Indelible Refusal Collaborators (in order of Schedule of Events)
Kim TallBear is Associate Professor, Faculty of Native Studies, University of Alberta, and Canada Research Chair in Indigenous Peoples, Technoscience & Environment. She is building a research hub in Indigenous Science, Technology, and Society. TallBear is author of Native American DNA: Tribal Belonging and the False Promise of Genetic Science (University of Minnesota Press, 2013). Her Indigenous STS work recently turned to also address decolonial and Indigenous sexualities. She founded a University of Alberta arts-based research lab and co-produces the sexy storytelling show, Tipi Confessions, sparked by the popular Austin, Texas show, Bedpost Confessions. Building on lessons learned with geneticists about how race categories get settled, TallBear is working on a book that interrogates settler-colonial commitments to settlement in place, within disciplines, and within monogamous, state-sanctioned marriage. She is a citizen of the Sisseton-Wahpeton Oyate in South Dakota.
First Story Toronto: Since 1995, First Story Toronto, (formerly The Toronto Native Community History Project), within the Native Canadian Centre of Toronto, has been engaged in researching and preserving the Indigenous history of Toronto with the goal of building awareness of and pride in the long Indigenous presence and contributions to the city. First Story Toronto shares this history through a variety of initiatives such as First Story Toronto Tours (formerly The Great Indian Bus Tour of Toronto), walking tours of places in the city, and making accessible a growing archive of historical materials about Toronto’s Indigenous community, past and present on our smartphone app.
Jon Johnson (French Canadian, with Haudenosaunee and Kichisipirini ancestry) is an interdisciplinary scholar that works within Toronto’s Indigenous community. His work is focused on urban Indigenous land-based knowledge and storytelling traditions in Toronto and is grounded in his role as a lead organizer, researcher, and tour guide for First Story Toronto.
Jill Carter (Anishinaabe/Ashkenazi) is a Toronto-based theatre practitioner and Assistant Professor with the Centre for Drama, Theatre and Performance Studies; the Transitional Year Programme; and Indigenous Studies at the University of Toronto. Her research and praxis base themselves in the mechanics of story creation (devising and dramaturgy), the processes of delivery (performance on the stage and on the page), and the mechanics of Affect. She has worked with Turtle Gals Performance Ensemble (Assistant Dramaturg and Performer), the Chocolate Woman Collective (Researcher, Assistant Director, Remount Director, Workshop Director), and Omuskego Cree Water Stories (Workshop Director). In Fall 2014, she directed the Canadian Premiere of Gloria Miguel?s Something Old, Something New, Something Borrowed, Something Blue at Native Earth Performing Arts? Aki Studio. Most recently, she has participated in Native Earth?s Weesageechak Begins to Dance (2016, dramaturg; 2017, performer); performed in Talking Treaties (Jumblies Theatre, 2017); and served as researcher and tour guide for First Story, Toronto for which she also devises land activations, mapping interventions, and personal cosmography workshops.
Kathryn Yusoff is a Reader in Human Geography in the School of Geography, Queen Mary University of London. Her research interests include environmental change, nonhuman life, feminist geophilosophy and extraction. She recently completed a book entitled “A billion Black Anthropocenes or None” and is finishing another on “Geologic Life”.
Elizabeth Povinelli is the Franz Boas Professor of Anthropology at Columbia University. Her writing has focused on developing a critical theory of late liberalism that would support an anthropology of the otherwise. Informed primarily by the traditions of American pragmatism and continental immanent theory and grounded in the circulation of values, materialities, and socialities. This potential theory has unfolded primarily from within a sustained relationship with Indigenous colleagues in north Australia and across five books, numerous essays, and four films with the Karrabing Film Collective. Geontologies: A Requiem to Late Liberalism was the 2017 recipient of the Lionel Trilling Book Award. Karrabing films were awarded the 2015 Visible Award and the 2015 Cinema Nova Award Best Short Fiction Film, Melbourne International Film Festival and have shown internationally including in the Berlinale Forum Expanded, Sydney Biennale; MIFF, the Tate Modern, documenta-14, and the Contour Biennale.
The Karrabing Film Collective is a grassroots Indigenous based media group. Filmmaking provides a means of self-organization and social analysis for the Karrabing. Screenings and publications allow the Karrabing to develop a local artistic languages and forms and allow audiences to understand new forms of collective Indigenous agency. Their medium is a form of survivance—a refusal to relinquish their country and a means of investigating contemporary social conditions of inequality. The films represent their lives, create bonds with their land, and intervene in global images of Indigeneity.
Cheryl Thompson has a PhD in Communication Studies from McGill University. In addition to teaching in the Department of Visual Studies at UTM, Dr. Thompson is a Banting Postdoctoral fellow at the University of Toronto, working with Dr. Stephen Johnson in the Department of English & Drama (UTM) and the Centre for Drama, Theatre and Performance Studies (St. George). She is also finishing her first book, Beauty in a Box: Detangling the Roots of Canada’s Black Beauty Culture.
