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welcome everyone to the disassemble the arts an ongoing arts and accessibility program

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this month we are featuring the toronto-based artist cyrus marcus squares

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as we have gathered here digitally i just want to take a moment and think through our land

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acknowledgement and think about how we can continue in solidarity with the indigenous of the land

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i’m currently located on the traditional and unseated lands of the illiquid-speaking peoples

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and the wasani peoples since our activities are shared digitally to the internet let’s also

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take a moment to consider the legacy of colonization embedded within these technology structures

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and ways of thinking that we use every day

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we are using equipment and high-speed internet not available in many indigenous communities these technologies leave significant

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carbon footprints contributing to climate changing climates are disproportionately affecting

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indigenous peoples worldwide i invite you to join me and acknowledge all of this

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as our shared responsibility to make good of this time and for each of us to continue our role in reconciliation decolonization

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and or allyship and i and i think also thinking through the

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situation right now and in terms of what we’re going to be talking about and we want to think about all of this

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in relation to indigenous communities both in canada and across the world

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my name is reagan schrum i am currently the assistant curator at the art gallery of great victoria i’m

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a queer and disabled individual living on the columbian speaking territories i have fair skin long brown hair that’s

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right now any ponytail and i’m currently sitting behind a white background and

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sitting on a brown couch if you have any trouble please

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use the chat private chat to message me to um

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so i can figure out any kind of technical issues that you are dealing with

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the built-in audio output in is in your computer’s external speakers you may also use your phone

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if you are going to be using the phone please make sure that you disconnect from your computer so you don’t hear

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so we don’t hear both of you today’s presentation is conducted over

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the screen share um so you may want to adjust your viewpoint on the top of your screen uh

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so you can have it more to the needs

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we ask at the end we’re going to have about a 10 to 15 minute question answer session we ask for

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accessibility reasons that you don’t use the chat function for those using screen readers

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they’ll be actually uh hearing everything that is being typed out along with

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hearing people speak and it can be very distracting so we ask you instead

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to use the q a function while at the end of the session

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if you would like to leave the the webinar early that is totally fine there will be a recording of this session

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that will happen in about a week or two um the leave meeting button is on the

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lower right hand side so please take advantage of that at any time in a week

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or two i will be sending up a follow-up email with today’s recording with a transcript

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and with feedback uh of the workshop and now i will introduce cyrus cyrus is

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an assistant professor at the school of arts in at mcmaster university

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he is a vayner scholar visual artist activist curator and educator cyrus uses painting

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installation and performance to explore social justice frameworks and black activist

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culture and he’s shown widely in galleries and festivals across canada

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he’s a core team member of black lives matter’s toronto a part of the performance disability

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arts collective and the abd phd candidate at york university in the faculty

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of environmental studies his ongoing curatorial work includes that sergey which is part of

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the gladstone hotel from 2016 to 2019 and blackness yes slash block-a-rama

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he’s the co-editor of the best-selling until we are free reflections on black lives matter in

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canada which just was released uh this year so i will leave it to you

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uh cyrus thank you so much of the credit this is three fires territory is the

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territory of the dish with one spoon wampum and it is also a part of treaty 13.

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uh i continue to be so thankful for the chance to get to live and work in these territories and i know that my

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work supporting and fighting for black liberation must come in solidarity

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with and in conjunction with supporting indigenous resurgence in order to ensure that we all get to be

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free so thank you um so a little bit about myself i’m a black trans disabled and mad

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artist parent educator i have uh brown skin very long

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uh blonde dreadlocks they’re maybe four or five feet long um and i’m wearing an orange hat and a

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green vest and a silver ginkgo biloba leaf earring to help me remember

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things because i have a memory impairment i’m wearing glasses and i have a background behind me

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of a monument in the united states that has been taken over by blm protesters and

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they’ve painted with beautiful bright colors messages of hope and survival all over

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what was once a confederate monument so that’s what i’m in front of in my background

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so i want to start sharing my screen and i’m going to tell you just a little bit about my work and my

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practice and about how i’ve tried to make space and create space for uh

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us to be able to bring disability into our conversations and into our creative practice um

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a little this image on the screen right now is an image of four uh gender fabulous black

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queer people uh look dressed in afrofuturist attire looking

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down at us through a camera lens and the screen title says irresistible revolutions

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and really and that is what my work is trying to do it’s trying to get at this tony k barbara quote from 1982

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that the role of the artist from the marginalized or oppressed community is to make the revolution irresistible so

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i’ll talk a little bit more about that as we go on but that’s something that is really guiding my work i am a

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phd candidate at york university and i’m doing a phd specifically looking

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at disability in the arts and the ways that disability deaf and mad artists are engaged with or not engaged

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with within the contemporary arts media and what is happening in our immediate environments in terms of supporting

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um and advancing the careers of deaf mad and disabled artists my work

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is largely rooted in activism as you mentioned i am interested in exploring black activist culture

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through my practice and to me activism and speculative fiction go hand in hand uh dreaming of the

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future afrofuturism and imagining a world where we get to be free

