MTL Connect’s Art Programme
October 18, 2022
Venue: 7 Doigts (2111 Saint-Laurent blvd.) and Online
DECOLONIZING PLACE: REINSTATING INDIGENOUS ECO(SYSTEMS) AND SOVEREIGNTY
Keynote: Cheryl Bryce
Moderator: Pamela Tudge
1:15 PM (in-person, at 7 Fingers)
Lekwungen ancestral land continues to nourish connections to culture, governance, food sovereignty and health. Indigenous food systems, including Kwetlal Food Systems and the cultural roles, connections and sovereignty, offers a framework for decolonizing systems. Addressing the harm colonialism continues to cause starts by identifying the issues and working with Indigenous people to end the harm through sustainable relationships. This discussion will talk about the colonial impacts and healing of the land and culture through the reinstatement of Kwetlal Food Systems in Lekwungen ancestral lands.
Why Hope? Why Now?
Panel with Dayna Danger, Navid Navab and Leila Zelli
Moderator: Manuelle Freire
2:30 PM (in-person, at 7 Fingers)
The present ecological moment urges us to reflect on creative imaginaries for the future. However, as much as the future matters, there is no future without the present. In this conversation, Montreal-based artists Dayna Danger, Navid Navab and Leila Zelli are invited to reflect on the following questions: How do contemporary artists and thinkers engage with pressing contemporary issues like climate change and equity? What is the inherent difference between what artists produce versus the output of scientists, and what is the importance of such a difference? What do contemporary artists hope for? Why is finding hope today so essential to our survival?
Nonhuman Futures
Workshop with Suzanne Kite
2:30 PM (online)
In this virtual workshop, Kite will investigate our present and future relationships with non-humans with a focus on technology and artificial intelligence, as well as demonstrating the protocols of negotiation developed in her own practice via the following prompt: how can humanity create a future incorporating human-technology/A.I. relations without a guiding ethical-ontological orientation to understand what is worthy of relation and what is not?
Cross-Species Sociality: Centring Relationality in Research-Creation
Master class with Miranda Smitheram
3:30 PM (in-person, at 7 Fingers)
Through an approach of centering collaborative relational kinship assemblages with environments and multispecies within research-creation, we will examine what it means to become-with through art and creative encounters with ecosystems. These concepts of making-with and becoming-with, invite us to consider ourselves in symbiosis with the world around us, not as a species disconnected from the conditions of its world.
EXTENDING Creativity with Foundation Models
Workshop with Harley Smart
3:30 PM – 4:45 PM (online)
Rooted in studio arts and independent publishing practices, the research-creation work conducted by Harley Smart explores how Foundation Models may be applied in order to ideate uses for post-consumer waste and transform both the production and consultation of books.
Recreate, Redesign and Restore: Food Systems of Hope
Workshop with Pamela Tudge
4:00 PM (in-person, at 7 Fingers)
In this workshop, we will integrate critical design hopeful future imaginings for food and its interrelated systems. Drawing inspiration from Canadian regenerative and food future projects, (ex. https://foodfuture.ca), Montreal’s Cimate Action Plan and Urban Agricultural Strategy 2020 – 2030 and the UN’s sustainable development goals for 2030, we will design speculative interventions and community actions for hopeful ecosystems for the future of food. Participants will be guided through a series of design stations centred around three key themes: health, waste, and land. The objective is to respond to these prompts by creating prototypes that incorporate the participants’ ideas, experiences and interests as they relate to food, food culture, and distribution.