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BEYOND COMPLIANCE: Events on Community Care, Access Justice and the Histories and Futures of Disability Culture

BEYOND COMPLIANCE:
Events on Community Care, Access Justice and the Histories and Futures of Disability Culture

Featuring two Events on Trauma-Informed Care by Vo Vo: September 26th & 28th, 2021

These virtual events are being hosted by organizations based on the unceded, stolen, ancestral territories of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Skwxwú7mesh (Squamish) and səlil̓ilw̓ətaʔɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) people.

This month, the Open Access Foundation for Arts and Culture (OAFAC) and grunt gallery, in collaboration with Cinevolution, present two free public events with artist and radical educator Vo Vo (bio below). These events are presented as part of OAFAC’s new series, Beyond Compliance, which aims to set a new cultural standard for accessibility by centering the practices of disabled, Crip, D/deaf, Hard of Hearing, Mad, neurodivergent, sick and chronically ill artists, curators, cultural workers and their co-conspirators. Through these events, presenters who hold embodied forms of knowledge pose visions for accessibility that move beyond compliance-level commitments, towards justice.

September 26th, 3:30pm-5:30pm PDT: Public Talk On Trauma-Informed Art Practice

Through this public talk, Vo will introduce some of the fundamentals of Trauma-Informed Care through an anti-racist and disability justice lens. Participants will interact with and reflect on how these principles might be applied to their practice. Vo will outline some dynamics and questions regarding curation, social practice, and art that hopes to address racial and social justice themes. Vo will fold into examples from their own visual and social art practice.

Access offerings will include:

  • Land Acknowledgement by: TwoSpirit Trickster Raven John, a mixed Stó:lō and Coast Salish multidisciplinary artist2Spirit Trickster Raven John.
  • ASL-English Interpretation: Dean and Jodi of Toronto Sign Language.
  • Automatic Captioning by: Otter.AI
  • Graphic Recording by: Corrina Keeling.
  • Visual Description of Images by: Vo Vo & Corrina Keeling.
  • Discord In-Chat Facilitation by: Black-Mixed, Gender Fluid, Neurodiverse-Crip, Equity ChangeMaker, and Storyteller Siobhan Barker (Sio/They/she) & TwoSpirit Trickster Raven John, a mixed Stó:lō and Coast Salish multidisciplinary artist 2Spirit Trickster Raven John.

Ways to Participate:
1. Register for Zoom Webinar here.
We acknowledge that Google Forms is not an accessible tool for all people. Please contact OAFAC’s Accessibility Coordinator, Siobhan Barker, at access@openaccessfoundation.org for alternative ways to register.

2. Watch the livestream on YouTube and Facebook Live: Links TBA

How do the Zoom, YouTube & Facebook Live experiences differ?
Sign up for the Zoom Webinar if you would like to access the Q&A and “raise hand” features. Through YouTube and Facebook Live you will only have access to the chat area, which will periodically be reviewed for questions and comments.

3. Connect on Discord here.

Please direct any questions about this event to: access@openaccessfoundation.org

September 28th, 6pm-7:30pm PDT: Trauma-Informed Critical Reflection Session for Artists and Cultural Workers

This event is a participatory workshop that leads participants through questions and criteria for their current, or yet-to-exist work or event. Reflection questions will cover long-term impact, sustainability, equity or reparations lens, social, gender and racial justice, accessibility aspects, social impact assessment, context, community need, site-specificity, proposed futures, possible futures, and alignment with the makers.

Access offerings will include:

  • Auto-generated captions by Zoom
  • ASL—English Interpretation
  • A transcript of the workshop will be made available after the event (in English)

Register for this workshop here.