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that’s what we’re doing when we’re doing activism walida marisha in a book called octavia’s brood

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which was all people writing in the spirit and uh energy of octavia butler a black

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speculative fiction writer um in the octavia’s brood walida and marisa

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says that in fact all activism is speculative fiction so on the screen right now is another

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clip from a video that i made of a bunch of afrofuturistic looking

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uh folks staring out at the screen and the text says whenever we try to imagine a world

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without war in a world without violence a world without prisons without capitalism

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we are engaging in speculative fiction all organizing is speculative fiction

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and so this idea that as artists as creators we’re getting to imagine the future

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in the same way that speculative fiction writers are doing it and in fact she’s saying that as artists we actually

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are you know in the best possible position to help people to imagine the world

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that we’re trying to get to when we talk about abolition when we talk about liberation when we talk about life after the

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revolution when we talk about what kind of world we want to emerge out of covet into

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you know it’s artists who are helping us to paint the picture of what that might potentially look like i also wrote my

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work largely in disability justice so as a disabled artist as a mad artist

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to me it’s been very important to draw on the important work of bipac cutie by pog uh disabled

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uh mad and deaf folks who have done such incredible work to say we need to talk

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about our experiences intersectionally we need to prioritize and support black

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and indigenous leadership and we need to make sure that when we’re doing work it’s all of us for all of us and if any of us are

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left behind it’s not the revolution so uh very thankful and indebted to disability just justice practitioners

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who have helped me to think through uh how i want to ground my practice

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i’m going to start by talking a little bit about a project that i uh i did that was aimed at addressing

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uh madness and essentially and addressing our our mental health and our survival

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this project was called activist love letters and it was first performed in 2012 at

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the feminist art gallery and on the screen you see a close-up uh image of a letter that an activist

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has written took her gomberg and it says dear activist it is another strange day for me

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and then the rest of the text is cut off and then you also see a small image of people gathered around a table

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writing letters together so what activist love letters did was it gathered people together strangers to

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uh you know draw inspiration from these incredible letters that activists have written to each

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other over time so thinking here of james baldwin writing to angela davis

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when she was in prison that famous letter that not only critiqued america for once again placing

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an image of a black person in chains on the cover of a magazine but two for saying we all must fight for

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angela’s life as if it were our own and of course he famously closes with for if they come for you in the morning

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they will be coming for me at night therefore peace brother james so thinking about those letters thinking

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about the letters that leonard peltier indigenous uh political prisoner uh wrote to mumia abu jamal a black a

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political prisoner encouraging us to fight for his freedom so all these incredible letters that are

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unseen and kind of invisible that activists have written to each other i was interested in uh in showing those

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and talking about the relationships that activists have built across great distances and

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often across a generational divide in the case of the baldwin and angela davis letter

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where people came together to say you know hey i see what you’re doing and i just want to support you

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the second part of the project was to invite these strangers that i had gathered together to write a love letter to an activist in

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their community to pick somebody to write to uh and then to send them a message of love

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and care that we get sent through the mailways so this image on the screen is a

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close-up of a a line a fishing line a clothesline uh with a whole bunch of bios of

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different activists pegged up along the line and a bunch of letters that people have written

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posted up on a gallery wall so for this project i would post up uh these these bios of activists working

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all across uh the north part of turtle island and inu at nunegat but also in the south um and i would often you know try to

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find bios of the particular people who were organizing in the community where the performance happened

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and i would invite people to write to uh one of these folks or maybe to write to somebody in their

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life who they’ve always wanted to reach out to to say oh by the way here you know this thing that you do

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thank you or i’ve always wanted to tell you this uh anyways i collect these letters um and i have mailed thousands of them

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this is a an image of a whole bunch of letters pinned up on a gallery wall and there’s just tons and tons and tons of them

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this is another image of a whole bunch of letters pinned up on a wall with one of them written in giant red

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letters the words you are amazing imagine getting that in the mail so all of these letters i i include

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information about how people can write back uh to me and i have gotten

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tons of responses i’ve mailed thousands of letters all over the world at this point since i’ve been doing the project for

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eight years then i’ve got some incredible responses and most people say that the letters

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came at the exact right moment that moment when there was self-doubt

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or questioning what is my next move am i making a difference is this work doing anything and then you

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get this letter in the mail from a complete stranger saying oh by the way

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your work is actually touching me it’s affecting my life and it’s been an incredible project one

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of the letters that i draw inspiration from is this letter from tricker gomberg who was a white uh activist

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environmental justice activist based here in tacoronto but also working out in the west coast

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in alberta um and he wrote this open letter to all activists just before he died

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um because he had a deep depression and he wrote this letter and he encouraged us

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to stay strong but the way that we needed to do that was to build relationships outside of our activism

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to build networks of care while we were well so that when we get sick or if we get sick we have support

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systems and support networks around us to help us to do the to to engage and to be there

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to do the activism but to not overdo it i think is how he says it to make sure that you have other interests and hobbies and things in your

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life that bring you joy and value so that if you get sick and you can’t

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be involved in organizing you still have things in your life that are sort of enjoying and sustainable and i read

