Indelible Refusal: Bodies, Performance, Walking Resistance starts Monday February 26th

This series of public lectures, panel discussions, film screenings, workshops, artistic walking interventions, performances, and master classes aim to actively engage in pedagogies of refusal and solidarity. The program aims to walk-with and think-with Indigenous, Black, 2 spirit, queer and trans artists and scholars to work through concepts related to land, settler colonialism, slavery, erasure, violence, and refusal.

Monday February 26 2018

Tipi Confessions: A Research-Creation Laboratory (public lecture)
Kim TallBear
5 to 7 pm – Robert Gill Theatre, 214 College Street. PLEASE NOTE THAT THE ENTRANCE IS ON ST. GEORGE. The theatre is wheelchair accessible and serviced by elevator from the St. George Street entrance of the Koffler Student Services Building.

Sponsored by the TechnoScience Research Unit and co-hosted by Sexual Diversity Studies
Moderated by Michelle Murphy
This event is free and open to the public.

Tipi Confessions is comprised of sexually-themed performances that take creative research methodologies to the stage. Three Indigenous women from the University of Alberta—Professors Kim TallBear and Tracy Bear, and social media maven Kirsten Lindquist produce several Tipi Confessions shows annually in Edmonton, across Canada, and internationally. With advising from University of Alberta drama faculty, and with mentoring from the original Bedpost Confessions™ in Austin, Texas, Tipi Confessions Indigenizes sexy storytelling and performance. The show is a key initiative of ReLab, a research-creation laboratory founded by Dr. TallBear at the Faculty of Native Studies at the University of Alberta. Foregrounding Indigenous analytics, standpoints, and contemporary practices, the ReLab produces research, performance, and art. With good relations in mind, that research and creative practice intersect two areas of inquiry, Indigenous sexualities and Indigenous “naturecultures.”

Tuesday February 27 2018

First Story (walking tour)
Meeting Place: 563 Spadina Ave (First Nations House, Borden Building North)
10:30 am to 1:00 pm – The walk will take place outside, regardless of weather. The walk will end at Hart House
This event is free and open to the public. Prior registration via Eventbrite.

This campus tour highlights the continuing history of Indigenous presence upon the lands that constitute University of Toronto’s St. George Campus. The stories, which constitute a history of fraught relations between this institution and the original persons (human and nonhuman) whom this institution has systematically displaced, are stories of loss and restoration, victory and sacrifice, hunger and satiation, and breakage and repair; they are inscribed upon these lands, sung by buried waters, written within the walls, and whispered by the ivy that clings to sedate stone and brick exteriors.

Insurgent Geology, Fugitive Life (seminar)
Kathryn Yusoff and Elizabeth Povinelli
2:30 to 4 pm – Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, 252 Bloor St. W, Room 11-164.
Two readings will be shared prior to the seminar that will form the basis for discussion.
This event is free and open to the public. Registration is required.Please email stephanie.springgay@utoronto.ca to register. There are limited spaces available.

Starting from how late liberalism and the Anthropocene unravel a set of normative discourses on agency and genealogy that cohered around (biocentric) life, this discussion turns to other durational fields of geology conceived through the concepts of geonotology (Povinelli) and geologic life (Yusoff). Focusing on the role of settler colonialism and the geologies of race in relation to New World/Old World/Newer World colonialism, we will explore some insurgent junctions in the tenses of Nonlife.

Karrabing Film Collective (screening and discussion)
Wutharr, Saltwater Dreams (2016) & Night Time Go (2017)
Karrabing Film Collective presents two of its most recent films, with Kim TallBear and Elizabeth Povinelli in conversation after the film screening
5 pm – Robert Gill Theatre 214 College Street
This event is open to the public.

Night Time Go (2017, 31:10). On September 19, 1943, a group of Karrabing ancestors escaped from a war internment camp and walked over 300 kilometers back to their coastal homelands in Northern Australia. Night Time Go is an exploration of the settler state’s attempt to remove Indigenous people from their lands during the Second World War using truck, train, and rifle and the refusal of the Karrabing ancestors to be detained. The film begins by hewing closely to the actual historical details of this ancestral journey but slowly turns to an alternative history in which the group inspires a general Indigenous insurrection driving out settlers from the Top End of Australia. Mixing drama and humor, history and satire, Night Time Go pushes subaltern history beyond the bounds of settler propriety.

Wutharr, Saltwater Dreams (2016). Across a series of increasingly surreal flashbacks, an extended indigenous family argues about what caused their boat’s motor to break down and leave them stranded out bush. As they consider the roles played in the incident by the ancestral present, the regulatory state and the Christian faith, Wutharr: Saltwater Dreams explores the multiple demands and inescapable vortexes of contemporary indigenous life.

