[archive]
Galvanized Suns Orbit Schedule
Michaela Bridgemohan | Weeping Gideon Child
Roya DelSol | A Vision of the Sun
Jonathan Chan-Choong | A Glass of ‘So Real’
Kofi Oduro | Preacha Draws & Ramblin
Luis Navarro Del Angel | Seis8s
Olivia McGilchrist | X-cosmos-X
Faune Ybarra | 1a. Stranded in Bed
Luis Navarro Del Angel | Seis8s
Diasporic Futurisms Curator Talk
Michaela Bridgemohan | Weeping Gideon Child
Roya DelSol | A Vision of the Sun
Ana Luisa Bernardez, Kanika Gordon, Luis Navarro Del Angel, and Marc Ngui
Roya DelSol | A Vision of the Sun
Queen Kukoyi | Blxck Womxn
Antonio Coello | Hant Quij Cöipaxi Hac
Olivia McGilchrist | X-cosmos-X
* each day has a slightly different schedule, all times are in EST
Featured Artists
Aisha and Andalah Ali
we tried to collect acorns but the acorn weevils ate them first.
Hydrangeae
we rented a super-8 camera from the liaison of independent filmmakers of toronto on dupont street, bought four reels of super-8 film from niagara custom lab on st helen's avenue. we walked from palmerston boulevard and filmed hydrangea bushes on the way to niagara custom lab to get the film developed. against floriography is our feelings on flowers. the first person is plural. i am two.
back to topAna Luisa Bernardez
Ana Luisa Bernárdez Notz is an interdisciplinary artist based in Toronto. She holds a BFA from OCAD University, and was the 2020 OCAD U Photography Program Medal Winner. Her practice is largely influenced by the ongoing Venezuelan migrant and refugee crisis, and by her own positionality and lived experience within it. Ana Luisa is a member of Colectivo Satelital, a collective of Venezuelan creatives based in Toronto.
Un espacio suspendido
"Un espacio suspendido" is a VR environment in which I recreated my grandmother’s bedroom in Caracas. The room floats like an island on a body of water, pointing both to the Venezuelan-Caribbean coastline where I grew up in, as well as to the (in)accessibility of this specific room, which is only possible through memories and images. It includes embedded family photographs, home movies from my childhood, and furniture that was modelled and textured referencing photographs from my personal family archive. This space exists in a limbo state physically and psychologically for both of us: I now live in Canada, and she was displaced to a nursing home in 2018. Being physically unable to document this space, I used this digital medium to memorialize and immortalize it, with the hopes of adding to my family history as we navigate the current Venezuelan crisis, which keeps us all divided across borders.
back to topMichaela Bridgemohan
Michaela Bridgemohan is a multidisciplinary artist of Jamaican and Australian descent who grew up in Mohkinstsis, also known as Calgary, located on the traditional territories of Treaty 7 Land. She is currently an MFA candidate at the University of British Columbia - Okanagan and received her BFA (with Distinction) from the Alberta University of the Arts in 2017. Bridgemohan continued her artistic research confronting criticism and concepts of Black biracial subjectivity, Afro-diaspora, and the visual ambiguity surrounding those kinds of bodies.
Weeping Gideon Child
Weeping Gideon Child (2020) is a continuation of Embedded Spirits (2018-2020) which engages with disembodied figures amidst a revival process. I intertwine personal narratives, Jamaican folktales, cultural mysticism and the complexities of racial ambiguity as to transform into something anew. I attempt to use my body as a duppy, a malevolent entity, to mimic the experience of occupying two worlds at once. Duppies are remembered as vengeful spirits who were maroon slaves, lynched at the arms of trees on foreign land. Ghosts and shape-shifters all occupy a liminal, in-between space that is reflective of racial obscurity, bodily shedding, internal and external transformation and subjugation. When I engage with these folk-monsters, I want to confront ideas of personal shame, identity, racism, cultural erasure, and trauma in order to make sense of my relationship to the unceded land I live on.
back to topJonathan Chan-Choong
Jonathan “JCC” Chan-Choong is a Guyanese-Jamaican-Canadian poet and writer, born in Scarborough, Ontario. Informed by a multicultural-racial background, one of the most ethnically diverse neighbourhoods in Canada, and food justice, JCC's central themes include identity, the human condition, and social observations.
