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Joy Xiang (she/her) is a writer and editor, born in Shanghai and based in Tkaronto/Toronto. Her work and life engages erotics, migration, material flows, and media nostalgia and futurity. She is currently Editor at _C Magazine_. 

Editor

Maandeeq Mohamed is a writer, researcher and the Associate Editor of _C Magazine_. 

Associate Editor

Publisher

Designer

C’s Chorus issue marks the beginning of our new print look, shaped by Hwa-Jin Jun, where we also ask what becomes possible if we embrace changing physical formats and materials as an ethos. We think of chorus as a collective noun: for voices, noises, expressions (of rage, solidarity, and otherwise). This issue embraces polyphony, or simultaneity, a chorus that does not dissolve distinction within the collective. From voice as infrastructure, a way of rehearsing coordination and collective power amidst spreading fascist logics, to the dispersal of seeds, anti-colonial cosmologies, melancholic sound in the colour blue, attuning to ancestors in museum collections, and the subtle accumulations in working-class time, we bring a cacophony of grievance and desire.


Chorus

Review

Innas Tsuroiya is a writer living in Indonesia who works across poetry, criticism, translation, fiction, and divination. She has written for _C Magazine_, _e-flux Criticism_, _TANK_, _The Stinging Fly_, _Poetry Wales_, _Protean Magazine_, _ArtReview_, _Artforum_, _ArtAsiaPacific_, and more.


Nestled unassumingly on the side of the road, like the many street-food carts or stalls in the area, is one special meatball cart. In lieu of money, customers can receive a bowl of meatball noodle soup (or bakso) in exchange for some “beautiful words” and chat with the vendors, two of the 18th Biennale Jogja participating artists Shooshie Sulaiman and Ayaka Yoshida. What began as their research into local taste and cuisine has developed into durational art; the making and selling of meatballs becomes a performative event in which spectators can participate. _Zombie Bakso_ (2025) encapsulates Biennale Jogja’s vision at its strongest and most entertaining, where art evolves alongside social engagement.

The 18th Biennale Jogja (BJ18)—curated by the ketjilbergerak collective, Eva Lin, and Bob Edrian—presents sprawling exhibitions from 60 artists and collectives across multiple venues in the city of Yogyakarta, Bangunjiwo Village, and Panggungharjo Village. Taking cues from the theme of “KAWRUH: Tanah Lelaku” (which translates to “KNOWLEDGE: Land of Rooted Practices”), the Biennale intended to mirror _kawruh_, a Javanese word that describes how traditional wisdom is accumulated and metabolized over time. It is through embodied knowing and environmental harmony that we derive our rationale. This, of course, as an organizing road map, doesn’t always translate to a smooth reality. Some venues may be too far from each other (although the Biennale provides a shuttle in the form of an _odong-odong_ wagon). Other sites, like a former warehouse or a nook in the field, are hidden from the main road with little to no signage. The climate too, could interrupt one’s visit. Novi Kristinawati’s site-specific _Ruang dalam Ruas_ (2025), a raised, treehouse-like bamboo structure encircled by banyan trees, is meant to expose the traditional material’s strength as well as flexibility. The structure, however, was flattened by a falling tree at some point during the exhibition, windswept by the weather at its spot in Djoko Pekik’s open-air yard.

Perhaps, despite some inconvenient instances, a generous conclusion can be drawn from the way the Biennale was organized: an embodied knowing necessitates some sweat, and an environmentally oriented exhibition could require more patience to navigate than a well-lit white cube. The first chapter of BJ18 was held in the village of Karangsewu, where local villagers formally welcomed the convergence of art and socio-cultural life with a weeklong series of traditional performing arts, dance, and workshop sessions. Chapter II serves as a wishful extension of this previous iteration. On the one hand, the scale of venues and themes can feel disjointed at times. On the other hand, if one considers Biennale Jogja’s long-term commitment to Global South solidarity (especially with the broadening of its Equator series, where equatorial countries became a parallel focus in previous iterations) and curatorial indigenization, the two chapters fit somewhat neatly within that agenda. BJ18 is the second of three planned themed biennials under the overarching themes of Translocality and Transhistoricity (the final instalment in 2027 will conclude the series, which began in 2023). As seen in the works and how they are displayed, BJ18 puts an emphasis on an alternative epistemology that is distinct from Western methodologies. Many installations take the form of folk art such as scarecrows and puppetry and wood carving, or have certain attributes pertaining to the rooted practices of traditional ecological knowledge (TEK).

At Pendhapa Art Space, a sculpture series created by Dicky Takndare and Dutch artist Kevin van Braak reminds us of the ongoing occupation of West Papua by the Indonesian government through symbolic wood masks carved in the style of Papuan traditional headwear. _Another Hidden Faces of Papua_ (2025) consists of large carved wood masks ornamented with an oxhide Javanese wayang hanging below, as if to suggest that West Papuan cultural identity should be acknowledged as sovereign and unsubjugated. Takndare himself co-founded Udeido Collective as a community of Papuan artists whose works foreground this sovereignty of expression and articulate the cultural-political reality in West Papua. Elsewhere at The Ratan, experimental musician Rani Jambak’s interactive turbine _Kincia_ (2025) resembles the river-powered agricultural technology previously used by West Sumatran farmers prior to the advent of electricity. _Kincia_ generates musical sound from its connection to small gongs called _talempong_—traditional instruments from Minangkabau that can be pushed, tested, and improvised on by the spectators. Here, the artwork’s mechanics are again facilitated by social engagement.

