Program

Deanna Bowen’s presentation involves self-reflection on two interdependent exhibitions presented at the 2020 Berlin Biennale and the Kitchener-Waterloo Art Gallery September 18–February 28, 2021. Respectively, The God of Gods: Berlin, Berlin, and Black Drones in the Hive extend critical interventionist research of the white nationalist ambitions that inform Canada’s cultural history and national narrative. Specifically, The God of Gods: Berlin, Berlin is an off-site companion work to Black Drones in the Hive that examines the history of Berlin, Ontario (now Kitchener) and Berlin, Germany during WWI as a means to reveal the familial, geographic, cultural and colonial entanglements between the British Commonwealth, Germany, Canada, the United States and Africa from the mid-1700s.

Bio
Deanna Bowen is a descendant of two Alabama and Kentucky-born Black Prairie pioneer families from Amber Valley and Campsie, Alberta. She is a recipient of numerous grants and awards, including the 2021 Scotiabank Photography Award, a 2020 Governor General’s Award, a 2016 John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship and the 2014 William H. Johnson Prize.

Quilt of Hopes: Documenting the Movement for Black Lives is an ongoing active archive and addition to the conversation and action in support of Black artists, Black-centred organizations and programming in Vancouver. Reflecting on the Black Art Gastown and Moniker Press co-presented installation exhibit, Vancouver-based artists respond to the question, “What is the role of the Artist in dismantling anti-Black racism?”

Bio
Nya Lewis’ practice is a culmination of centuries of African resistance, love, questions, actions, study and embrace. Lewis is an MFA candidate at OCAD University, the year-round programmer at the Vancouver Queer Film Festival, an independent curator currently serving as a Projects Assistant at Or Gallery and a Guest Curator at UBC Museum of Anthropology.

Adrian Stimson presents an overview of the book “Old Sun Boys” and a discussion about the process of meeting AA Bronson and responding to his project A Public Apology to the Siksika Nation, as well as understanding ways toward reconciliation. Stimpson also presents an overview of a project with U of C Humanities Mapping Project mapping the Calgary Stampede. 

Bio
Adrian Stimson is a member of the Siksika (Blackfoot) Nation. He has a BFA from the Alberta University for the Arts and MFA from the University of Saskatchewan. 

Adrian is an interdisciplinary artist who exhibits nationally and internationally. He was awarded the Governor General’s Award in Visual and Media Arts in 2018, REVEAL Indigenous Arts Award from Hnatyshyn Foundation in 2017, Blackfoot Visual Arts Award in 2009, Alberta Centennial Medal in 2005 and the Queen Elizabeth II Golden Jubilee Medal in 2003. 

He is in many prominent collections including: The British Museum, Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Art Gallery of Ontario, Remai Modern, Mackenzie Art Gallery, Art Gallery of Alberta and Campbelltown Arts Centre, Australia.

Starting from Adorno’s concept of “form as sedimented content” and the aesthetic experience of growing up in the 90s (grunge, hip-hop and the birth of the Internet), Kevin will present several projects that engage with language and typography as a material practice. 

Bio
Kevin Yuen Kit Lo is a graphic designer, community organizer and educator based in Tiohtià:ke/Montréal. He runs the design studio LOKI, working at the intersection of graphic design, cultural production and social change. He loves dogs and hates capitalism.

A conversation with Sara Sutterlin. Sara talks about her experimental food magazine Doof, explaining her practice, how her publishing work is based in collaboration, her iconoclast aesthetic view, and even reads one of her poems.

Bio
Sara Sutterlin is the author of several poetry books and the publisher of experimental food magazine Doof and feminist erotic magazine Leste.

This panel is a conversation about the role of registering and documenting the histories of trans folk. María Belén Correa, the founder of the El Archivo de la Memoria Trans (Argentine); Verónica Fieiras of Chaco Editorial, publisher of the book Archivo de la Memoria Trans; and Dr. Aaron Devor from the Transgender Archives (University of Victoria) will join us in a discussion about the practices and politics surrounding queer archiving and trans archiving in particular.

Bios:

Dr. Aaron Devor, Chair in Transgender Studies & Archives
Dr. Aaron Devor has been studying and teaching transgender topics since the early 1980s. He established and holds the world’s first Chair in Transgender Studies; initiated and hosts the international, interdisciplinary Moving Trans History Forward conferences; and founded and serves as subject matter expert for the world’s largest Transgender Archives. 

The Transgender Archives at the University of Victoria, founded in 2011 by Dr. Aaron Devor, preserve and safeguard the history of pioneering Trans+ activists and community leaders, and researchers who have contributed to the betterment of Trans+ people. Their records of research related to Trans+ people go back to the nineteenth century, while their records on activism by Trans+ people start in 1960 and are in fifteen  languages from twenty-three countries on all continents except Antarctica. At over 160 linear metres (one and a half  football fields long), their collections comprise, by far, the largest Trans+ archives in the world. Collections are open to the public at no charge.