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aloud from that letter uh at the end of every performance for the last eight years because

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i think those words are so sombering and so harrowing we need to make sure that that all

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activists in fact actually have a support network around them that they are supported when they are

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struggling because we know activism can cause intense burnout and that they have support around them in order to as

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tucker gomberg says in the letter be able to live to fight another day

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so through this process of uh writing uh letters and receiving letters back and getting

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to know all of these different activists i became very interested in wanting to get to know these people

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a little bit deeper just wanting to get to know them and understand their work their being their interests

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their loves and so i started drawing them i started drawing activists

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larger than life um so making portraits that were ten feet tall and six feet wide

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of activists um through a process of interviewing them and asking them about their work

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and um really taking up this charge of what would it take to create resilient

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conditions for activism what would it take to create the kinds of conditions where people

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could stay engaged in organizing and mobilizing over a period of time

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with breaks and with community support with mutual aid built in rooted in disability justice where there

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is a slowness where there is a care built into the work what would that take and so one of the things that i wanted

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to offer was these acts of reverence these celebrations of activist labor of

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activists lives of activist love so i started drawing these people larger than life and what

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better way to get to know them than to get to ask them all of these questions but also to get to trace every line on their face

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you know and really get to understand the shape of their being so this is a portrait i did

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actually in 2015. um shortly our 15 or six yeah 15

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uh shortly after the killing of eric garner by the police and his famous uh last words were

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uh i can’t breathe and this is a portrait of an activist in minnesota

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um and she was attending a protest in the mall of america and they did a massive protest and shut

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down the mall and it was incredibly successful and they had all put mass to to contain their identity

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and she had written i can’t breathe on this hospital mask and i was so struck by that image and so

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and so i drew her and of course now in 2020 this drawing has seemed

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so um interesting to me because it has all of these other meetings of course as we know this summer the

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police continued to attack and kill black people indigenous people

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mad people and they killed uh george floyd and famously his last words were also i

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can’t breathe and this image of somebody with a mask on of course in 2020

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because of kovid because of the pandemic has this whole other way to it um interestingly enough this was

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the only activist that i had ever drawn uh in this series that i hadn’t met

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first i had seen this image and just felt compelled to draw it uh through organizing and through

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activism and building networks of care i met miski noir an activist and organizer with black lives matter

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in the states uh who is based in minneapolis and i i was uh you know showing them my

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artistic practice and i was showing them some of the drawings and then they saw this drawing and they said oh my gosh i know that’s family i

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know them and was able to put us to in touch i was able to share the drawing and so now we’re connected so now the loop is

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closed all of the activists in the activist portrait series are people that i’m connected with through organizing and activism these

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drawings take an incredible amount of time and labor and in part that’s part of my

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embedding disability justice into my work as a disabled artist i’ve been very interested in figuring

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out how to be in this body and the meat sack as they call it

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how do you exist in this body and do the things that you want to do and i’ve been very interested in pushing to see

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where my limits are and so when i initially started doing drawings like this one of joshua um i was very interested in

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drawing it in a long durational chunk so i drew for about 85 hours straight with short breaks for sleep and

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food just to see if i could do it i have uh you know a couple of autoimmune diseases

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and my mobility you know what isn’t guaranteed for for i won’t be able to do that for

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forever and i wanted to see if i could do it in this moment and so i drew this in a long durational chunk

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uh during a residency at the art gallery of york university this is a portrait of queen titio

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palecki and much like most of the people that i interviewed and and and photographed

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she said i don’t know if i’m an activist i don’t know if i’ve done enough to consider myself an activist and it’s

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interesting because most activists that i talked to and organizers were like oh i don’t know if i if i’ve

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done enough to con to give myself that title yet they were doing all of these incredible things and so there was this

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myth of the super activist out there who’s doing all the things all the time that we seem to compare ourselves to in

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order to understand whether we can consider our work to be part of the movement for black lives or the movement for social change

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or whatever it is that we’re fighting for interestingly enough queen titia palecki

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and her son started an organization called prosthetics for foreign donation when her son who’s an amputee found out

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that he couldn’t recycle or donate or reuse his prosthetics as he outgrew them

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and of course in nigeria where they’re from and of course in all these other places there were so many people who were

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really looking for prosthetics and needing them and so they decided to create an organization that would collect

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prosthetics from all over and then redistribute them worldwide so that’s what prosthetics for

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foreign donations do and the last time i checked with their numbers they had collected over 60 000 prosthetics and sent them all over the

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world but she still wasn’t sure if she had done enough to consider herself to be an

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activist which is so incredible to me uh so this gives you an idea of the scale

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uh this is queen tt here and you can kind of see she’s about six foot two maybe so you

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can imagine how tall this drawing actually is uh in comparison uh these drawings are

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moments of capturing activists lives they create an archive of activism

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in this moment i asked all of the people that i had drawn the same three questions i asked them to

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talk about how they got involved in organizing i asked them a speculative fiction question because what

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leader imarisha said is true all activism is speculative fiction because we are daring to dream that

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another world is possible so i asked them if they could travel through anywhere in