If one’s land becomes a wellspring of memories and metaphors from which to draw inspiration, then it is also first and foremost a tactile material. Artist and architect Jessica Soekidi collaborated with Nurohmad to build _Selaing Bumi Panggungharjo_ (2025) in a location shaded by bamboo trees. The dug-out hearth made of bricks from the village soil is encircled by an arrangement of stones and roof tiles, as if in a conference. There is a small clay statue of praying hands inside the hearth, and batik fabrics with elemental symbols hang above it. As much as the site-specific installation bridges the land’s rich resources and BJ18’s theme, paradoxically, it also gestures to the limitation of the Biennale. Without the scheduled “activation” event—in this case, the artists guided a crowd during the October supermoon to write down their prayers on a piece of paper, which would soon be extinguished by a flame—the forms of several works such as this one could not meet their own conceptual potential.

Considering the iterative model of BJ18, where villages are positioned as a site of continuous unfolding for artistic discourse, I am left wondering why the Biennale favours a mode of connecting with art in terms of what it _does_ more than what it _is_. What to make of the dead hearth, the windswept bamboo, the field scarecrows, and everything else that has now integrated into the land following the Biennale’s conclusion? And what knowledges might become rooted or emerge as a consequence?

Writer

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The Biennale Jogja 18: Chapter II “KAWRUH: Tanah Lelaku” ran from 5 October to 20 November 2025 at Yogyakarta, Indonesia.


“KAWRUH: Tanah Lelaku”

Feature

Sebastian De Line is the Associate Curator of Care and Relations at Agnes Etherington Art Centre, and an Adjunct Assistant Professor for the Cultural Studies Graduate Program at Queen’s University. Publications include the _Journal of Visual Culture_, _Junctures_, and forthcoming works in _Asian Diasporic Visual Cultures and the Americas_ and _The Bloomsbury Encyclopedia of Sound Studies, Volume Two: Arts, Practices, Theories_.


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Collections

Curatorial practice

Museums

Sebastian De Line focuses on notions of audibility in the context of caring for museum collections, where attuning to ancestors who reside there is a paradigm shift for what Western Eurocentric museum practices call “objects.”


Listening to Collections: Ancestor-Led Care in Museums

Brody Weaver is a writer, artist, and educator living and learning between Kjipuktuk (Halifax, NS) and Tkaronto (Toronto, ON). She is studying archives and records management at the University of Toronto’s iSchool, and her work can be found in _Femme Art Review_, _Visual Arts News_, _Peripheral Review_, and _C Magazine_.


_Anita Louise and the Wild Women_ premiered to a standing ovation from a packed audience. The short documentary opens with a shot of the white-haired Anita Louise Martinez (1939–2025) positioning her camera toward an unseen filmmaker, who in turn records Martinez in a delicate photographic standoff. The off-screen filmmaker is Arena Alamino, whose directorial debut carefully uses the documentary form to create a filmic portrait of Martinez in the final moments of her life. A lifelong activist and prolific photographer, Martinez devoted over five decades of her life to fighting for and documenting the intersecting feminist, peace, labour, and LGBTQ2IA+ rights movements in Nova Scotia, where she moved in 1983. Ever-present at community events and rarely seen without her camera, Martinez’s photographic collection chronicles generations of queer life in the province.

Alamino first discovered Martinez through her photographs in the Nova Scotia LGBT Seniors Archive. Sifting through handfuls of images depicting marches, demonstrations, and community gatherings, she was struck by a collection of photos documenting _Wild Women Don’t Get the Blues_, a recurring lesbian camping weekend held in a remote location in Pictou County between 1983 and 1996. After nearly two years of trying to contact Martinez, and fresh out of the Atlantic Filmmakers Cooperative’s DIY DOC program, Alamino found herself knocking on Martinez’s front door to thank her and propose making a film to honour her legacy.

_Anita Louise and the Wild Women_ oscillates between interviews with Martinez, her loved ones, and the subjects of her photographs. Among reproductions of Wild Women Don’t Get the Blues photos, we see the daily minutiae of her daughter Lorraine’s caretaking acts, and Martinez’s smile stretched cheek to cheek beside her best friend and fellow activist Eric Smith. Alamino’s next project, which won the Lunenburg Doc Fest pitch competition in 2025, will focus on Smith, who was ousted into spotlight and scrutiny in the ’80s when his AIDS diagnosis was made public without his consent. With a short run time of just over 10 minutes, _Anita Louise and the Wild Women_ is not and cannot be a comprehensive life story. Rather, it offers a vignette of one aspect of Martinez’s life, highlighting the effect her presence and photographic practice had on those whose lives she touched. Alamino very well could have focused on Martinez’s work with the Nova Scotia Persons With AIDS Coalition (now the Health Equity Alliance of Nova Scotia), where she supported and photographed gay men dying from the virus to create a dignified record to leave for their loved ones, and where her portraits of the founding members hang on the wall to this day. The focus on _Wild Women Don’t Get the Blues_ photographs is subjective, and it says more about Alamino’s creative and personal interests than it does about Martinez herself.