A Glass of ‘So Real’
What happens when your identity is questioned by your own community? What does it mean to be a minority amongst minorities? A Glass of ‘So Real’ is a poem and a conversation about identity, self-love, acceptance, and familial history. As a multicultural-racial person, my appearance does not always match people’s expectations of what a West Indian should look like. Because of this, my origins have been denounced by both the Caribbean and larger Canadian communities. This poem is named after the hibiscus drink, sorrel. With its deep red colour, it symbolizes our unity as Caribbeans and the blood that ties us together.
back to topAntonio Coello
Storyteller and filmmaker born in Mexico City in 1977
Hant Quij Cöipaxi Hac
The non-tangible heritage of the Seri Indigenous people ventures into animation. A collective adaptation of the ancient Seri creation story, made by children and elders.
back to topLuis Navarro Del Angel
Luis Navarro (Mexico City) is a student of New Media and Cultural Studies at McMaster University. Luis is creating a computer-music software inflected by musical expressions derived from political resistance and opposition (e.g. Cumbia). Luis usually plays with Jessica Rodriguez under the name Grupo D’Binis.
Seis8s
This is a real-time musical improvisation influenced by cumbia sonidera using seis8s ("seis octavos"), a computer language that allows real-time interaction with digital audio and localized musical knowledge. Seis8s is a recent project that aims to be collaborative, through consensual musical knowledge from the different personal and collective borders that exist in Latin America. Seis8s also expects to be an ideology critique of the dominant computer-music world system rather than an uncritical abstraction of worldviews. The first "module" of seis8s produces music influenced by Cumbia sonidera, a style particular to the Mexican working-class in Mexico and the United States. For more info on Cumbia sonidera see the book “Sonideros en las aceras, véngase a gozadera” available here. For more info on Seis8s click here.
back to topRoya DelSol
Roya DelSol is Black media artist based in Toronto. Working primarily as a lens-based artist, she aims for her work in all spheres to centre and uplift the experiences Black, queer, and marginalized peoples. She creates photographic, video, motion graphic and VR work; capturing Black femme intimacies, strength & joy in hopes of visualizing new, liberated worlds.
A Vision of the Sun
An experimental film drawing its inspiration from early PSA / propaganda type videos. Like these videos, it contains explicit messaging -- but rather than warning of potential harms or seeking to program it’s audience, it functions as a protection spell that will protect it’s viewers & amplify the spell’s power with each viewing. Through the use of popular depictions of Black "witches" & text overlaid on top of this imagery; the video leads the viewer through a ritual that instead honours the history of African descended religions, traditions and spiritual practice as a way of spreading information about these practices, amplifying connections to our ancestors, and strengthening and protecting Black peoples worldwide.
back to topKanika Gordon
Kanika Gordon is a digital media artist with a focus on telling compelling stories through a futurist lens. Mixing video and analog images with futuristic soundscapes she creates worlds that nearly resemble our own- exploring what the future could look like while asking questions the viewers must answer for themselves.
Future Beginnings
Future Beginnings explores Black mythology and the ritualistic practices that connect us to these belief systems. Sharing stories from the past and connecting them to soundscapes of the future reflects a deep knowing of the power that comes from knowing these histories and continuing to tell them. Passing these practices down through generations secures them and ensures they continue. Constructing ways of being that honor them while moving forward into the future creates a space that connects us all to the magical.
back to topQueen Kukoyi
Queen is a Black Bajan of Nigerian Ancestry, Queer, Femme presenting, Mother, Author, Scholar, Activist, and International Artist as well as Executive Director at BSAM Canada Institute. As a creative Queen explores poetry, digital collage, and animations along with installation work that explores concepts around the Afrofuturistic meditative space. Queen uses the lens of Afrofuturism 2.0 in her visual arts, mindfulness, and storytelling to facilitate discourse that decolonizes the Black identity and affirms all intersections of Blackness.
Blxck Womxn
The Blxck Womxn installation seeks to build on the belonging and celebration of black womanhood bloomed in the resistance of White Supremacy. In acknowledgment of the history, this work hopes to provide a theoretic framework for the consequences of singularizing the black womanhood trope and it may begin to aid in the realizing of all intersections of Black women. Black women can collectively begin redefining what Blxck Womxnhood means. Through radical understanding, we can explore how the intersections of gender norms, racism and colorism work together. Then a new narrative is created through a transformative lens. Black women can collectively begin redefining what Blxck Womxnhood means to us, for us, by us.
back to topJean-Pierre Marchant
JP’s past films have explored themes such as the malaise of white-collar modernity, local histories, landscapes, and myths. His current work uses a substantial archive of home movies recorded by his parents to interrogate themes such as youthfulness and glamour, migration, rootlessness, working-class respectability, Latino identity, and disappointment.