Please direct any questions about this event to: access@grunt.ca

Vo Vo is a radical educator of 11 years in over 20 countries in inclusion, racial justice, intercultural communication, trauma-informed care, de-escalation and transformative justice. Their work explores support strategies and models of community care within a post-traumatic social landscape, focusing on the resilience of BIPOC, LGBTQIA2S+ and disabled communities. They have trained staff and board members from over 300 organizations in OR and WA since immigrating to the US in 2014. Editor of an internationally renowned publication, speaker, curator, artist and musician who has exhibited and toured in Australia, Germany, Indonesia, The Netherlands, Singapore, Croatia, Mexico, Finland, Denmark, New Zealand, Vietnam, Sweden, Malaysia, and the States. Local festival organizer. One of the festivals they curate is IntersectFest: A Festival For and By People Of Color – now in its sixth year. It has featured over 200 Black, Indigenous, and POC artists, including dancers, poets, filmmakers, curators, visual artists and more. It also creates space to discuss radical political approaches to community organizing and artistic practice. Their recently initiated career as a visual artist has seen them primarily work in textiles, embroidery, weaving, and furniture building. Their installations seek to interrogate power dynamics, structural oppression, challenge histories and realities of imperialism, white supremacy and colonization. They continue to explore support strategies and models of community care within a post-traumatic social landscape, focusing on the resilience of BIPOC, LGBTQIA2S+ and disabled communities.

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River Journeys

River Journeys
September 25th, 2021
Online via Zoom — click here to join

What was it like to travel along the Mackenzie River a thousand years ago? Two hundred years ago? Or one hundred years ago?

For World Rivers Day, artists from Canada’s north were asked to consider this question. Their new works will be unveiled at grunt gallery on Saturday September 25th at 1:30pm PDT via Zoom.

Sculptor John Sabourin created a work based on the ancient story of the giant Yamoria, who carved out waterfalls along the Mackenzie. Performance artist Jeneen Frei Njootli was inspired by the oral history, “The First Axe,” which describes an encounter between the Dene and a white trader around 1800. Curator Sharon Snowshoe will present Chief Jim Koe’s story of the signing of Treaty 11, one hundred years ago. Finally, filmmakers Peter Mather and Arlyn Charlie will give a sneak peek of wildlife they encountered this summer while canoeing down the Peel River to the Arctic Ocean.

Join us for this unique celebration of the river known as the Dehcho, the “Big River”.

This event is hosted by Drew Ann Wake. Wake received her BA in Anthropology and an MA in Sociology from the University of British Columbia. She then went to work for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, attending the hearings of the Mackenzie Valley Pipeline Inquiry as it travelled to thirty Dene and Inuvialuit communities across the Northwest Territories. After a stint as a museum curator, she began developing educational games that have now been played by 25,000,000 students around the world.

Accessibility: ASL interpretation and auto-generated captions and transcription by otter.ai will be provided. We acknowledge that live translation means that some words may not be translated accurately to English and we welcome your feedback and questions in the comments during the presentation.

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TIDAL VOLUME:  Sound-Based Indigenous Exchange Residency

Tidal Volume is a digital artist residency featuring Indigenous artists from Vancouver and Melbourne, Australia. Tidal Volume is designed as a ‘call and response’ residency that creates an opportunity for Indigenous culture-bearers and artists to work with sound, song, language, spoken word and text to connect across distance. Produced in the context of the pandemic, Tidal Volume asks us to consider what presence means when we can’t be in physical spaces together. How might we communicate — and listen — differently?

The waterways and coastlines of Vancouver and Melbourne set the basis for exploration: both ocean and river represent rich history, complex currents, exchange and deep knowledge. It is also a contentious place, a defining factor in increasingly urgent discussions around nationhood, access, jurisdictional boundaries and climate change. As we seek to revisit, explore and nurture histories of the foreshore, we also seek to provide a space and a support network for artists to interrogate and expand our understanding of the land and waters around us.

Artists Salia Joseph (Sḵwx̱wú7mesh, Snuneymuxw) and Orene Askew (Sḵwx̱wú7mesh) participated in this 4-week exploratory sound-based exchange with Maya Hodge (Lardil & Yangkaal) and Jarra Steel (Boonwurrung & Wemba Wemba) from September 27th—October 24th, 2021. Learn more about the artists here.

Click here to watch a captioned recording of the final event and artwork presentation, which took place online on November 19th, 2021.

Tidal Volume is presented by grunt gallery and The Blue Cabin Floating Artist Residency (Vancouver, CA) in collaboration with Footscray Community Arts Centre (Melbourne, AU).

Funded by the generous support of the Australia Council for the Arts and the Canada Council for the Arts.

Image: Jarra Karalinar Steel, 2021.