The traces drawn by Alamino are her interpretation of this vast photographic archive, translating visual gems that by themselves are veiled with historical opacity into animated and accessible points of entry into an underappreciated aspect of queer history in Atlantic Canada. Under Alamino’s direction, Martinez’s photographs shine as conduits for memory, storytelling, and intergenerational connection as viewers are privileged with the firsthand recollections of the queer elders depicted within them.

Anita passed away on Tuesday, February 4, 2025. The film was completed just two months after her death. It would be easy to narrate the genesis and creation of _Anita Louise and the Wild Women_ as an isolated incident of the right people meeting at the right time, but to do so would ignore the rich self- and community-documentary tradition within queer independent media, from photography and filmmaking to publishing and print, that this film both depicts and enacts. Martinez’s impulse to create an intimate record of her lesbian community is mirrored in Alamino’s decision to participate in this tradition, recording and transmitting her legacy to a younger generation of queer and trans people.

I met Martinez in 2019 at a meeting for the Community Advisory Committee for the Nova Scotia LGBT Seniors Archive, before anything had been formally donated, when she and a group of other queer elders gathered to decide if the Seniors Archive was the appropriate steward for materials they had been collecting for most of their lives. Martinez was aware of the value of her contributions and the promises that the archive held. Flashing forward from that deliberation to Alamino knocking on her door five years later, I cannot help but feel that Martinez made the right choice.

_Anita Louise and the Wild Women_ is a testament to how the preservation of community history does not begin or end with the archival profession—it is a collective responsibility. More than a screening, the premiere at the Halifax Independent Filmmakers Festival was a reunion and a celebration. Attended by subjects of the film and Martinez’s loved ones alike, the room applauded Alamino for representing their friend with such tact and care. The intergenerational magic present in that room attests to Alamino’s directorial strength and grounds her as a promising new voice in Atlantic Canadian filmmaking, where her work finds itself in good company among the proliferation of inquiry into queer and trans histories in this region.



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_Anita Louise and the Wild Women_ screened on 30 May 2025 at the Halifax Independent Filmmakers Festival, Bus Stop Theatre. Produced with the assistance of the Atlantic Filmmakers Cooperative, 2025.


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_Anita Louise and the Wild Women_ — Arena Alamino

Andrew Witt is an art historian and critic who writes on contemporary art. He is currently the 2025–2026 PERICULUM Foundation for Contemporary Art Discourse Fellow. His book _Lost Days, Endless Nights: Photography and Film from Los Angeles_ was recently published by MIT Press (2025).

The title of Sojourner Truth Parsons’s exhibition nods to the poet Louise Glück with a strange, unguarded familiarity, as if the show were already on a first-name basis. The title makes you wonder whether Glück’s poetry is meant to illuminate Parsons’s paintings, or whether the relation remains more fugitive and opaque. I feel like it’s something closer to the latter, a secret held in a very particular way, the painter’s private relation to the poet, an idea that hangs in the room, the kind of thing that resists full articulation. When confronted with an elusive relation like this one, there’s the temptation to start trawling through Glück’s poetry in search of a passage or line, some interpretative key to help guide our encounter, as if meaning were a matter of proper cross-referencing. But that doesn’t seem to be the point. Maybe the secret should remain a secret. I find myself drawn to that possibility: that Parsons’s work refuses the impulse to explain her work away by citing a line of poetry, refuses any neat literary correspondence between painting and poetry, insisting that if a relationship exists at all, it is an obscure and obstinate one.

And there is a simple fact worth stating outright: Parsons’s paintings are dark. Some are almost entirely black. You think of night when you look at them, or some nocturnal state, because they inhabit night’s atmosphere, its perceptual logic, and a refusal to yield everything all at once. Her canvases are saturated with darkness as a material fact. In a series like _End of April beginning of May_ (2023), darkness is the entire field, its structuring principle. The title refers to that seasonal threshold in the southern Catskill Mountains when winter gives way to spring, a tonal shift these paintings also hold. This series is composed of different shades of black, slight variations that reveal themselves only through sustained looking. Working through these tonal variations, the viewer must stay with the paintings, must look and keep looking, until the blacks start to separate into other shades of blues, purples, and greens, the faint residue of other colours absorbed and held within.