Camille Turner is an explorer of race, space, home and belonging. Born in Jamaica and currently based in Toronto, her work combines Afrofuturism and historical research. Her interventions, installations and public engagements have been presented throughout Canada and internationally. Camille graduated from Ontario College of Art and Design and York University’s Masters in Environmental Studies program where she is currently a PhD candidate.
jes sachse is a Toronto-based artist, writer, and curator. Often found marrying poetry with large-scale sculptural forms, their work addresses the negotiations of bodies moving in public/private space and the work of their care. Their work & writing has appeared in Canadian Art, C Magazine, NOW Magazine, The Peak, CV2 -The Canadian Journal of Poetry and Critical Writing, Mobilizing Metaphor: Art, Culture and Disability Activism in Canada, and the 40th Anniversary Edition of Our Bodies, Ourselves.
In 2017 through two concurrent residencies with Dancemakers emerging choreographer program (Peer Learning Network), and 7a*11d Performance Art Festival‘s ground-breaking social media residency 7a*md8, jes returned to dance as a medium, in which they are trained in classical ballet and tap, incorporating choreographic gesture into their professional practice.
The dancer has been in residence at the University of Toronto from February 26-March 6 in studio rehearsing through the body methodologies of movement and narrative. Incorporating ASL into dance-based story telling, this time in residence is culminated in an accessible community-based dance event, a conversation which they have invited in multi-disciplinary artist Golboo Amani to co-curate together.
Golboo Amani is best known for her performance and social practice works. Amani often relies on familiar social engagements as a point of entry into her practice. Critical of systemic social patterns, the artist views social situations as ready-made sites for aesthetic intervention.
Acknowledging that many of us are marked by long, personal histories and prescribed relationships with pedagogy, Amani’s work often addresses the conditions of knowledge production that render epistemic violence as invisible, insignificant and benign. Much of her work focuses on interventions or alternatives to formal sites of pedagogy to include forms, contexts and content normally excluded from institutionalized knowledge production. By expanding sites of pedagogy to include the streets, backyards, homes, public transit, Amani intends to produce non-hierarchical pedagogical experiences that speak to collective agency and egalitarian epistemology.
Amani’s work has been shown nationally and internationally in venues including the Creative Time Summit, Art Gallery of Ontario, Articule, XPACE Artist-Run Centre, Encuentro: Hemispheric Institute, Union Gallery, Blackwood Gallery, Rats9 Gallery, Rhubarb Festival, FADO Emerging Artist Series, TRANSMUTED International Festival of Performance Art (Mexico City), 221A Artist-Run Centre, and the LIVE Biennial of Performance Art.
Gein Gizhii Kwe Wong is an interdisciplinary director and artist of First Nations and Asian descent who is Two-Spirited and Queer. Her works focus on obvious things like gender, class and race, as well as things a little less obvious like gender, class and race. She sits on the Board of Directors of the Toronto Arts Council, as was an inaugural member of the TAC Cultural Leaders Lab. She is a recipient of the 2014 Ken McDougall Director’s Award and 2015 CCGSD Canadian Youth Role Model Lifetime Achievement Award. Gein is Artistic Director of Eventual Ashes, a co-owner of the world’s oldest LGBT bookstore, Glad Day Bookshop, a member of the Indigenous eco-restoration group, Naadmaagit Ki, and a member of the Indigenous Two-Spirit drum group, Balance Bringers. She was a 2012-13 Canadian Stage Director in Residence, a 2013 Harbourfront Centre Resident Artist, a two-time Philadelphia Asian Arts Initiative Resident Artist, the inaugural resident artist at fu-GEN Asian Canadian Theatre, collaborated on a New York HERE Arts Centre Residency and was a member of the Native Earth Performing Arts’ Animikiig Creation Unit. She conceived and directed “Say Their Names, Remember”, a 500 person performance piece which opened the Ai Weiwei exhibit at the Art Gallery of Ontario. she co-created “The Forgetful City”, a site specific interactive video installation that reopened the RC Harris Water Filtration Plant in Toronto – an art-deco castle closed to the public for a decade due to 9/11. In 2014, World Pride commissioned her to commemorate the 45th anniversary of the Stonewall Riots by creating a large scale immersive performance experience to remember Stonewall. in 2016, she co-created “Long (Dragon) House” an immersive experience performed inside the Song Dong exhibit at the Art Gallery of Ontario and was invited to Brown University to give the talk “Intersectionality is an Ocean”. This summer she co-created The Interstellar Spadina House Museum Guided Tour and Cobechenonk an immersive canoe trip through time up the Humber River.
Vanessa Dion Fletcher employs porcupine quills, Wampum belts, and menstrual blood to reveal the complexities of what defines a body physically and culturally. She links these ideas to experiences with language, fluency, and understanding. All of these themes are brought together in the context of her Potawatomi and Lenape ancestry, and her learning disability. Her work is held in the Indigenous Art Center Collection in Gatineau, Quebec, and Seneca College. Dion Fletcher graduated from The School of The Art Institute of Chicago with an M.F.A. She is the recipient of the Textile Museum of Canada Melissa Levin Emerging Artist Award.