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OPEN STUDIO: Morgan Switzer-Rodney

OPEN STUDIO: Morgan Switzer-Rodney
July 16th – 30th, 2021

Hours: Wednesday to Saturday 3pm—7pm, or by appointment
 

Since last Fall, emerging artist, activist and podcast producer Morgan Switzer-Rodney has been working with mentor Syrus Marcus Ware to develop work around her family histories, Black futurisms and embodied, relational portraiture. As part of her mentorship, Morgan spent 4 weeks using our gallery space as a studio. Morgan will be hosting open studio visits for two weeks!

Please note adjusted visiting hours, or email communications@grunt.ca to book an appointment.

Morgan Switzer-Rodney is a young Black, kinky, queer femme, full-time activist and part-time artist residing on the stolen lands of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm, S’ólh Téméxw, Skwxwú7mesh Úxwumixw, and səl̓ilwətaɁɬ peoples. She has been co-curator of a salon series called Black Chat for the last 4 years, making space for Black folks to simply exist and be Black while being fed both food & knowledge. Running this space out-of-pocket and her home space with her Aunt is a foundational act to counter the constant policing of Black lives, and shine a light on the importance of intergenerational organizing. This project has since blossomed into 3 streams of programming including the original gatherings, arts and cultural communal field trips and a podcast. Morgan’s art practice is rooted in conversation, communal care and being a part of the experience. She’s inspired by her ancestry, the beloveds around her, the world as she sees it and beyond how she can imagine it. She is a healer through practices of body painting, curation, and interviews. The inspirations in her work include storytelling, science fiction, intergenerational sharing, and what happens after the revolution(s). She believes in ancestral memory and abolition, and encourages everyone to explore the complexity of the messiness that is the human experience.

Syrus Marcus Ware is a Vanier Scholar, visual artist, activist, curator and educator. Syrus uses painting, installation and performance to explore social justice frameworks and Black activist culture. His work has been shown widely, including in a solo show at grunt gallery, Vancouver (2068:Touch Change) and new work commissioned for the 2019 Toronto Biennial of Art and the Ryerson Image Centre (Antarctica and Ancestors, Do You Read Us? (Dispatches from the Future)) and in group shows at the Art Gallery of Ontario, the University of Lethbridge Art Gallery, Art Gallery of York University, the Art Gallery of Windsor and as part of the curated content at Nuit Blanche 2017 (The Stolen People; Won’t Back Down). His performance works have been part of festivals across Canada, including at Cripping The Stage (Harbourfront Centre, 2016, 2019), Complex Social Change (University of Lethbridge Art Gallery, 2015) and Decolonizing and Decriminalizing Trans Genres (University of Winnipeg, 2015). Syrus holds a doctorate from York University in the Faculty of Environmental Studies. He is an Assistant Professor in the School of the Arts at McMaster University.

Accessibility Information:


grunt gallery is accessed from the sidewalk via a 106” long, 64” wide concrete ramp that rises 12”. The slope is 1 : 8.75. There are no rails on the ramp. The front entrance is a manually operated outward-swinging double door with a total width of 64”. Entry to the Media Lab behind the gallery space is via a 42” wide passage and entry to the neighbouring amenity space is through a manually operated outward swinging double door with a total width of 70”. No stairs, inclines, or elevators are necessary to access the public areas once inside the gallery.

grunt gallery has a single gender neutral washroom that is accessed via a 31” wide doorway with a sliding pocket door with a door handle that is 40” high. The toilet has a 10” clearance on the left side and a 21” clearance in front, with a support bar on the left side. Please email access@grunt.ca if you have any questions.

Image: Morgan Switzer-Rodney, research materials. Photo by Vanessa Kwan.

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Nu chexw kw’átchnexw kwétsi sḵel̓áw̓?// Can you See Beaver?

Nu chexw kw’átchnexw kwétsi sḵel̓áw̓?// Can you See Beaver? is a community-based research and public art project led by Gitksan Witsuwit’en artist and community organizer Jolene Andrew and produced by grunt gallery Project Curator Nellie Lamb, in collaboration with Mount Pleasant Neighbourhood House.