We might speak of Parsons’s series in the way we speak of Ad Reinhardt’s late abstractions: through the intensification of vision that occurs in sustained encounter with a black monochrome. To look closely at Reinhardt’s paintings is to realize they are never purely black, but blocks of near-black tones, variations of red-black, blue-black, and green-black. It seems like an obvious point, but those differences only start to register after time has passed, after your eyes have adjusted and recalibrated to the near-monochromatic surface. Any reproduction collapses them, flattens their slow revelation. And here, perhaps, it’s worth admitting that this kind of attention, this form of sustained looking, feels almost anachronistic now, like a muscle we’ve let atrophy. The kind of patience Reinhardt demanded presupposes a viewer who still knows how to stand still. Parsons’s paintings bet on the existence of that viewer or perhaps, more modestly, offer an invitation to become one briefly. There’s something defiant in that gesture, especially in a culture that has trained us to scroll endlessly. The painting asks us to remain, to stay with the darkness until it begins to reveal itself.

And yet Parsons is not a practitioner of “pure painting,” as Reinhardt might have framed it. The black of her canvases is not an abstraction emptied of reference, but a figural economy, a material condition. In the series _July Tree_ (2020–2021), the canvas feels constructed rather than painted, built from collaged planes, blocks of colour, silhouettes, fragments of interiors, and the suggestion of unclothed female forms sharing a space together. Her figures appear as though glimpsed across a courtyard or through an open apartment window, momentarily lit by a full moon, the dark glow of other lives moving behind glass. There is a voyeurism to this look. To look into darkness is to want something from it: the thrill of seeing another life that is not yours, or just proof that someone else is awake and that you are awake with them. Parsons’s paintings understand that desire and urge.

Her nocturnal scenes stage a metapoetics of painting, a meditation on what it means to see through paint. Since we will never know the depth of Parsons’s relationship to Glück, the darkness of the night becomes the condition for seeing elsewhere, not necessarily with clarity, but as a counterpoint to the rhetoric of illumination that so often structures the history of vision and poetic thought. The darkness, we might say, is not just what Parsons paints, but what she paints through: the condition of working through uncertainty, of staying with the darkness long enough for something else to take form.

Parsons’s other works in the show include the patchwork composition _The beginning of the end of the garden_ (2025). The work appears to embrace an incremental process: adding a square, extending the field, altering a hue that either deepens or recedes. And perhaps this, too, is where the work of painting resides, in that same twilight condition of making and remaking. To paint is to build a world slowly, layer by layer, one colour over another, one decision covering or revealing the last. There is only the insistence of a return—to paint, to paint again, to move through the night, and return to the canvas the next day.


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“Louise” ran from 3 October 2025 to 28 February 2026 at Contemporary Art Gallery, Vancouver.

“Louise” — Sojourner Truth Parsons

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**Artists Api’soomaahka and Christina Battle each engage with seeds through a restorative environmental framework, including circulating seeds of regionally native plants like sweetgrass. Deeply invested in climate action through their practices, both artists work with their communities, rural and urban ones respectively, to reflect on the universal lesson that the land is key to our collective survival.**

**This piece builds from their conversation at the MacKenzie Art Gallery on November 15, 2025, moderated by associate curator Lillian O’Brien Davis, as part of _Gathering the Great Plains_. While Treaty and colonial geographies carve up the Prairies, the growth patterns of sweetgrass trace an alternative map of the Plains region, offering a glimpse of an alternative geography grounded in healing for people and the land. Centred on themes of movement, borders, and migration, the _Gathering the Great Plains_ series positions the Great Plains as a gathering force—a witness and participant shaped by the stories the region holds. This program was formed in partnership between the MacKenzie Art Gallery and Remai Modern.**

 
##### PROPOGATION 
##### Naapi’s Garden and Katoyiss Seed Bank are joint projects led by Blackfoot artist and land-based educator Api’soomaahka (Running Coyote). The initiatives originated as a project to regenerate native grasslands and restore the presence of Blackfoot plants on Kainai First Nation. Naapi’s Garden works to grow plants that have traditionally played an important role in the lives of Indigenous people. The garden propagates plants such as sweetgrass, licorice root, and wild onions. The plants are used for both nourishment as part of a traditional regional diet and their medicinal properties.

**Api’soomaahka:** Most First Nation communities in the western Prairies would only plant tobacco for ceremonial and medicinal uses. In my community, the last tobacco ceremony was held on Blackfoot Territory in the mid-’50s and consisted of 230 songs. This type of planting involved making a small hole with a digging stick without disturbing the soil. This is the main method we utilize at Naapi’s Garden, as it was transferred and adapted in various propagation methods. Due to the decline of native grass and flowers in my community, this project came to be one of the ways to regain our food security and sovereignty. It’s also preparing our children for the future by teaching them to become horticulturalists and herbalists. They are the seeds who will grow, thrive, and further the culture.

##### “connecting thru grasses” was an exhibition by Battle first presented at the Art Gallery of Southwestern Manitoba in 2020; curated by Alyssa Fearon, it toured to the MacKenzie Art Gallery in 2021. The exhibition considered how we might both map and define Prairie boundaries anew. The show was accompanied by a participatory project that included the circulation of grass seed packs.

