Installed at the Aga Khan Museum in July 2022 as part of their Rhythms of Canada festival, Under the Tent is a multimedia storytelling project exploring (non)belonging under the policy of Canadian multiculturalism. Led by the Canada Excellence Research Chair in Migration and Integration, Anna Triandafyllidou, and award-winning filmmaker Cyrus Sundar Singh, I had the pleasure of presenting multidisciplinary works from photography and film to experimental and performing arts.
"Five decades after Pierre Trudeau’s Liberal government adopted a formal multiculturalism policy, many Canadians, immigrants or not, are still trying to search for their identity and find their place in this country. Inspired by the Black Lives Matter movement and other social justice efforts amid the global pandemic, Ryerson University researchers have launched an innovative project to explore the legacy of multiculturalism’s ideal and the sense of belonging to a Canadian identity."
To the tune of a melodic cinematic electronica soundscape, ’Starting Out’ offers a visual exploration of displacement with a vintage aesthetic and a cosmic vibe — a grappling with forced migration and its ripple effects in space and time. An experimental short film produced as part of the i am… Project, led by X University in collaboration with TIFF.
There are many sentiments floating around on social media that invoke Martin Luther King and Nelson Mandela as embodiments of peaceful protesting. Many have likened rioters and looters to ‘criminals’ and have condemned outrage as a response to anti-black racism. In the end, why do people riot? In this post, Christina Hutchinson argues that this is in fact the wrong question to ask.
In a first contribution to Conditioned Things, Christina Hutchinson considers the way in which social media desensitizes viewers to acts of anti-black violence and spectacularizes police brutality. On the one hand, social media allows us to bear witness to this violence and expose systemic injustices; on the other, white viewers may ‘consume’ the violence and walk away from it relatively unmoved and unharmed. Here, she provides a few tips on how to become a responsible witness, rather than a passive consumer of anti-black violence.
“In a makeshift classroom at a correctional facility in Southern Ontario, some 20 students – half of them incarcerated at the facility – sit in a circle alongside a professor. While the professor is responsible for framing discussion topics and structuring class activities, students are encouraged to direct comments at their peers, linking personal perspectives and experiences to the class readings. The students are participating in the Walls to Bridges (W2B) program, which was launched by the faculty of social work at Wilfrid Laurier University in 2011.”
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