The project is collaborative and based in community. It began with a conversation about a historical beaver dam that once blocked Brewery Creek near the spot where Main St and 14th Ave now intersect. This led us to wonder about the absence of such an important animal in an urban socio-ecological system and consider how the history of beavers in this landscape can inform our relationships to the land now and into the future. Throughout the project we will be contemplating the importance of keystone species like the beaver, whose knowledge and skills build dams that create wetlands, providing habitat for many other plants and animals. Nu chexw kw’átchnexw kwétsi sḵel̓áw̓? Can you see Beaver? is a reminder to take notice.  The project looks to beavers and the other animals and plants in their communities as teachers and guides. It asks questions about obstruction and flow, what has changed and what has endured, and what we can learn from these histories in the ongoing and complex contexts of urbanization, colonization, and decolonization.

The project’s Squamish language title, Nu chexw kw’átchnexw kwétsi sḵel̓áw̓? asks, “Can you see the beaver?” We hope you will join us in opening our hearts and minds to beaver’s teachings. Starting in March 2021, we are hosting a series of knowledge sharing, field study, planning, and art-making events focused on the landscape, plant, and animal (including human) life in the area that is now known as Mount Pleasant and rooted in the Indigenous knowledge and art of Skwxwú7mesh (Squamish), səl̓ilwətaɁɬ təməxʷ (Tsleil-Waututh), and xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam) storytellers, weavers and other urban Indigenous artists. Events are led by Jolene alongside artists, historians, scientists, storytellers, and knowledge holders and are open to Indigenous and non-Indigenous community members.

Further details about this project and upcoming events can be found at: https://archives.grunt.ca/Detail/occurrences/3623 

Image: Nicole Neidhardt.

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Community Workshops: Captioning, Transcription and Non-Auditory Access

Online, FREE.
Presented by grunt gallery and Kay Slater.

The last two years of working and gathering primarily online has brought into wider view an understanding that many in the disability arts community have always understood and advocated for: we need more skilled people creating video and digital content that is accessible to non-auditory audiences.

Click here to access our pre-recorded Non-Auditory Access Workshop on Vimeo, with captions available in English, French and Simplified Chinese as well as a full transcript in English.

This series of workshops is designed to help arts organizations, artists and community creators take a tangible first step towards building accessibility into their practices. By outlining best practices (and identifying the pros and cons of available auto-generated captioning services), and inviting participants to learn the basics of captioning and transcription for live and pre-recorded material, we invest in a baseline standard for access as well as a shared and shareable knowledge base.

The series included a mentorship opportunity to learn captioning alongside experienced and practicing access professionals with an invitation to co-facilitate their own non-auditory access workshops designed specifically for their own communities.

2021 workshop offerings included half-day workshops supported by our community partners ArtStarts in Schools, DTES Small Arts Grants Program, Gallery Gachet, WePress and the Pacific Association of Artist Run Centres. The full spring schedule of workshops is below.

2021 Live Workshops:
  • Friday March 12th, 1:30pm – 4:30pm: Workshop aimed towards Galleries, Artist Run Centres, and other Presentation Venues. Google Meet (with English auto captions).
  • Friday March 19th, 1:30pm – 4:30pm: Workshop aimed towards Galleries, Artist Run Centres, and other Presentation Venues. Google Meet (with English auto captions).
  • Thursday, March 18th, 5:30-8:30pm: Part of the ArtStarts in Schools Spring Digital Learning Lab: Digital Transformations. Workshop aimed towards Teachers, Caregivers, and Teaching Artists.
  • Tuesday March 23rd, 1:30pm – 4:30pm: Workshop aimed towards creators and artists.
    *All ages / spring break special, Zoom with CART (captions) and ASL Interpretation.
  • Thursday April 22nd, 5:30pm-8:00pm: Workshop Aimed Towards Creators and Artists*
    Presented by our community partner, DTES Small Arts Grants Program. On-location, in-person viewing at Carnegie Community available in the theatre. Centre viewing in their Theatre, and online streaming. Workshop also available online for free (link coming soon).
  • Friday April 23rd, 1:00pm-3:30pm: Workshop Aimed Towards Creators and Artists*
    Presented by our community partner, DTES Small Arts Grants Program. On-location, in-person viewing at Carnegie Community available in the theatre. Centre viewing in their Theatre, and online streaming. Workshop also available online for free (link coming soon). *Cantonese/Mandarin translation will provided for online participants.
  • Sunday April 25th, 1:00pm-3:30pm: Workshop Aimed Towards Creators and Artists*
    Presented by our community partner, DTES Small Arts Grants Program. On-location, in-person viewing at Carnegie Community available in the theatre. Centre viewing in their Theatre, and online streaming. Workshop also available online for free (link coming soon).
  • Friday April 30th, 11am-1pm: Captions for CanLit, specifically for literary event organizers, including publishers, bookstore staff, and magazine editors.
    This workshop will take place on Google Meet with automatic captions. Presented by Kay Slater with Leah Horlick.
  • Friday May 28th, 5:30pm-8:00pm: Q&A Session – Live with Kay, ask your captioning and transcription questions! Presented by our community partner, DTES Small Arts Grants Program. Live webcast, with on-person viewing at Carnegie Community Centre available in their theatre. Mandarin and Cantonese translation available via online stream. ASL Interpretation will be available 6-8PM
  • Friday September 24th, 10:00am – 1:00pm: Workshop aimed towards Galleries, Artist Run Centres, and other Presentation Venues. Via Google Meet (with English auto captions).
  • Tuesday, November 9th, 6:30 – 9:00PM PDT:  Workshop aimed at Dancers, Performers, and Festival Events. Co-Hosted by Sparkle Plenty and Kay Slater.
Do you have any accessibility needs?