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time and space to any point in human history to get involved in a social movement

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or an activist moment where would they go and when would they go and why and it’s amazing to watch

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people’s faces change as they start to imagine and i take lots of photographs while they’re talking and capture these

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moments of joy and these moments of reflection and these moments of somberness and then that’s what i end up drawing

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this is tandy young um a housing activist and mental health activist uh here in tacronto sometimes i draw two

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people together and kind of show the relationship this is dainty smith and keisha williams

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two uh chronically ill and disabled uh femmes who uh do work and organizing

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here in toccaronto this is uh omi shrey dryden a disabled

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uh professor and activist who started the got blood to give campaign

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uh trying to ensure uh the end of the blood ban and has done some incredible work in the

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movement for black lives and around disability justice as a disabled activist is now based in the halifax

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uh so getting to draw these people large and really just celebrate them and their

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organizing this is one of the youngest freedom fighters this is uh um a young freedom fighter from

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black lives matter freedom school uh paired here in an image with kim and crew a black woman of trans

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experience who has done incredible work uh to support uh and engage trans justice and

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transliberation so these portraits are acts of reverence and love

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we also know that portraiture is definitely implicated in uh creating conditions of who we

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consider to be inherently valuable and who we don’t consider to be involved you know who

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gets to have their portrait taken and who gets to have their portrait drawn is definitely tied up

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with ideas of who is considered inherently valuable so who normally gets their portrait painted

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is like kings and popes and university presidents and

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university hospital administrators and instead in this image we have a

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these are all graphite drawings black and white uh portraits of queer trans disabled mad and deaf folks uh

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this is melissa watson and uh hampton grant uh melissa

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organizing out of toronto afro-indigenous artist an activist and hampton a

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musician an organizer based out on cosellis territory in vancouver

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this is misky noir on the left here a portrait of miss key wiping uh something off of their glasses

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and looking boldly into my camera lens uh this is the person who connected me with that

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activist that was in the first image and of course an image here of kona kachana

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bursting into laughter uh showing you that black queer joy uh kona an organizer and activist uh

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based in vancouver this is uh troy jackson and alfred kaki

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uh two uh masculine uh identified folks sitting in loud uh vibrant printed

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uh suits uh smiling one looking away and one looking at the camera um again drawn in black and white

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showing uh both introspection and also black queer joy

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so i became very interested in these portraits as a way of ensuring resilience as a way

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of supporting our survival these images of black queer trans uh disabled mad and deaf

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uh people as activists who are doing such incredible labor on the front lines of our movements that

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i wanted to to really celebrate these folks and to say thank and thank them for their organizing and to make

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uh activism seem permeable and accessible so that people who are looking at these portraits want to get to know the folks

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that they’re looking at they want to to find out more about them and want to figure out maybe maybe even how to support their

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organizing and their lives i started thinking a lot about

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these portraits and how they could be used in other ways to support uh the lives of activists

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and are mobilizing and organizing so i started creating wallpaper of the act of

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the activist portraits as a way of changing the environments that we live in um there’s this strange

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phenomenon of 12 wallpaper which is a type of wallpaper that is sort of a historic style that

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often features drawings line drawings of either uh rich white

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people uh doing uh relaxing things in the countryside these big colic scenes maybe swinging

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from a tree on a swing or images of indentured labor

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folks happily working in the field as if this was something that any of us wanted to be doing and

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this is repeated over and over again like a wallpaper pattern very strange so i was like why do people

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put those in their bathrooms why do we why do we keep do we don’t we don’t know who these people are in the drawing why do we do this what would

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happen if instead we had wallpaper that was images of activists what if that’s what we started our day

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with what if that’s how we first embraced our morning was going into the bathroom and seeing images of

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george jackson uh black panther party organizer in san quentin prison

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um you know what what would happen if we saw images of organizers in our community so what’s on the screen

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now is uh five sheets of black and white wallpaper

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that features repeated patterns of the activist drawings in a sort of colitis kaleidoscope design

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there’s a close-up on the screen right now of a kaleidoscope design of a drawing that i did of george

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jackson a black liberatory organizer who became politicized while in prison

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and was killed while in prison by the prison guards um and was a freedom fighter for black

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liberation this is on the screen the image of the person with the mask

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that said i can’t breathe that i talked about a moment ago from eula but now uh turned into wallpaper in a

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repeated pattern that goes up and down that almost looks floral or or shape-like

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again another example of wallpaper this is an image of nzinga maxwell uh amazing black

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activist here in tacoronto who was picked up by ryerson campus police and through

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collusion with the canadian border services association and agency and uh deported

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uh in 2006 and a lot of organizing happened to try to stay the deportation um and

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the memory of her activism lives on here in tacoronto this is her repeated over and over again

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as wallpaper and again this beautiful image of kim and kuru and her incredible and tireless work uh

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for black justice for trans justice again turned into this almost ethereal

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uh floral uh pattern uh repeated as wallpaper uh this is uh this last image

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i’ll show you of the wallpaper is of it installed at the leonard bear gallery in montreal uh in one long wall and again it just