**Christina Battle:** “connecting thru grasses” looks closer to the prairie habitat. One of the most endangered in Canada, only a small fraction of the original tallgrass prairie remains post-colonization. The project tries not only to draw attention to this grim fact but to take inspiration from the vast root systems of prairie grasses that, despite it all, continue to help hold the land together. While the gallery work also considers technologies that continually monitor and generate images of this diminishing biome, the participatory project aims to spread vital prairie grasses across the region. Open to those living across three Prairie provinces (Alberta, Saskatchewan, and Manitoba), participants are sent a pack of three prairie grass seeds: little bluestem, Canada wild rye, and sideoats grama. Across one month, they are sent prompts via email and invited to think more deeply about the prairie biome before planting their grasses and marking them on a collective map that documents the project and the grasses growing on into the future.

 
##### CIRCULATION 
**CB:** _seeds are meant to disperse_ (2015–ongoing) is an ongoing project where I grow, save, and share seeds. The seeds are offered as a trade or gift, in an attempt to encourage and support alternative systems of exchange. After they’ve planted their seeds (usually the following season), participants are asked to send a response in return: a story, image, or reflection after the seeds have been planted. The responses are then shared through the project website and archive as a resource for others. A number of offshoots from this take the form of publications, how-to guides, and participatory projects. All are meant to share knowledge around particular seeds and are available as a resource through the website.

With this seed-saving project, I think a lot about responsibility—and how to shape circumstances for gifting and receiving seeds in responsible ways, from sharing information to providing opportunities to participate on people’s own time and terms. When participants reach out wanting seeds, I try to first find out more about where and how they grow to make sure I’m being responsible with the seeds I send—that the seeds are native to the region where they are planting, or that care will be taken in how they plant them. Often, participatory projects extending from _seeds are meant to disperse_ are region-specific, for example with “connecting thru grasses.”

One of the conversations I had with Api’soomaahka leading up to the gathering in Regina was about sweetgrass seeds and my hesitation to share them with just anyone. Because the plants have such important cultural value, and because growing them from seed can be complicated for novice growers, I wasn’t always comfortable sending them to just anyone who would take part in the project. I always want to make sure that the seeds and by extension the plants grown from them will be cared for in responsible ways, and I’m continually working to find strategies for doing so with the project.
 

##### POLLUTION 
##### What have you observed about the environmental impact of the increasingly extreme climate events on your respective communities (e.g., water levels on the Kainai Nation or urban air pollution concentration in certain areas of Edmonton)?

CB: Over the past few years, I have been thinking more deeply about the impacts of air pollution on our physical bodies and mental well-being. It’s a known problem that is well ignored in most cities where I’ve lived, but quite profoundly so in Edmonton where we have some of the worst air-quality levels in the province year-round. There’s been renewed interest in air quality because of the extreme wildfires many communities faced in recent years, but the reality of bad air is that, most often, it isn’t visible to us. The toxins and pollutants in the air don’t always look as obvious as wildfire smoke, yet they have the same impacts on our bodies and minds. As pipelines are approved and extraction lauded, we continue to ignore the impacts these decisions have on all of us.

A: Water and air quality from current and future strip mining and cultivation are having a negative effect on flora and fauna. Our watersheds are under threat and is quite noticeable from creeks and lakes drying up. Winds are becoming a daily issue as they are strong and blow away topsoil. Planting native species is a great way to heal the land from erosion, development, and cultivation. Joining individuals and groups who advocate for the land is a great way to amplify your voice. You build allies to help and work together as a team. Growing native plants is a great alternative as they are hardy and drought tolerant.
 

##### RESTORATION 
##### The environment’s impact on the body is a concern in both your work, whether it’s through the restorative effects of a traditional diet or the negative impacts of proximity to pollutants. Could you speak more to this?

**CB:** _seeds are meant to disperse_ came out of a need and want to secure sustainable, fresh, and organic food that was also affordable. When the impetus of the project began, I had been living in a known food desert in North Denver, and the connections between how this overlapped with other issues of environmental racism were readily apparent (a historically Black neighbourhood, the area was also one where industry and large traffic-infrastructure projects were continually approved without regard for the communities who lived there). Over the years, as vegetable prices have been steadily increasing, not to mention the lack of dialogue around pesticides used on our foodstuff, I wanted to find ways to increase my access to affordable organic vegetables.

**A:** Being an educator for preschool offers a great advantage in teaching land-based knowledge, as it was in our past where children were taught at an early age. Utilizing Traditional knowledge as opposed to colonial education at an early age regains and strengthens the future for young horticulturalists. It’s also to combine Traditional with Western knowledge.

My hope is that future generations will have lower rates of disease and longer lives by adhering to our continued traditions of plant and food as medicines. Medicine from the land helps your body to flush out impurities from your kidneys, liver, and respiratory system. Having and using traditional medicines early in life can help your body move to a healthier state. A future with less health issues is the goal.

Sweetgrass is the plant they will carry into the future.