Our workshops are hosted on Google Meet (Free Service – Accessible by Browser) with Auto-Captions (English), and we will have a session with ASL Interpretation on March 23rd. Let us know if you have any access needs when you register, or write us an email at access@grunt.ca

Session Transcripts will be made available.

Check back for updates, including paid mentorship opportunities and streamable content.

Kay Slater (project lead/ workshop facilitator) is a multidisciplinary artist, accessibility consultant and arts worker.  As a consultant, they work directly with artists and organizations to build accessibility in at the planning stage, and to incorporate sustainable, grass roots strategies that support evolution in artistic presentation. Their work is rooted in anti-oppression practices, and they employ open source and community-engaged approaches to support ongoing knowledge transfer  with makers and creators at all stages of their careers. They are a member of the Open Access Mapping project’s Advisory Committee, are a proud volunteer and social coordinator at Queer ASL, have completed the Rick Hansen Foundation’s Accessibility Certification program and are working towards CSA Accessibility certification later this year. Kay is passionate about sharing knowledge with the wider arts community.  Kay is queer and hard of hearing. They use They/Their/Theirs pronouns exclusively online.

Mentees:

Leah Horlick is a writer and poet who grew up as a settler on Treaty Six Cree Territory & the homelands of the Métis in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan. Her long-awaited third collection of poems, Moldovan Hotel, is available now from Brick Books. Her first book, Riot Lung (Thistledown Press, 2012), was shortlisted for a 2013 ReLit Award and a Saskatchewan Book Award. Her second collection, For Your Own Good (Caitlin Press, 2015), was named a 2016 Stonewall Honour Book by the American Library Association. She is also the author of wreckoning, a chapbook produced with Alison Roth Cooley and JackPine Press. She lived on Unceded Coast Salish Territories in Vancouver for nearly ten years, during which time she and her dear friend Estlin McPhee ran REVERB, a queer and anti-oppressive reading series. In 2016, Leah was awarded the Dayne Ogilvie Prize for LGBT Emerging Writers. In 2018, her piece “You Are My Hiding Place” was named Arc Poetry Magazine’s Poem of the Year. She lives on Treaty Seven Territory & Region 3 of the Métis Nation in Calgary.

Jocelyn Statia has over 5 years of experience in the arts and culture sector; and many years of customer service experience. She has a BFA in Visual Arts and a Library & Information Technology Diploma. Her professional experiences involve research and production of ideas, culture or objects from the past and present. This informs her understanding about how work is produced, preserved, presented and the social and public implications for the understanding of art, culture, identity and access to information.

Sparkle Plenty (she/her) is Cree with mixed heritage who lives and works on the stolen territories of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Wahtuth people known as ‘Vancouver’. She has worked in many arts organizations as a communications professional, programmer, facilitator, and performance artist. She is a convening member of the Virago Nation Indigenous Arts Society, where she produces and performs in shows and workshops with the mission to reclaim Indigenous sexuality from the toxic effects of colonization. She has been invited to perform and share her decolonial point of view for arts events including the Vancouver International Burlesque Festival, Talking Stick Festival, TRANSFORM Cabaret Festival as well as numerous other arts festivals.