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creates this completely transformed environment an environment in which activism is thriving there are activists

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covering every surface and an environment wherein we are experiencing black queer joy

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and where we are just that much freer so my work is really interested in

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trying to make sure that we all make it that we all survive i started doing a project in 2019

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that was a performative that involved installation and drawing and performance

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around this idea of survival in the future so if all activism is speculative fiction

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because we’re daring to dream that another world is possible what would it look like to create an act

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of a project that was a sci-fi story that was about activism so i created a

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story called antarctica and on the screen is a map of antarctica that i drew that shows the way that it’s been

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divided up into pie-shaped future colonies uh claimed by a bunch of different countries

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uh in the world which is a true thing um and i told the story a fictitious story about

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a time in 2025 when the people who had been sent to antarctica to be born to stake a future

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land claim were which really did happen uh were called home to actually start the process of colonization

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asking will cullinate will humans ever realize that colonization is never okay so on the screen is an

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image of the three actors in the play raven wings dainty smith and yusuf kadura wearing the white paper

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suits that were a standard issue of the antarctic company uh staring out of the camera looking bold

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and strong in this story uh there are three characters and uh the first one is sabian she is a

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trans woman she is uh um an activist before she gets sent to antarctica

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and she’s just dead set on not following the company’s wishes and instead trying to encourage the others to escape

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to freedom to an unclaimed part of antarctica um the uh sabian convinces uh

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marcus one of the other characters a racialized disabled

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character who is kind of going along with it because with the wishes of the company because

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he wants to have a safe place for himself but he is in love with sabian and so he agrees to

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to go on this adventure and then lastly there’s the an image here on the screen of uh dainty smith as jessica the last

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character in the play and she needs a lot more convincing and it sort of goes through what happens when we try to

32:36

talk through uh resisting colonization and what that could look like you can see an image on

32:41

the screen here in addition to the drawing of dainty as jessica there’s a whole bunch of jars with

32:47

antarctic ration labels on them and you can sort of see how in this installation there were jars

32:53

and things that you could touch it was completely tactile there were textiles that hung from the

32:58

ceiling that were all white referencing white supremacy and all of the materials all of the books all the

33:04

letters everything could be read through everything could be touched there was audio

33:09

there it was a very accessible interactive installation during which in the installation three

33:16

times a week a 30 minute play that told the story of the antarcticans uh played out uh in the installation so

33:23

this is the drawing of uh dainty smith as jessica and this is use of kadura

33:29

uh as um uh as marcus as a drawing and this is the real use of

33:35

couture standing in front of a drawing of use of couture in the installation again just to show you

33:41

the size and scale so working on antarctica was a way of

33:46

imagining a future where maybe it’s a little bit more dystopian uh you know

33:52

maybe we’ll make it maybe we won’t make it but the idea that uh there’s still a fight uh there’s

33:58

still a fight ahead of us that we have work ahead of us as climate change rages on

34:03

and as things like viruses you know become a thing you know how are we uh as as bipac folks

34:09

going to be there for each other and show up for each other and ensure our survival

34:16

i also did a project in 2019 for the biennial that was again aimed at

34:22

imagining a future that is decidedly utopic wherein we have survived

34:29

so what better way to support disability justice than to create a future where black and

34:35

indigenous disabled deaf and mad people have survived and are thriving so on the screen are eight different

34:42

images of black uh queer and trans disabled and mad folks in futuristic attire

34:50

looking out at the screen doing various things that are part of this story called

34:55

ancestors do you read us so in this um story this is the title wall from the exhibition in the

35:02

ancestors can you read us dispatches from the future it was set in the year 2072

35:08

and uh they our great-grandchildren have figured out a way using old

35:13

technology to patch through into uh 2019 to give us a message from the

35:19

future a message that uh tells us that it’s time to act to rebel to

35:27

overthrow capitalism to fight back uh against uh white supremacy and to ensure

35:33

that they get to live in this glorious future so uh here is a mad

35:38

artist uh gloria swain playing one of the characters from 20 20 72 and disabled artist

35:45

ravenwings again uh playing a character from 2072 looking out at the screen in black

35:51

afrofuturist attire with neon lights this is an image of the video installed at the caliber

35:58

share new media wall at the ryerson image center which is where it was on display for three months so the

36:03

presumption of the video was that that that wall was what they patched into so our great great grandchildren were

36:09

like oh i can get a message to the media wall and they patched this message through um and

36:16

uh told the story of a potential future only if we act now

36:24

so i want to um this is uh one more image of uh rodney deverless at sylvia rivera

36:32

and some of the protests in hong kong i want to close out by talking about one more project called radical love

36:38

and this project was aimed at supporting and ensuring trans survival trans people rarely get

36:45

to live to be elders we just had trans remembrance day earlier this week and we know that we need

36:50

to create a space where black trans people afro-indigenous trans people indigenous trans people survive and

36:58

thrive on the screen is a beautiful image of raven wings looking out at the screen i created

37:03

a series of light box monuments that lit up at night that had an audioscape that you could

37:09

listen to of their voices and that were these visual images that you could touch that were that that had audio and visual uh image

