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C Mag

Workshop

Repeating With a Difference: Tracing as a Counter-Archival Practice, Francisco-Fernando Granados

4:30-7:30pm

Event Details

Date

8 Apr 2022

Location

72 Perth Ave, Toronto

In this series of artist-led workshops, participants develop approaches to alternative archival practices that are rooted in community rather than established by an institution. Informed by the tenets of C Magazine’s Experiments in Criticism program, which was formed in consultation with experts in critical art pedagogy in 2019, these workshops pose questions for contemplation, discussion, and activation, such as: How can we develop embodied historiographic practices using creative-critical methods? How can we immediately begin to write a future that doesn’t perpetuate the same erasures we’ve witnessed to date? How do we record select details of our present in ways that will ensure they retain their vivacity over time, and by extension, how do we decide what to commit to memory?

This program is co-created and co-presented with the Toronto Biennial of Art.

Repeating With a Difference: Tracing as a Counter-Archival Practice
Francisco-Fernando Granados
Friday, April 8
4:30-7:30pm
72 Perth Ave, Toronto

Register here.

Drawing is a task of observation, mark-making, and composition that allows us to understand the world from an embodied perspective. This workshop aims to explore the medium as an expanded practice in the making of embodied cultural histories. Together with Granados, participants will engage in multidisciplinary experiments with images, movement, and words that aim to open up the possibilities of tracing as a relational instrument with which to engage (and build) archives.

Tracing might be thought of as a counter-archival tool that can connect moments of keen insight with experiences that resist the structures of language. It transcends boundaries of institutional belonging and can enable multidirectional community connections. Tracing may entail the articulation of particular social/political/cultural formations, the timely telling of memories when the present urgently echoes the past, or the careful contouring of what cannot yet be known. The hand may tremble as it traces. It lingers in the spaces around judgement, making room for doubt and slippage as entry points for dialogue, seeking to use the space of the aesthetic in service of equitable futures that must be affirmed, even as they remain unpredictable.

Please contact info@cmagazine.com with any accessibility requests.

BIO
Francisco-Fernando Granados (he/him) is an artist, writer, and teacher born in Guatemala. He lives in Toronto, the traditional territory of the Mississaugas of the Credit, the Anishinaabeg, the Chippewa, the Haudenosaunee and the Wendat peoples. Since 2005, his multidisciplinary practice has traced his movement from convention refugee to critical citizen, using abstraction performatively, site-specifically, and relationally, to create projects that challenge the stability of practices of recognition. These projects extend from drawing into performance, installation, publishing, and public art. Granados’ work has developed from the intersection of formal painterly training, professional engagement with diverse cultural and institutional spaces, intellectual engagement with queer and feminist theory, and early activism as a peer support facilitator with newcomer communities.

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