Innholdsfortegnelse for Winter 2016 - 2017 i C Magazine

This summer the TIFF (Toronto International Film Festival) Cinematheque in Toronto showed Lizzie Borden’s Born in Flames (1983) as part its Free Screen series. Similar to Jennie Livingston’s 1990 film, Paris is Burning, BIF has gained tremendous significance among the LGBTQ community. The small-budget production was drawn out over a five-year period. Bleak, downtrodden streets of downtown New York City serve as the backdrop for the film’s fictitious near future, in which a socialist democratic revolution has overturned the capitalist state. Borden casts predominately Black female protagonists who seek a radical reorganization of society. The film’s portrayal of different groups of women working out how to challenge patriarchy and white supremacy was unique for its clear illustration of the fragmentation within second wave feminist struggles. Craig Willse and Dean Spade…

I don’t think I ever watched porn on VHS; I’m too young for that. As my sexuality took shape, amid the early dramas of being a queer teenager, the Internet was already fully accessible to the public. My first curious fantasies were thus nervously typed into a search engine or furtively searched for in library books. The rapid dominance of Internet porn meant that by the time I was 18, daily glimpses of sticker-covered nipples at the corner store and the mysterious curtained-off backrooms of my local video stores had vanished. As these sexual ephemera remain an object of childhood speculation rather than adult consumption, I’ve learned only through research of the huge impact that obscenity laws and morality brigades had on precarious queer communities. The uncertain digital future of…

Desearch Repartment’s Institute for Durational Futures: Brought to you by ESSENTIALHAPPINESSPOSSIBILITY exhibition revealed a commitment to exposing the narcissism of unreflexive privilege and the socalled apolitical detachment of the artist in a postfeminist and post-identity art world. As an anonymous think tank working in between platforms of social performance, DR takes the apathetic to task, and snarkily reminds us that the post-identity artist assumes no responsibility. Claiming identity politics were too restrictive throughout the ’90s, the satirical DR works to undermine an “excess of content” in the contemporary art world, instead focusing on the production and performance of immaterial spaces around content. To this end, Desearch offered up an “interactive convention” in exhibition form at AKADEMYSPACE in Cologne last November; this “convention” encouraged viewers to escape from accountability in favour…

“Ours is a world in vertigo. It is a world that swarms with technological mediation, interlacing our daily lives with abstraction, virtuality, and complexity.” So begins the Xenofeminist Manifesto, formally Xenofeminism: A Politics for Alienation (hereafter XFM), compiled by the collective Laboria Cuboniks in 2015. “XFM constructs a feminism adapted to these realities: a feminism of unprecedented cunning, scale, and vision; a future in which the realization of gender justice and feminist emancipation contribute to a universalist politics assembled from the needs of every human, cutting across race, ability, economic standing, and geographical position.” The considerations, in short, of Laboria Cuboniks, or LC, are extensive, taking into account not only the ways in which technology can facilitate pluralistic feminisms, but also the extent to which technology may constitute an interdisciplinary…

What is the 4% universe? To answer this question and to understand the magnitude of this phrase, let’s start where we generally do, with us: humans. Currently, there are 7.4 billion people on this planet. Our combined number of 7.4 billion constitutes only one species out of an estimated 8.7 million species (and that’s not including the uncountable group of microbes). Now given that there are 7.4 billion humans in one species, just imagine how many living organisms there are on earth from a possible 8.7 million species! This incalculable number of living organisms combined with non-living organisms – all of the matter in this world – and all of our interactions, our exchanges of energies, our beliefs, our dreams and fears, ALL OF IT, is contained on this one…

Jaime Black’s Conversations with the Land first reached an audience at Actual Gallery, a commercial space that has since closed. Black’s process engages with the histories, materialities and relations of specific sites, both on the land where she and her ancestors have lived and as a guest on other people’s territories (this is work with the more-than-human that does not “free” anyone from cultural distinctions and responsibilities). Recalling her grandfather’s ways of living with the land, she gathers things that happen to be nearby – stones, fabric, remains of past living – and creates allusive mise-en-scènes that also incorporate herself. Photographs mediate the ongoing project, yet both the title and the work suggest that conventional discourses of photography – as technical apparatus, documentation or art – are limiting with respect…

The name of the exhibition A Pool is Water is excerpted from a Joan Didion essay about wealth and drought. When Didion writes “a pool is water,” she means that swimming pools are symbolic. In California, they have always signalled affluence and leisure. But to Didion, pools represent order: they stand for the mastery and control achieved by cutting a hole in the ground and filling it with water that stays there until we drain it. Even though that water is undrinkable, even though it’s in limited supply, we’ve tamed it and claimed it. Four words, equally terse and poetic, convey all this. Everything in this show is on trend – not a curatorial diminishment, but a nod toward the acuteness of the selection – from Didion, to the rosé…

“today, i passed a mirror and did not see a body, instead a suggestion, a debate, a blank post-it note there looking back. I haven’t enough room to both rage and weep.” Donte Collins – from “what the dead know by heart” What is to be done with the Black body in this time of crisis? When the circulation of imagery of Black people killed, tortured, maimed and left to drown constitutes a deathly hallows to be pursued by the various houses of white supremacists, authoritarian populists, carceral feminists and talking heads, what is to be done with the unacknowledged buildup of anti-Blackness and the existential questions it raises, the unruly and unsightly forms it takes on? The body is a construction that appears through modern modes of knowing and…

Wanda Nanibush is the guest writer for this column in c132. I am a woman of my people I am an image and word warrior I am Anishinaabe I am a worker I am my language I am a daughter, aunt, sister I am water I am land I speak/act against violence against women, water, children, land I speak/act with the ancestors and knowledge keepers I remember when I decided to add kwe to Anishinaabe a few years ago and how much of a struggle it was at first. This struggle marks out some of the pathways I have found to and from western feminisms and something we could call Indigenous feminisms. Sharing this journey opens up a space for thinking about the contradictions that structure my relationship to the…

1 Bob Marley & The Wailers. “Waiting in Vain”, 1977. Are you mad? Harness this feeling. How do we channel madness when we find ourselves continually rooted in being undone? Our bodies hold ineffable energies that remain unperceivable to those existing outside their fleshy contours. This cipher precedes language and its translation deep within the wells of un-mappable geographies. These wells harbour safety until we are awash in death and she leaves us rising like smoke diffused and unnamed. So we say her name. We repeat these utterances like mantras. In this madness we merge and dance furiously. I missed the incessant dancing on September 1, 2016. However, instinctively, I felt this vision was a continuous unfolding and each day there awaited a new experience. Simone Leigh’s The Waiting Room…

Water is intrinsically dynamic: its state changes depending on temperature and, in its most common liquid form, it responds to movement. Water’s chemical properties suggest neutrality: it is tasteless, it can act as both an acid and a base, it dissolves many substances and it is almost entirely clear. Globally, it demarcates many liminal places, such as international waters, and time spent on water often has a feeling of suspension. Although the political issues regarding water are often as various and as complicated as its chemical properties, the United Nations nonetheless considers clean water a fundamental human right. Ruth Cuthand’s Don’t Breathe Don’t Drink makes it clear that in Canada clean water is far from politically neutral, and in a disconcertingly beautiful installation she forces her audience to encounter their…