##### Can you talk about your work on sweetgrass restoration between Saskatchewan and Alberta?

**A:** Sweetgrass is one of the plants that are important to the First Nation communities. It is an edible plant with many uses for the body and mental health. Using sweetgrass in smudging makes the connection to the spirits of the land; it helps connect to the sky beings, or star people.

In the past 10 years, there has been a steady decline, and only through human efforts can we save this important grass. The proposed joint project for the Prairie region biospheres will take a multifaceted approach to investigate and develop ways to enhance sweetgrass supply for First Nation partners across Beaver Hills and Waterton biospheres, AB, and Redberry Lake and Riding Mountain biospheres, SK. This is a long-term project to unite the communities to help the land and save our culture. [^1]

The combination of Traditional knowledge and Western knowledge contributes to the expansion of propagation by using plant tissue culture to speed up the process of nature. One seed and its root can produce up to 150 or more plants as opposed to the one seed, one plant method. This increases the outcome by tenfold and increases the possibility of more seed production. Sweetgrass has been added to the other plants that are currently being researched for the plant tissue culture, such as the wild turnip (also known as Indian breadroot), wild carrot, and tobacco.
 

##### PROPAGATION 
##### Through the lens of your artist practices and environmental advocacy, how do you think about the future in your work?

**CB:** As seeds are shared, they are meant to help others imagine building a world different from the trajectory we’re currently on—I see it as a sort of practicing (for) the future. My hope is that the project helps draw attention to a number of critical issues like food security and sustainability, species diversification, seed copyright, climate change, urban renewal, and anti-capitalist forms of exchange; and that it shares information and ideas for new ways forward. I think a lot about distributed models and look to both plant systems and systems of technology to think more about notions of “spread.” One goal of _seeds are meant to disperse_ is to engage with this notion by disseminating ideas outward from the garden as a form of community-building.

**A:** My vision for my work is to regain food security and sovereignty for our future generations as it relates to the land and all that grows. It’s to introduce how being a good steward of the land protects all. After all, a warrior’s responsibility was to protect the land and thus protect the people.

Art and the land work together in many ways; the land offers a wealth of earth pigments, from various berries and roots, to acquire colour. It’s also a non-toxic form of art.

As for the future, I most likely will not see the outcome of my work as I will be long gone from this land. Learning about the land is key to survival.

[^1]: These biospheres are recognized by UNESCO’s Man and the Biosphere (MAB) program as sites to model sustainable futures. Often, these designations were possible because of local communities. Learn more at: https://www.redberrylake.ca; https://www.beaverhills.ca; https://www.waterton-biosphere.com; https://rmbr.ca

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Api’soomaahka and Christina Battle engage seeds as tools of ecological restoration, cultural continuity, and community exchange. Through a dialogic format extending from their panel at MacKenzie Art Gallery in partnership with Remai Modern, their practices situate seed work within broader discussions of climate change, Indigenous knowledge, and environmental justice across the Prairie region.


Sharing Seeds

Sharing Seeds (with Lillian O'Brien Davis)

Wanda Nanibush is an Anishinaabe-kwe image and word warrior, curator, and community organizer from Beausoleil First Nation. She recently won the Toronto Book Award for her coauthored book Moving the Museum. She is the 2025 Helen Frankenthaler Visiting Professor in Curating in the PhD Program in Art History at CUNY. She is also part of the curatorial team for Counterpublic 2026, a triennial civic exhibition in St.
Louis. In 2024, Nanibush was awarded The Hnatyshyn Foundation Mid-Career Award for
Curatorial Excellence. Nanibush founded aabaakwad, an international yearly gathering of over 80 Indigenous curators writers, and artists.

Composition: We Return

Amanda Boulos (she/her) is a visual artist and educator. Boulos engages with fragmented oral national narratives from Palestine, Lebanon, and Canada to explore how those histories can morph into a future Palestinian diaspora. She is an Assistant Professor of Painting and Drawing at OCAD University, a member of the plumb, and a programmer for the Toronto Palestine Film Festival.

When Play Confronts Power

**Nic Wilson** (they/he) is an artist and writer living and working between the Prairies and the Maritimes. Their most recent book, The ‘Ayin, was published in the summer of 2025.


The Afterlife of Writing

Teresa Tam is an artist from and based in Calgary. She doesn’t specialize in anything, but likes to work with digital processes, functional installations, all things shaped in paper, excessive labour, and collections of mildly niche objects. She graduated from AUArts in 2014 and is the other half of Yolkless Press.

One Thing: In Search of an Incorruptible Life

Steph Wong Ken is a writer currently based in Tkaronto, near a forest of black oak. [stephwongken.com](http://stephwongken.com)

The House Edge

Kai Trotz-Motayne is a Guyanese-Canadian researcher and writer from Tkaronto/Toronto, whose work takes inspiration from the many Caribbean people that raised her. She spends most days reminiscing about family gatherings that would end with tales of her family’s
Caribbean past. Inspired by their imaginative retellings, her mind now wonders what stories she will one day tell. Her work now explores how storytelling practices, like identities, evolve and transform through movement.