37:17

you could explore either or any all um that were lit up in the middle of the night addressing the fact that for a lot of

37:23

trans people they felt safer at 2am than they did at 2pm because of the risk of running into transphobic

37:30

people in the middle of the day so i created these um images of black and afro-indigenous trans women

37:37

and non-binary people uh just being their bold amazing creative brilliant selves um

37:45

and uh and and it was called radical love and i’ll just end with a couple of words

37:52

from monica forrester who is one of the people who were included in the project i had asked her if she could describe her ideal future

37:59

her ideal city and she said i would be looking around me and i would see my black family my black

38:05

queer and trans family living their best life getting their best life that’s what i picture

38:11

as being the root of what we do the root of what we build for really embodying what nothing and no one

38:16

being disposable means you know so this idea that comes again from disability justice that it’s all us uh

38:25

nothing without us about us without us and that if it’s if we’re not all involved it’s not the revolution these are some posters i had

38:32

made supporting mad justice this one says freedom for mad people support us don’t control

38:38

us because during the pandemic i found that i didn’t feel desired to draw i wanted to make digital work

38:44

that was readily accessible and that i could put out quickly this is a poster that has turquoise

38:49

lettering that says stop using crazy when you mean anything other than crazy so your popcorn isn’t crazy the movie

38:56

wasn’t crazy like let’s actually use that word in a different way uh this is a drawing i did of marcia p johnson with a

39:04

a beautiful african print backdrop and it’s a quote from marsha p johnson that says i may be crazy

39:10

but that don’t make me wrong so again just creating work that supports and that celebrates the perspective

39:16

of black man people of um black disabled people and uh and and

39:22

black deaf people as i mentioned at the beginning of this talk my work is rooted in this quote from tony cate bambera

39:28

we have a beautiful image of a black trans person with their fists up a disabled black trans person with their

39:34

fists up surrounded by pink smoke bombs and uh the quote on the side says

39:39

as a cultural worker who belongs to an oppressed people my job is to make the revolution irresistible

39:46

and that’s the quote from tony bambera that guides all of my work so thank you so much for the chance to

39:54

share my work with you and i would love to go to any questions that you may have

40:01

as we anything that might be coming up uh thank you so much

40:07

thank you so much cyrus for that um just a reminder uh for folks to

40:14

use the q a um if possible so it can be a little bit more accessible uh but just coming

40:22

like thinking through what you just spoke to things that really um

40:28

made me so excited was to think of activism as that speculative fiction that that’s a

40:36

a concept i’ve never heard before and one that makes me very excited of

40:41

expanding what we can really do as a community um that our imagination can really take

40:49

us anywhere um yeah and also the myth of the super activism i think we

40:57

all have that feeling like we need and maybe it’s just this capitalistic production of we need to be

41:04

doing more and more and more um when when your work really reminds me of

41:09

uh um that instagram uh of the ministry of rest uh yeah the history

41:16

yeah yeah and exactly and yeah exactly and this is this idea that

41:23

you know one of the things that is has always been true is that we have always done activism

41:28

from our beds we have always from harriet tubman running the underground railroad as a disabled woman and doing

41:34

organizing from her bed to us doing it in the pandemic disabled folks have always been able to do

41:40

incredible amounts of organizing from our beds it’s only now that we’re saying oh by the way like let’s remember that

41:47

like we we need not to have an ableist society tell us that it doesn’t count because it’s not

41:52

happening on young street or marching down portage you know because it’s coming from our

41:58

bed somehow uh we don’t often because yeah because of this capitalist idea we don’t

42:03

think of it but but there’s and just think about how much has happened i mean how much disabled deaf and mad

42:09

folks have shaped our response to this pandemic how we’re going to survive what we need to prepare for

42:14

how we’re going to do online how we’re going to handle isolation how we’re going to do disability justice how we’re going to do mutual aid what does

42:20

community care look like it’s all coming from disabled people like they’re literally supporting an entire world right now

42:27

who’s freaking out because they haven’t had to live with these conditions before conditions that are all too familiar

42:34

with so many of us i have immune issues i’m often not going out so you know for many of us this is nothing

42:40

new but for for a lot of people it is and so they’re learning from disabled communities perhaps from the first time which is an

42:47

incredible moment so we have a question uh

42:53

such joy in your work how do you find joy was there a particular inspirational moment

42:58

where the joy was born out of oh thanks yeah i mean i really love

43:05

i love what i do so i feel like i get to have a lot of joy

43:10

to me activism is the most joyful thing i can remember literally uh

43:17

what year would it have been 1998 being at a protest uh at the university of toronto and

43:24

um we were holding these banners and we were walking down uh university and the media stopped us

43:29

and they said can we take your picture and we stood there and we smiled and they said no no no this is activism

43:34

it’s serious don’t smile and i’ve always remembered that because i was like oh they got it completely wrong because

43:40

they want to portray activism as this sort of drudgery but in fact it is so much

43:47

fun if more people knew how fun it was more people would get involved in it you can meet friends you can meet lovers