This program is produced by grunt gallery with the support of the Canada Council for the Arts, Disability Alliance BC and Sarah Wang.

    

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COVID-19 Gallery Protocols

Please be advised of our current protocols to help ensure the health and safety of all during the COVID-19 pandemic:

 

  1. Maximum 6 people in the gallery at a time (excluding staff)*
    1. For larger groups, please contact communications@grunt.ca to book an appointment in advance.
  2. Please do not enter the gallery if:
    • you have traveled outside Canada in the last 14 days
    • you have had contact with a person confirmed to have COVID-19
    • you have any symptoms such as fever, chills, coughing, loss of taste or smell
  3. Masks are mandatory while inside the gallery (if you don’t have your own, we will provide one)
  4. Use the hand sanitizer provided upon entering the gallery
  5. Please practice social distancing (minimum 2m between visitors)

*For large groups, please email communications@grunt.ca to book an appointment in advance.

Thank you!

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Cool Indians on Main Street

Cool Indians on Main Street
on the Mount Pleasant Community Art Screen

grunt gallery and Cool Indians On Main Street have teamed up on a project for the Mount Pleasant Community Art Screen! Charlene Vickers and Neil Eustache, the co-founders of Cool Indians on Main Street benchin collective have invited Indigenous artists to make an open ended statement about Indigenous presence and benchin. What is benchin one may ask? Benchin is the act of gathering socially to sit on a bench to people watch, share ideas, stories, and just be together. Moving through the uncertain times of a pandemic, benchin is redefined and expressed differently. Benchin happens in individual moments, alone or within one’s  social “bubble.” Benchin is expressed via face-time chats, or by sharing benchin pics on social media, or by a regular phone call.  This summer Charlene Vickers organized a dream team of Cool Indian benchers to create a series of digital media works for the Mount Pleasant Community Art Screen as the next iteration of what “benchin” could become.

Cool Indians Benchin Dream Team:
Lacie Burning
Robert Chaplin
Neil Eustache
Jeneen Frei Njootli
Whess Harman
Maria Hupfield (with collaborators Ester Neff, IV Castellanos)
Janine Island
Jenny Irene Miller
Casey Koyczan
Manuel Axel Strain
The Human Nature Collective (Daina Warren, Kirstin Snowbird, Robert Snowbird, Theo Pelmus, with Kevin McKenzie)
Tania Willard
Charlene Vickers

Images, from top left: Wavers by The Human Nature Collective; Alas and Forsooth by Whess Harman; The Labour of Protecting by Manual Axel Strain; Cool Indians design by Neil Eustache; Prayers by Lucie Burning; We Practice Our Culture Because Our Parents Were Not Allowed To by Casey Koyczan; Swaying Praying by Tania Willard; Canuck the Crow by Robert Chaplin.

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These Ones (formerly Together Apart)

These Ones (formerly Together Apart) is a loosely formed collective of 2S/Indigiqueer artists, writers and performers that followed out of the Spring 2019 Together Apart, Queer Indigeneities 2S/Indigiqueer Symposium, inspired by the Two-Spirit Cabarets held at grunt during the early 90s. With a flexible format of membership, These Ones uses itself as a mobilizing point to pool skills and resources that can be adaptive to ideas, projects and partnerships as they come. By operating through grunt gallery with Curator Whess Harman (Carrier Wit’at), the collective is able to anchor itself and its projects within a stable and intuitive organizing body while retaining agency over programming decisions and outcomes. The project reflects the widely interdisciplinary nature that inherently follows organizing around the identities that fall within the cross-section of both queer and Indigenous. Since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, the moniker of “Together Apart” has taken on a very different meaning and indeed has been taken up by other groups and projects. With that, our Together Apart collective will now go forward as “These Ones.” “These Ones” is a phrase often affectionately used in Indigenous communities to refer to groups of usually-but-not-always young folks who are very close with one another and tend to move as a unit.