For Those Who Visit Us in Our Dreams

Shalaka Jadhav is based between Block 2 of the Haldimand Tract (Kitchener, ON) and Treaty 1 (Winnipeg, MB). Their research interests on spatial positionality and critical geographies of grief and public memory can be evidenced in exhibitions and programs they have curated in Halifax, Winnipeg, Kitchener, and Toronto. Shalaka has held roles at OCAD University and Blackwood Gallery, and is the Co-Director of Textile, a hyperlocal arts collective in Waterloo Region that supports writers and artists through mentorship, publishing, and curation. Trained as an urban planner, Shalaka took the advice of an aptitude test to pursue curatorial studies, and practices as a researcher, curator, and writer.

Yasmeen Nematt Alla is an Egyptian immigrant and settler on the unceded and stolen lands of Tkaronto and Waawiyatanong, Turtle Island. Her practice creates machinations that attest to the existence of the Brown Disabled Queer Self, resisting systems programmed to forget us. She has most recently exhibited at the Winnipeg Art Gallery, Bronx River Art Center, Heaven Gallery in Chicago, and Xpace Cultural Centre in Toronto.

To Enshrine an Ululation

TJ Shin is an artist and writer based in Los Angeles. Their writing has been published in Active Cultures, Asia Art Archive, _Mousse Magazine_, Vera List Center for Art and Politics, and more.

The _KISSSSS_ of Yong Soon Min

Lara Mimosa Montes is a writer, editor, and teaching artist whose practice and experiences span the fields of alternative publishing and experimental writing. She was born in the Bronx.

Sofía Gallisá Muriente is a Puerto Rican visual artist and cultural organizer. Her work employs text, image, and archive as medium and subject, exploring their poetic and political implications.

In the Lacuna

Christiana Myers is a curator, writer, educator, and cultural policy analyst based in Menahqesk/Saint John, NB. Her practice often explores physical, environmental, or institutional systems, and her PhD research in Art History through the University of Glasgow examines representations of contagion in contemporary artistic and curatorial practice.

A Vampire Walks Into a Funhouse

One Thing: Kamala Ibrahim Ishag’s Zar Paintings

Furqan Mohamed is a writer and educator from Tkaronto interested in all things culture, kinship, and abolition. Her work has been featured in publications such as _Canthius, This Magazine, Maisonneuve,_ and _The Local_. She is presently a graduate student at the University of Toronto.

Karice Mitchell is a photo-based artist whose practice seeks to situate the vintage erotic publication _Players_ as a crucial marker of Black cultural production. Concerned with how the Black female body has been historically and colonially exploited, Mitchell is invested in finding restorative ways to engage with and respond to archival erotic material. She received her BFA at York University in 2019 and her MFA at the University of Waterloo in 2021. She resides on the unceded and traditional territories of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh First Nations where she is a Black Scholar Assistant Professor at the University of British Columbia.

Black, Alive, and Looking Back at You: In Conversation With Karice Mitchell

Joshua Segun-Lean’s writing has appeared in _Republic Journal, The Brooklyn Rail_, and elsewhere.

Tiffany Sia is an artist, filmmaker, and writer who was born in Hong Kong and currently lives and works in New York. Her films have screened at TIFF Toronto International Film Festival, MoMA Doc Fortnight, New York Film Festival, Flaherty Film Seminar and elsewhere. Her essays have appeared in _Film Quarterly, October_ and _LUX Moving Image_. Sia’s first collection of essays _On and Off-Screen Imaginaries_ was published by Primary Information in 2024.

Cinema, Nostalgia, and the Excess That Remains: A Conversation With Tiffany Sia

Nasrin Himada is a Palestinian writer and curator from Montreal. Their practice is heavily influenced by their long-term friendships and by their many ongoing collaborations with artists, filmmakers, and poets. Nasrin’s recent project _For Many Returns_ experiments with writing as an act dictated by love, and typifies their current curatorial interests, which foreground desire as transformation and liberation through many forms. Nasrin currently holds the position of Associate Curator at Agnes Etherington Art Centre, Queen’s University in Kingston (ON).