43:53

you can meet family you can make connections you can make artistic collaborations like

43:58

all of this stuff can come from from getting involved in your community right like so much as

44:03

is is possible so to me activism has always given me joy as has my artistic practice and they

44:09

both started about 25 years ago i started making art professionally 25 years ago and and and

44:17

activism around the same time and so they both have fueled uh me you know in so many ways but i

44:23

also you know like i think that tricker gomberg’s words of having things in your life that

44:29

fulfill you uh outside of uh production is so essential so like i have

44:37

plant babies all over my apartment and they gave me joy i have a daughter who’s nine who’s incredible and she

44:43

gives me joy and you know i have an identical twin and we have you know these incredible belly laughs and we’re able

44:50

to just sort of be together and then i think about like what monica forrester said in that quote

44:55

like you know in her ideal city it’s when we’re in these moments where we’re all i mean and i hope we get to be together

45:02

again soon where we’re laughing where the music’s playing where you can feel the reverberation in your chest

45:07

where where where we’re together uh those are joyful moments in community i think of

45:12

things like black rama which is this big black queer and trans festival here in in the city and those moments where

45:18

you’re just like oh i’m out and i’m surrounded by my people and that can be so joyful and if you can

45:24

hold on to that throughout the year you know it can carry you through

45:30

yeah that’s lovely of of um of finding all of those moments uh of

45:37

joy when i think uh maybe from again a a non maybe from an ableist community

45:44

a non-disabled disability community there’s a lot of grief going on that they’re not used to so

45:51

um yeah thank you so much for your for your passion of all this

45:56

um we have a question here does harm reduction factor into your practice

46:06

i’m a big proponent for all kinds of harm reduction so as an abolitionist um

46:13

you know to me quite literally in terms of the most direct meaning of harm reduction

46:19

um you know i’m advocating for a safe supply i’m advocating for decriminalization of all drugs

46:25

i’m advocating for drug users to get to be considered inherently valuable and that that you know that people who

46:31

use drugs are people that i love and i want them to have all of the things and to be

46:36

able to thrive and survive in this life so absolutely you know to me disability justice is

46:42

is connected to harm reduction in so many ways because we’re we’re advocating very similar things

46:48

um but then also thinking through all of the other ways that we can reduce the harm associated

46:53

with whatever you know so i have harm reduction practices in my artistic process you

47:00

know how can i do this in a way that maybe i don’t need to draw for the 85 hours straight just to see if i can do it

47:05

you know what what you know how can i do this in a way that still allows me to explore what i was

47:11

exploring but that doesn’t tax my body and then thinking about harm also um

47:16

[Music] in relation to yeah just you know in relation to abolition

47:21

and and the harm that happens in our communities and how we respond differently and what what choices we can make and

47:27

how we respond to harm um we know that you know the traditional response is to go to punitive cultural

47:35

strategies for responding to harm and i would rather think about starting from a place of love

47:41

and responding to harm from a very different starting point so to me i think a lot about um harm

47:48

and reduction of harm and uh what it could mean for us because of course we all deserve

47:55

the right to self-determination all of us all of us all of us and that’s what we’re fighting for here

48:04

um and a person is asking uh um i think they’re

48:10

they’re uncertain maybe haven’t heard the term mad before um so they’re just asking matt in the

48:16

context that you’re using it i mean struggling with mental illness as someone with chronic

48:21

mental illness i’m not familiar with this usage but i’m loving it yeah so mad is like this term that we’ve

48:28

tried to take back i think people are reclaiming it often it’s capitalized you know as

48:34

you know a way of kind of showing the traditional marginalization of our of our people from even from within

48:41

disability conversations so separating out mad and capitalizing it as a way of giving voice to an invisibleized

48:47

experience because of course through through um we get shot away we get put

48:53

in the hospital we get shadow we remove from our communities i’ve been you know in psychiatric detention countless times then and that

49:00

you know is a removing of us from our communities and rather we’re saying no we want to be reinserted

49:05

actually we want to be we are part of these communities we make these communities thrive so mad is a way of reclaiming uh the

49:13

beautiful variance of human emotion the beautiful variants of human biochemical

49:19

reactions in our brain and the beautiful variants of the ways that we think through things so human beings have vastly different

49:27

and amazing capacities to do all sorts of wonderful things with our brains and we’ve been told that some of them

49:34

are pathologized and some of them are normalized and what madness rather says

49:40

is what if we just looked at it all as part of the human experience what if we expected madness what if we

49:46

desired it even and said you know that there are things that we can learn from this that this

49:51

you know my i’m i’m a proud mad person you know not to say that they’re i’m i hate being

49:56

depressed and i hate you know like i hate some of the parts of it we can be frustrated with the experience at the same time as being

50:03

proud of it being part of our identity and that it does allow us to see the world in a slightly different way and

50:08

that that could be considered valuable mm-hmm that there’s there’s gifts in in

50:14

uh in depression and anxiety and in all of the um mental health uh yeah that’s probably

50:22

um we just have a comment here someone was saying i was really moved by

50:29

the portraits you were able to capture personal and intimate moments from people whose activism