A Parent's Wishlist
A short film about upward mobility and working class aspirations, A Parent's Wishlist is about an object that could be found in many North American homes between the mid-twentieth and early twenty-first centuries - a set of encyclopedias. Dragged from one city to another and across the country by my Chilean immigrant father, his Encyclopedia Britannica set came to symbolise his hope for a better life for both himself, and for me.
back to topOlivia McGilchrist
Olivia Mc Gilchrist (she / her) is a white French-Jamaican multimedia artist and researcher exploring how colonial legacies extend their reach to Virtual Reality (VR) technology. Her research-creation PhD project borrows critical tools from Feminist studies, Black studies and Postcolonial Caribbean studies in order to offer a framework for the aesthetic experience of VR immersion figuratively and literally.
X-cosmos-X
In X-cosmos-X, I am looking at water and submersion through screen-based technologies, to stimulate a contemplative, immersive experience. Inspired by Barbadian writer and poet Kamau Brathwaite’s notions of ‘tidalectics’ and a ‘Caribbean cosmos’ layers of video and 3D water shaders create a fluid effect, further pushing my explorations in experimental virtual underwater environments which include non-Western spaces. My current research-creation practice also investigates how contemporary iterations of Virtual Reality (VR), within a continuum of screen based and multi-media installation art practices, may trouble postcolonial identities through hybrid representations of human and non-human bodies.
back to topMarc Ngui
Marc Ngui (b 1972, Georgetown, Guyana) is an artist/designer based in Windsor, Ontario. He trained as an architect before devoting his creative practice to concept creation, visual communication and storytelling using the formal conventions of information diagrams and graphic novels. Marc's work has been exhibited across Canada and internationally, including The Orpheus Institute, Ghent, Belgium; The JR Ishinomaki Line Art Festival, Onagawa, Japan; Supermarket Art Fair 2013, Stockholm, Sweden; The Kitchener Waterloo Art Gallery, Kitchener, Canada; Doris McCarthy Gallery, Toronto, Canada; and the Toronto Comics Arts Festival
Welcome to Dee Double Dub
Welcome to Dee Double Dub is a sci-fi comic that describes a futuristic eutopian megacity on the Detroit River.
The DWW (Detroit-Windsor-Waawiyaataanong) Urbiome is a vast ecologically integrated metropolis situated on the Detroit River in the Southern Great Lakes Ecoregion. It is a radically optimistic vision of a benevolent civic structure that has evolved to enable all of its inhabitants, human and otherwise, to thrive.
Welcome to Dee Double Dub is part of a larger world building exercise, Future Parfait, which asks creators to 1) “Imagine your own perfect world, making room for all others” and 2) “Imagine it evolving from the present day.” It is a method for envisioning positive futures that are rooted in present realities. Using timelines, current events and historical precedent, a map is drawn, a story told, weaving concepts into strands of possibility
Kofi Oduro
My artistic practice is an observation of the world around us, that I then put into artworks for others to relate to or disagree with. Through Videography, Poetry and Creative Coding, I try to highlight the realms of the human performance and the human mind in different scenarios.
Preacha Draws & Ramblin
The Preacha Draws and the Rambler Speaks, we are embarking on a journey, where the open source mentality is used to make an a futuristic Realm, that code and poetry altered the state of the universe. The first portion of the work is embedded in a state , where the Preacha uses an array of open source tools to convey words and emotions from Rambling Intellect interaction with the pieces. In the second phase, Rambling Intellects start speaking through the code and open source environments and Illest preacha rebuttals with what he is expressing. This mirrors the need of open communication as inspiration and through these occurrences that these environments can extend themselves to another level, if we are mindful that space and distance can be a motivating tool as the Rambler and the Preacha are united even though 1000’s of miles away
back to topFaune Ybarra
Faune Ybarra is a “diasporic artist”, her regard to media relies on the connections she establishes with that which surrounds her. An MFA candidate at Simon Fraser University, Faune’s research/practice focuses on the interrelation of displacement and "diasporic gestures".
1a. Stranded in Bed
1. a Stranded in Bed is part of a work-in-progress archive where I acknowledge times, places, and spaces of the so-called “Canadian” East and West coast. I am a diasporic artist writing and making from Vancouver, coming from Newfoundland, but born and raised between Oaxaca and Mexico City. From constantly adapting to different landscapes, I’ve asked myself how and or if it’s even possible to lay roots as a non-native person when my transits resemble more those of the seeds of a dandelion. In the form of what I have come to call “diasporic gestures”, actions to ground oneself to the currently inhabited land, I sustain a conversation with the book Through Newfoundland with the Camera, published over 100 years ago, responding from the new land I’m trying to adapt to. In attempting to ground myself to the places I inhabit I claim agency over my own diasporic journey, part of a shared history of immigration and displacement.
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