B.3.1 Media art practices as intercultural performance—activating communities of resistance

• Sarah Shamash; University of British Columbia, Emily University of Art + Design

The project to decolonize media art cultures and studies through scholarship, making, teaching and curation is only achievable, I argue herein, through networks of solidarity and by activating communities of resistance (Mohanty). As Patricia Hill Collins explains, transformative knowledge emerges from collective experiences, not individual “knowers” (Fighting Words). Some of the questions I examine are: How is visibilizing Latin American, Latinx visual cultures, particularly from oppressed peoples and groups, revelatory of community resistance to colonial power relations? What are the aesthetics of community resistance in Latinx, Latin American media art production and how does examining these aesthetics shift media art pedagogies in the academy? This presentation focuses on how a personal media art research-creation practice is part of communal endeavors to assert intercultural identities and realities within the Canadian nation state that disrupt canons of whiteness and contribute to plural knowledge systems (as part of decolonization within the academy). Through community formations, solidarities, and networks—even those that are geographically distant from my localization on unsurrendered Coast Salish territory—my research-creation practice is centered on Global South and decolonial thought and action with a focus on Latin American (Brazilian), Indigenous, Chicana feminist knowledge production. While co-existing with community as a valid form of knowledge is not always recognized in the academy, I explore pedagogical and creative methods that activate community knowledges as a form of social practice that enhances, pluralizes and radicalizes conceptions of media art valuation. Whether as a member of intersecting communities (feminist, media art, Latinx), or through engaging media artworks, texts, and guest speakers in the classroom, and/or through public curatorial programs, I examine how activating these diverse Latin American, Latinx centric knowledges is a form of performing complex intercultural identities that affirm social heritages, interconnected solidarities, and ‘imagined communities’ of resistance.

B.3.2 Bodies of Contestation: Canadian Women Artists from Latin America

Tamara Toledo, York University

As we question western canons and, in an effort, to decolonize subaltern presence of Latin American and Latinx diaspora within Canada, it is important to indicate how their positionality influences and directs their practices. How they navigate erasure. To what extent their in-between state facilitates a relationship of solidarity with Indigenous communities rather than as settlers, regardless of their circumstances of migration. Cold War geopolitics, neoliberalism, patriarchal systems, along with identity politics have provided material for four women artists from Latin America who navigate a system that perpetuates marginality and exclusion in Canada. They have adopted this place as their home and work within Western Eurocentric spaces, accentuated by systemic racism, and centuries of colonialism. Their practices have been ignored despite their relevance and contributions to discourses within contemporary art. Claudia Bernal, Maria Ezcurra, Julieta Maria, and Helena Martin Franco’s geo-political and socio-cultural contexts offer sites of contestation, their counter-narratives offer a voice for peripheral identities, and their position as women who defy patriarchal structures of power denounce genocide and violence. They inspire a decolonizing framework of study and offer a site of transformation where their position can trace moments of erasure and empowerment. By decolonizing public spaces, presenting proposals of contestation, all within the power of their own bodies, these artists embark on a path to decentering, altering, reconfiguring, and constructing counter-hegemonic narratives that defy traditional canons. They resist the condition of “Third World” classifications by redefining the production of knowledge based on experience, collaboration, community engagement, knowledge sharing, activism, resiliency, and a combative spirit that accompanies each of their practices.

B.3.3 On the Name of Inclusivity: “Latin American and Latinx-Canadian Turns” in Montreal

Analays Alvarez Hernandez, Université de Montréal

In this paper, I will focus on the relationship between art institutions, and Latin American and Latinx-Canadian artists in Montreal. In the last 20 years, Montreal’s museums, art centers, private galleries, university and municipal galleries and artist-run centers appear to manifest an ever-growing interest in these artists. That said, these institutions’ approaches vary and sometimes have different outcomes than the intended ones. To discuss these approaches and their outcomes, I propose to briefly delve into an artist and curator residency and the recent activity of an exhibition center. The Residency of the Americas is a program funded by the Montreal Council for the Arts and spearheaded and hosted by the Darling Foundry since 2008. In 2016, it underwent a significant change; since then, the residency has been entirely dedicated to artists and curators “from” Latin America. This “Latin American turn” was motivated, among many other reasons, by the organizers’ willingness to reserve this program for artists who have less “access” to this kind of opportunity and international contemporary art networks. In 2020, a Mexican-Canadian artist, lecturer, and scholar was appointed as general and artistic director of SBC gallery. This hiring has had a major impact on this exhibition center’s functioning and the thematic scope of its exhibitions and events. For instance, in 2021 SBC gallery dedicated its programming almost exclusively to showcasing Latinx-Canadian artists, and the trend continues today. The analyses of these residency and programming’s exhibition center will allow me to explore different approaches to “inclusivity”: Do the Latin American and Latinx-American turns respectively taken by the Residency of the Americas and SBC Gallery reinforce invisibility and subalternity conditions attached to Latinx-Canadian artists, or, on the contrary, offer them a space to thrive? In short, with this paper, I intend to stress the urgency to go beyond the implementation of “inclusive” strategies and operate structural changes that dismantle (art) institutions’ coloniality of power.

B.3.4 Screening Latinx-Canadian Cinemas: Film Curation as a Counter-Archival Practice

Zaira Zarza, Université de Montréal

In 1995, Colombian-Canadian film producer and programmer Ramiro Puerta initiated Cruzando Fronteras or Crossing borders, a foundational meeting of Latin American diasporic filmmakers in Toronto. This gathering originated the now known as Alucine Latin + Media Arts Film Festival. To date, Alucine has been one of the leading platforms for the exhibition of Latinx-Canadian cinemas across the country. This paper seeks to explore film curation as a critical tool for audiovisual heritage preservation that helps shape cultural memory and reclaim screens for subaltern communities. In doing so, I will analyze Alucine’s programming strategies as a process that contributes to both the dissemination and construction of diasporic counter-archives from Latin America in Turtle Island. Drawing from silenced archivism theories, I will particularly consider how this case study rescues stories and practices marginalized or absent from Canada’s official film history. In this process, I argue that the festival configures new audiovisual repositories with increasing self-management and broader documentary autonomy. I will discuss how Alucine has participated ––or not–– in the archival mobilization of Latin American and Latinx-Canadian narratives in three main ways. First, by surveying selected films that utilize archival footage to memorialize and remediate the cultural past of the region and its diasporas. Secondly, I will scrutinize the ways in which programming and exhibition have contributed to the creation of a counter-archive through documentation of discussion sessions, design of promotion materials, etc. All these resources, mainly located in personal repositories of curators and filmmakers, are examples of people-to-people, non-institutional or “minor” archived that help preserve the festival’s memory as well as that of its community.