50:35

requires public assembly and public presence the act of protest and ipoc experiences uh tends to be reduced down

50:43

to masses losing the individual uh to the group so seeing these

50:48

individual portraits was incredibly powerful thank you so much

50:54

thank you yeah and we have a couple of other oh we have so many more questions um

51:01

let’s see uh can you speak a little about what you

51:07

were saying about exploring uh what i was exploring but in a way that doesn’t harm my body

51:13

as a chronically ill dance artist i’m definitely some something i am exploring and would love

51:18

to hear about that in your art process yeah so i mean i used to um

51:27

i was very interested in seeing how far i could push it um i wanted to i just wanted to know and

51:34

um so i would draw these durational um drawings uh sometimes at home but

51:40

sometimes in the gallery and i would just be there for 85 hours and i would just sleep on a cot and i

51:46

would just you know just do it um and you know i i suppose it was like

51:53

something i just had to do i just had to go through that process just to kind of i don’t know i was working something out

51:59

and now i’m like okay you know i want to be able to do drawing when i’m 90.

52:04

you know i want to be able to get up in the morning and to feel energized enough

52:10

to go and and work on a drawing and that’s what i’m doing for the day and if i’m going to be able to do this

52:16

in the long run that i’m going to have to be thinking through differently how i i do this work

52:23

i think about stacey milburn and how she in her day job was like a ergonomics

52:30

consultant for a company like on how to do uh safe work environments

52:37

injury yourself or get repetitive strain and you know artists we need that we don’t get a lot of coaching on how to do our practice in a

52:43

way that is um super safe for our body i mean if you’re in dance i mean all of my dance friends i know they actually often

52:50

get asked to push it uh they get asked to push it just as part of being in the field

52:55

um and what that would mean and you know to push back and to say no so in my own practice i’ve been thinking a lot now

53:01

about what sustainability would look like and so you know uh yeah figuring out new ways

53:08

of working that are more manageable um and still as effective and fun i mean i

53:13

still have as much joy working for five hours straight as i do for 85 hours straight so i could

53:20

just do five hours yeah um someone says oh sorry

53:28

uh this presentation has made me feel seen as a disabled bipod person sorry for the

53:34

ringing in the background thank you so much uh with your experiences in theater and performance

53:41

how do you navigate the intense culture of ableism in theater while still trying to

53:47

remember to center joy i’m trying and struggling with this one now

53:53

yeah so i did for a couple of years i worked with sarah garten stanley the

53:59

incredible sarah garden stanley on a project called the cycle at the national arts center that was specifically looking at

54:06

um making canadian theater more um a space for all of us more space where

54:12

disabled artists deaf artists could be uh engaged in all areas of artistic production from

54:18

creation to acting to lighting to stage design to do whatever um not just thinking about access in terms

54:25

of audience right which is what the default always is so what i learned from that process was

54:31

we brought together theater practitioners from all across this north part of turtle island and in nunegat and what i found out was that

54:38

so many of us had these same struggles you know the theater space isn’t accessible or the

54:44

theater space isn’t affordable or you know there isn’t a space where we can rehearse or practice or the grant

54:49

isn’t something that i can access or that like there was just so many things that were um you know we were being type cast in

54:57

roles as if we ever got them like there were just so many ways that that were very familiar and so

55:02

thinking through together about how we can kind of push back against that i mean for me i have found a lot of joy and

55:09

self-creation so i started writing plays i started writing the theater that i wasn’t seeing

55:15

you know i started creating work that i wasn’t seeing and by doing that i was able to create the conditions for

55:21

performance rehearsal practice that worked i can remember being part of an incredible play i was so happy to be

55:27

part of it i was so thrilled um about the the rehearsals schedule broke me i mean as a disabled

55:34

artist it was just completely inaccessible to do that many hours every single day even though i understand why

55:41

that’s the you know disciplines of the theater but it like it didn’t work for me so when i do my work

55:47

we do it in a totally different way we do it in chunks we do it in breaks we do it and we we we we can

55:53

clear up our process we can our timelines so i found a lot of joy in self-production because you can control

56:00

the conditions a bit more and i work largely with other disabled artists you know who are like down with

56:06

you know doing this in a good way um so that’s one of the ways that i’ve been able to do it but i think that in any theater

56:12

environment that i get into i try to push back and be like okay how can i make this how can i make sure

56:18

that i’m setting the example for what an accessible option could look like

56:23

and good luck you got this well that is all the time we have for

56:29

questions i just want to thank you so much cyrus um i hope to live as much joy and

56:36

passion as as you have shown just with the the 40-minute talk you

56:41

have done um yeah it’s quite something it’s a reminder for me of of how strong

56:49

uh the disability community is and and here in victoria i think our disability community is is

56:56

um growing and will strengthen um as as we hear from people from all over

57:03

uh yeah so thank you so much for your time and thank you all for for joining us i i

57:10

feel like um i hope all of you uh felt the the passion

57:15

and the joy that that cyrus um and and i hope that this uh

57:22

helps encourage that with others amazing thank you so much all power to

57:27

the people

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