Following the screening of the two films, Professors TallBear and Povinelli will discuss the films and facilitate an open forum.

Wednesday February 28 2018

Indigenous Methodologies master class
Kim TallBear with with Professor Susan Hill
12-1 pm Centre for Indigenous Studies
Closed to the public.

Centre for Indigenous Studies and community lunch with Kim TallBear
1 to 2 pm – First Nations House, Borden Building North, 3rd Floor, 563 Spadina Ave
This event is open to the public.

Poetry reading and focus on creative research with Kim Tallbear and Gein Wong
2 to 3 pm – First Nations House, Borden Building North, 3rd Floor, 563 Spadina Ave
Everyone is welcome! This event is open to the public.

Desire and Change: Difficult Dialogues in Contemporary Art and Art Education (Master Class)
Stephanie Springgay and Audrey Hudson
5 – 8:00 pm Art Gallery of Ontario
Closed to the public.

This class will offer students a unique opportunity to engage with contemporary art with the Art Gallery of Ontario (AGO) exhibitions on view and online resources. There will be a particular focus on artists who have historically been left out of conversations. The class will create a space of critical reflection and re-imagination, where difficult thought and theory are centred, embodied, mobilized, and take shape.

Thursday March 1 2018

Mapping Memory: Public Space as Archive (panel discussion)
Camille Turner and Cheryl Thompson
Moderated by Andrea Fatona

6 to 8 pm – Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, 252 Bloor St. West, room 11-164
This event is open to the public.

Despite the many creative and inventive techniques used to walk and map place, the prevailing history of mapping is entrenched in Imperial and Colonial powers who use and create maps to exploit natural resources, claim land, and to legitimize borders. This talk examines counter-cartographical approaches to mapping, memory, and the archive in order to resist dominant power structures, question the assumptions that conventional maps produce, and recognize different spatial knowledge systems. Camille Turner and Cheryl Thompson will discuss their research into local archival material and Black history in Toronto while also challenging contemporary blackface and debates over public monuments in Canada.

Friday March 2 2018
Desire Paths: Poetic choreographies and the conversation of space finding
4 to 7:30 pm – Unit 2, 163 a Sterling Rd. [please note venue change] jes sachse (During Feb 26th-Mar 6th follow @squirrelofmystery on Instagram to peak inside the studio)

The event is free and open to the public. TTC tokens provided. To register, email jes.sachse@gmail.com (please include your access needs & any questions you might have. Note: this studio space is large enough for more than one wheelchair user to move in. We love you & your needs have been anticipated)

Panel discussion 4 to 5:30 pm:
Listen to a host of movers significant in developing the intersection of social justice & performance talk about the vital labour of radical space making, as they share secrets to space & resistance within their practices, and stories of favourite dance floor moments and movements.

DJ sets and dance floor 5:30 to 7:30 pm
At 5:30 we’ll dim the house lights and put on gels as we move from discussion to live DJ sets, in our experimental, physically accessible, ASL integrated dance floor. In a city where it costs money just to take a shit, come to a place where u dance & give none~
Curated by jes sachse and Golboo Amani

jes sachse will be in residence in the Leonard Common Room (LCR), Morrison Hall 75 St. George St. from 6 to 7 pm on Feb 26 – 28; March 3 to 6. Please drop by.

Saturday March 3 2018

BlackGrange (walking tour)
Camille Turner
Meeting Place: Lobby of University College, 27 Kings College Circle
2 to 5 pm
This event is free and open to the public. Prior registration via Eventbrite.

From the perspective of a fictional time traveler, Camille Turner’s BlackGrange rethinks and re-imagines the present by illuminating histories of the African Diaspora in Toronto’s Grange neighbourhood.

Monday March 5 2018

Our Continuing Relationship with the Humber River, An Evening with Balance Bringers, Drawing With Knives and Eventual Ashes (public lecture and performance)
Gein Wong
5 to 8 pm – Luella Massey Studio Theatre 4 Glen Morris St
This event is free and open to the public.

“We can tell you many things about Cobechenonk, but actually, we’d rather invite you to board one of our canoes and experience it for yourself.”  Sit down with us to talk about our work along the Humber River including the Cobechenonk Shadow Canoe Show.  The evening will include some video footage from the performance and live examples of our Shadow Puppetry work.

Tuesday March 6 2018

Finding Language: A Word Scavenger Hunt (walking event)
Vanessa Dion Fletcher
Meeting Place: Circulation Desk, OISE Library, 252 Bloor St. W.
3-4:30 pm
Free and open to the public. Register on Eventbrite.

I’ve lost my words. Some of them are stuck in little boxes in my brain – drawers that won’t open. Some of them are in the mouths of my Indigenous ancestors. Come with me while I search the OSIE library for these lost words and find some of your own along the way.