María Belén Correa and Verónica Fieiras
The Archivo Trans project began with Claudia Pía Baudracco and María Belén Correa, two activists who were instrumental in creating Argentina’s first trans organization (ATA) and passing the country’s first trans rights bill (the Gender Identity Law). Pía and María Belén always imagined having a space to reunite surviving compañeras and their memories. After Pía died in 2012, María Belén started the archive from a box of Pía’s old photos. In 2014, with the help of photographer Cecilia Estalles, they began collecting and digitally preserving Pía’s photographs and others from the trans community. Six years later, the archive houses a collection of more than 10,000 documents, with material dating back to the early twentieth  century and up until the late 1990s.

Created in 2015 by Verónica Fieiras, CHACO is an independent space for alternative and experimental approaches to publishing, understanding bookmaking as a creative journey to walk alongside the author, reinterpreting and adapting his work into a new expressive medium.

Description
“Reading and translation groups on independent editorial work” is organized by tijuana, in partnership with the platform par(ent)esis.

In 2020 and 2021, facing a situation in which the possibility for face-to-face exchanges was far off, tijuana proposed virtual meetings to deepen independent editorial work, in which texts in Portuguese, English and Spanish formed the basis for debates on what, how and why to publish. The exercise of reading extended to a collaborative translation of writings that put forward the essence of the act of publishing independently. Registration was free and open to all levels of Portuguese, English and Spanish.

They started with the text “Sabão” by Fabio Morais, a portrait of the Brazilian history of publishing, and continued with a  manual for self-publishing edited by Banca Carrocinha. In 2021, they carried on with a love letter to independent publications written by the North American artist Tia Blassingame, and an essay on the politics and economy of independent publishing by Mexican editor Nicolas Pradilla.

Each text has been translated into another language. The translations of the four publications are available online, free to be downloaded, enjoyed, shared and printed in a simple and accessible way in your home.

Bio
Opened in 2007, tijuana started as an initiative of Galeria Vermelho (São Paulo, Brazil) to create an exhibition space to show works, especially artist´s books, that didn’t fit smoothly into traditional exhibition spaces. In 2009, tijuana inaugurated its first Printed Art Fair, uniting publishers from Latin America dedicated to artists’ books and special editions. Since 2010, tijuana has been publishing its own editions through Edições Tijuana. In the last two years, tijuana has also developed Reading and translation groups on independent editorial work.

Hyperlink Press will share their practice on the accessibility of zines, Korean queer/feminist history archive, and their long-term project series “Remembering LB City,” which was a South Korean cyber lesbian utopia from two decades ago. Reminiscing about the early 2000s, their practice seeks to discuss exciting alternatives to traditional forms of community building for a more equitable world.

Bio
Hyperlink Press is a zine/curatorial collective that seeks to distribute work by artists that navigate in-between spaces of the internet, queer communities and diaspora experiences. Their mission is to uplift marginalized and underrepresented experiences, identities and histories in the art gallery and technology field.

A discussion on the publishing practices at Chimurenga and how the aim of these activities is not just to produce new knowledge, but rather to express the intensities of our world, to capture those forces and take action. This has required a stretching of the boundaries, for unless we push form and content beyond what exists, then we merely reproduce the original form—the colonized form if you will. It requires not only a new set of questions but its own set of tools—new practices and methodologies that allow us to engage the lines of flight, of fragility, the precariousness, as well as the joy, creativity and beauty that defines contemporary Africa.

Bio
Chimurenga is a pan-African platform of writing, art and politics founded by Ntone Edjabe in 2002. Drawing together myriad voices from across Africa and the diaspora, Chimurenga takes many forms, operating as an innovative platform for free ideas and political reflection about Africa by Africans.

RAW is a centre for art, knowledge and society, situated at the crossroads of different disciplines informing curatorial practice. Conceived in 2008 by Koyo Kouoh, independent curator and artistic director of Zeitz MoCAA, RAW has quickly become a place where different ways of documenting, archiving and memorizing our history, as well as disseminating it, are confronted and combined. Thus, among the institutions with which they collaborate, Chimurenga has quickly emerged as a publishing house with which they share struggles, purpose and challenges. They are delighted to share this platform with them. 

Bio
Fatima Bintou Rassoul SY is a cultural mediator and curator with a Master’s degree in Exhibition Sciences and Techniques from the University of Paris 1 (Panthéon-Sorbonne). After several years spent in public and private cultural institutions in France, she is now Curator of Programmes at RAW. There she develops her curatorial practice and research on the market dynamics operating on the contemporary art scene of the continent and its diaspora. She lives and works in Dakar.

Insta: raw.gram2011

This talk is about what we do and what we lose as part of migratory living, about residues and turning away from the past to find love elsewhere. In one story, Christopher Rey Pérez moves to Brooklyn and purchases a bookcase, and in another he  talks about Eloísa Cartonera, a poetry press in Buenos Aires. As much as he accumulates books, he also gives, leaves and loses them, and he plans to tell a story about what communal energy develops along the way that can exceed the borders of place. In a different story about the same theme, Pérez narrates how he writes the self into a book, retells who he is now because he’s made that book and confesses why he likes to give away any copies he has of this book. 

Bio
Christopher Rey Pérez is a poet interested in publishing. Originally from the border of Texas, his books leave or reach Mexico, Brazil, Lebanon, Cyprus and Puerto Rico, among other places. He, along with Gabriel Finotti, publishes Dolce Stil Criollo, a nomadic, multilingual project of bookworks that make up a small history of the Americas.