching, or caressing, which
I welcome from an art object even if
they can’t always do that in the spaces
they are shown in. It’s nice to know,
and see, that there is still softness in
the world available to us. These materials
had to be found, given, bought, dried,
and then embedded. Softness arrives
through the history of those objects. I
think by the time the organic material
arrives in a work like _Chibereko (Womb)
IV_, it’s representative of holding on.
Other times, when materials arrive in
an artwork, it’s the end. Sometimes,
things may make it through the tides
of time. Like when you see something
in the water, washed up on the shore,
and wonder “Where did you come
from?” and “What life have you had?”


[^1]: Chiedza Pasipanodya, conversation with Roxanne Fernandes.
[^2]: Material intimacy can be understood as how an artist utilizes the multiplicities of a material toward greater personal connection.
[^3]: Roland Barthes and Thomas Clerc, The Neutral: Lecture Course at the College De France (1977-1978), trans. Rosalind E. Krauss and Denis Hollier (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), 51.
[^4]: Chiedza Pasipanodya, Chiedza Pasipanodya (artist book, Cranbrook Academy of Art, 2025).

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Fernandes_C162.pdf

In their conversation, Roxanne Fernandes and Chiedza Pasipanodya notice subtle transformations of matter that unsettle fixed meaning in Pasipanodya’s sculptures. Through clay, steel, concrete, wood, graphite, wax, and more, Pasipanodya recalls the shapes and lineages of objects like the Zimbabwean instrument m'bira or termite mounds that represent legacy-building, labour, and the family. 

What Happens When the Light Shifts?: Chiedza Pasipanodya's Perceptual Flickering

Rana Abughannam is a Palestinian architect and educator with an interest in the politics that govern urbanism and built heritage. Her research focuses on paradigms of counter-colonization exemplified in Indigenous, bottom-up, and constant practices of resistance against on-going colonial projects. She is an Assistant Professor at the School of Architecture and Landscape Architecture at the University of British Columbia.

Émélie Desrochers-Turgeon is an architectural historian and designer whose work traces
the ways land and life are negotiated through architecture. Her research moves between built environments and ecologies, attending to the entanglements of colonial modernity, extractivism, and the architectures of soil, repair, and return. She lives in Kjipuktuk/Halifax, where she works as an Assistant Professor at Dalhousie University.

Karen Lutsky is an associate professor of landscape architecture and the Director/Founder of the Great Lakes Design Labs. Her creative practice and writings focus on how landscape architects and designers might better design with changing landscapes. She recently co-authored the book _Five Bay Landscapes: Curious Explorations of the Great Lakes Basin_ (2022) and holds a position at the University of Minnesota’s Department of Architecture, Landscape Architecture, and Interior Design.

Ozayr Saloojee is a South African/Canadian teacher, writer, and designer. He is a Professor of Architecture at Carleton University, where he is also cross-appointed in African Studies, and at Carleton’s Centre for the Study of Islam. His research and creative practice look toward architecture enacted otherwise, where design is a practice of tender, epistemic dreaming.

Zoe Todd (she/they) is a citizen of the Manitoba Métis Federation from Edmonton, AB, Canada. They are an artist, storyteller, and interdisciplinary scholar who studies Indigenous governance and fresh-water fish futures in the Prairies.

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History

Rana Abughannam, Émélie Desrochers-Turgeon, Karen Lutsky, Ozayr Saloojee, and Zoe Todd consider how imperialism in their homelands—from South Africa to Gaza to Turtle Island—are contemporary manifestations of the logics of the Roman empire. But, like the Tiber River flooding Rome, they also remind us of the “possibilities for solidarity, liberation, and return that come from breaking the dam.” 

C Mag

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