Yantong Li (b. 1998, Dali, China) is a curator and artist based in Toronto. He is a Master of Visual Studies (curatorial) candidate at the University of Toronto. Li works at the intersection of global infrastructure, Sinophone and trans-Pacific diaspora, regional folklore, and decolonization. His recent works and curatorial projects have been shown internationally, which include the Curatorial Awards at Jimei x Arles International Photography Festival, Xiamen (2022); Durian-Durian: The First Trans–Southeast Asia Triennial, Guangzhou (2023); Trinity Square Video, Toronto (2023); The New Gallery, Calgary (2024); Jackman Humanities Institute, University of Toronto (2024).

```````````````````To Return

James Albers is an emerging artist, writer, and cultural worker situated on the unceded territory of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), and səlilwətaɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations. They are interested in the magic of fiction and believe in the truth of a perfect lie. Recently, they’ve been exploring hidden folklores, intimacy, and uninhibited dancing.

Bhenji Ra is a Filipina-Australian artist based on Gadigal land, Eora Nation. Ra’s projects combine choreography and video and are deeply rooted in social justice practices. Her practice combines dance, video, illustration, and community activation. Her work dissects cultural theory and identity, centralizing her own personal histories as a tool to reframe performance. She is the mother of Western Sydney–based collective and ballroom house SLÉ.

Bhenji Ra Dances at the End of the Rainbow

Christian Vistan is an artist from the peninsular province Bataan, Philippines, living on unceded xwməθkwəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), and səlilwətaɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) territories, colonially known as Vancouver. In their artworks, they translate experiences of distance and diaspora into hybrid forms that fold together memory, place, poetry, and abstraction. They make paintings and texts, organize exhibitions and publications, and often collaborate with other artists, writers, curators, and their relatives.

Floor Drawing Series by Aubin Soonhwan K: Text

Aman Sandhu is an artist and writer working between Montreal and Glasgow. His installations often include drawing, moving image, sculpture, and text. He considers them as ensembles of objects that come into view through improvisation.

Sahar Te is an artist and writer whose practice exists at the intersection of text, installation, and time-based media. Her interest in media, politics, literature, theatre, and acoustics inform her work. Te’s engagements span language and poetics, aesthetics and semiotics, social dynamics and inter-species, and oral histories.

Our Third Sun

Emma-Kate Guimond is a performance artist and writer based in Tiohtià:ke/Montreal. She has published essays in _Espace art actuel_ (2023) and _Inter, art actuel_ (2024), and works as a creative ally for the theatre company Joe Jack et John. Her recent exhibition and short film _The Plot_ (2024) was presented at Centre CLARK in Montreal.

Gui B.B’s Performances and the Erotics of Debt

Raven Davis is an Anishinaabe, 2-Spirit artist and educator, born in Michi Saagiig Territory, Toronto, ON. Davis investigates land-based and archival research, with calls to action, healing, and works authenticized by lived and intergenerational experience. Davis utilizes movement, visuals, and sound/media in their practice. For over 30 years, Davis has advocated for equitable, IBPOGM art and liberated futures.

Cara Tierney (they/them) is a transdisciplinary artist and educator who lives/works on unceded Anishinaabe Algonquin land. A settler of Scottish-Irish-Italian descent, their work investigates the way meaning is structured in, around, and through the body. They are oriented toward building more equitable and sustainable futures.

Hard Limits, Soft Landing

Adrien Crossman is a queer and non-binary white settler artist and curator currently residing on the traditional territory of the Haudenosaunee and Anishinaabe in so-called Hamilton, ON. They are interested in the affective qualities of queerness: how queerness can be felt through specific aesthetics and sensibilities. Crossman cofounded and co-runs the online arts publication off centre and is an Assistant Professor in the School of the Arts at McMaster University.

Fetish Aesthetics and Fan Fiction in Dana Buzzee's Philosophically Pornographic Practice

Andrea Dávila is a researcher, writer, and museum professional interested in the cultural and disciplinary intersections within art history, focusing on the visual dialogues and continuities within contemporary Latin American art. She graduated from Barnard College, and has held curatorial internships at the Dallas Museum of Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art.

One Thing: Tracing Fragments of Queer Desire


Erica N. Cardwell is a writer, critic, and educator currently based in Toronto. She is the recipient of a 2021 Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant. Her writing has appeared in _ARTS.BLACK_, _Art in America_, _Frieze_, _BOMB_, _The Believer_, _The Brooklyn Rail_, _C Magazine_, _Studio Magazine_, and other publications. She is Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Toronto Scarborough and a Terra Foundation Research Fellow for _Threewalls_, a Chicago-based arts organization. Her book, _Wrong Is Not My Name: Notes on (Black) Art_ will be published by _The Feminist Press_ in March 2024.


Sinister Pleasure: Interview with Ja'Tovia Gary

Alexa Bunnell is an emerging artist, writer, and fermenter based in Mohkinstsís.

A Good Animal on Wet Sheets: Disobedient Gasps in Subspace

Born in Kjipuktuk (Halifax) and currently living in Tkaronto, traditional territory of the Mississaugas of the Credit, the Anishinaabeg, the Chippewa, the Haudenosaunee, and the Wendat peoples, Trish Salah is the author of the Lambda award-winning poetry collection _Wanting in Arabic_, and of _Lyric Sexology Vol. 1_. Her writing is widely published in journals and anthologies, and translations of her work have appeared in French, Greek, and Arabic. She has co-edited special issues of _TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly_, on cultural production, and of _Arc Poetry Magazine_, showcasing trans, Two-Spirit, and non-binary writers. She is also an Associate Professor of Gender Studies at Queen’s University, and Editor at the _Journal of Critical Race Inquiry_.

Composition: give up your own

eunice bélidor is a curator, researcher, and writer born and based in Montreal. Her current curatorial research focuses on letter writing as creating affective archives; she is interested in the intersection of epistolary writing with care, feminism, anti-capitalism, and racial issues.

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