Projects for These Ones are both on-going and forth-coming, and open to 2S/Indigiqueer community members for assistance in the conception and organization of  projects. Following the original symposium event, the Together Apart Zine, initially a publication made to go alongside the event, has extended now into a nine issue run gathering work from artists and writers from across Turtle Island. Adapted into a two-term peer mentorship model, the Together Apart Zine has been edited both by writer Brandi Bird (Cree, Saulteaux and Metis) and following with Kaya Joan (Jamaican/ Vincentian, Kanien’kehá:ka). Through the course of the nine issues, over 30 queer, Indigenous and Afro-Indigenous creators have contributed to either the zine or its accompanying launch events and partnerships.

As of July 2022, These Ones is thrilled to announce a new project written by Jessica and Ben Johns. Cree & D, a narrative radio play, takes you along with Aunties Vera, Darlene and Mac (voiced by Jessica, Emily Riddle and Matt Ward respectively) to solve the case of Kokum Cardinal’s stolen (very powerful and important) staff. Written in the style of a Dungeons & Dragons campaign, this is a story of love, family, and of course adventure, as these aunties work to preserve the hard won and tenuous peace treaty between the six nations. Click here for details.

Going forward, Together Apart is seeking avenues of digital projects both in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, but also in efforts to be accessible to queer Indigenous folks beyond urban spaces. These projects are grounded in an ethos of for us/by us as a way of better expressing queer Indigenous identities in all its multiplicity while prioritizing solidifying platforms in which queer and Indigenous creators have opportunities to build their practices with and alongside one another.

Images: Untitled by Kaya Joan; Issue 5 cover by Lacie Burning; Issue 4 interior art by Jaime Blankinship.

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ONLINE LAUNCH | New Documentation & Response by Tobias Ewé for Recollective: Vancouver Independent Archives Week 


Photo: Quivering by Hong-Kai Wang

“When an earthquake’s sonic event oscillates through the air – rolling over the earth – it absorbs all objects in its wake. The sonic outline of every object in the path of the sound wave is inscribed into its signature. An earthquake produces rumbling imperceptible infrasounds that alter the geological make-up, as well as deep bass frequencies that offer up new modes of understanding the malleability of geological strata. Movements are world-makers. As sound moves, worlds are created. As the earth quakes across its surface, new lines are drawn up.”   – Tobias Ewé

Recollective: Vancouver Independent Archives Week announces the web-launch of “On Hong-Kai Wang’s Quivering,” a newly commissioned text by Tobias Ewé in response to This is no country music, a performative lecture hosted at Artspeak on November 1, 2019, and Wang’s exhibition Quivering which was on view at Artspeak from October 26–December 7, 2019.

Read Tobias Ewé’s response and view the event and exhibition documentation on the Recollective website.

Recollective: Vancouver Independent Archives Week is a series of free public events that highlight artist-run centre archives, artists working with archives, and the intersections between contemporary art practices and social movements in Vancouver and beyond. Recollective commissions original response works to our programming from a variety of artists, writers, and activists. Stay tuned for more Recollective responses and programming at archivesweek.ca!

BIOS
Tobias Ewé
is a Danish experimental theorist currently based in Vancouver, BC. He is writing a PhD on inhuman psychoacoustics in the Department of Art History at the University of British Columbia. His research focuses on the epistemology of listening in modernity, and its symptoms in the sonic arts at the nexus between vibrational inhumanism and speculative aesthetics. His most recent work appears in Holger Schulze, ed (2019), Handbook of the Anthropology of Sound, London: Bloomsbury; and Laboria Cuboniks (2018[2015]), Xenofeminisme: En politik for fremmedgørelse, trans. Tobias Ewé, Copenhagen: Passive/Aggressive. Tobias has exhibited/performed diagrams and sonic fictions in Germany, Canada, Denmark, Italy and online.

Based in Taipei, Taiwan, Hong-Kai Wang’s research-based practice confronts the politics of knowledge lost in colonial and diasporic encounters. Through experimental modes of sonic sociality, her multidisciplinary work seeks to conceive of other time-spaces at the intersection of lived experience, power and ‘listening.’ Wang’s work critically interweaves the production of desire, histories of labor and economies of cohabitation. She has presented projects at Asia Art Biennial 2019; Theater Commons Tokyo 2019; Sculpture Center New York; documenta 14; Taipei Biennial 2016; Liquid Architecture; and the Museum of Modern Art.

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