Praise for Discord: Collaborations in Talking Back

A Thesis Support Document Written in Partial Fulfillment for
The Master of Fine Arts at
Emily Carr University of Art and Design
Annie Canto
May 2020

Canto 1

“Whether the goal is harmony, antagonism, or any of the myriad of outcomes that fall outside of those
two somewhat unrealistic poles, the labor of self-discovery is worthy of both our time and our brain
power. This is work that asks us to interrogate who we are as an essential element of progress:
intellectual, pragmatic, political, and aesthetic.”
-

Chloë Bass​, Where Who We Are Matters: Through Art to Our Social Selves

Black: So let’s play. When I
say “agonism,” you say—
Blue: —“an aesthetics of
difference,” the delight
in surprises, collisions, inbetweenness. You?
Black: I’d say, “mixie.” The
acknowledgement that we
are contingent beings, that
identity is relational, and that
one is incomplete without
the other.
-

Marisa Jahn​, A Ballad of Black and Blue

Canto 2

Table of Contents
Acknowledgements

3

Who’s in the Room?

3

Statement of Intent

6

Share My Lunch, No Really, I Brought Too Much

7

Pedagogy and Socially Engaged Art

11

Methods of Collaboration in Talking Back

14

Collaboration and The Politics of Friendship

16

Group Making and Community Representation

16

The Centre for Polite Dissent

18

Zine Production, Publishing Spaces and Calling In Before Calling Out

19

Learning from the Processes of Refusal

22

Conclusion

24

Works Cited

25

Notes

26

Reflection: The Aftermath of Making Public

28

Appendix A. BACKTALK Exhibition Pamphlet

31

Appendix B1 and 2. Writing from The Centre of Polite Dissent

33

Appendix C. The Antiracist Classroom, Towards a Pedagogy of Consensual Learning Resource
Packet Introduction
37
Appendix D. Get Down with Macadamia Nut, Funky Moves for Salty Mixed Nuts

40

Canto 3

Acknowledgements
The work and life surrounding this document takes place on the traditional and unceded
territories of the Coast Salish Peoples, specifically that of the xʷməθkwəy̓əm (Musqueam),
Skwxwú7mesh (Squamish), and Səl̓ílwətaʔ/Selilwitulh (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations.
The following text is written in first person, the “I” mostly pertaining to my own voice,
but with respect for an abounding influence from many members of my newly established
community made in conjunction with the MFA program at Emily Carr University of Art and
Design. Nura Ali, Becky Bair, Aaniya Asrani, Reyhan Yazdani, Megan Jenson, Amanda Huynh,
Justin Langlois, Diyan Achjadi, Jay White, Lucie Chan, Sue Shon are all artists and educators
I’m particularly thankful for in this moment, as they modeled how higher education is an
opportunity for a kind of growth that extends beyond references and into discovery about how
we exist in the world.1 Not listed by name are my peers in the MFA 2020 cohort, whose
dedication to community has allowed me to understand the kind of everyday support needed for
the existentially self-reflective processes that make up rigorous artistic inquiry.
For the sake of this degree requirement, I will adhere to the convention of
single-authorship, though this text works through questions of holistic collaboration and what
it means to write with a collective voice. Many of the ideas outlined here are not only in
dialogue with the academic sources I list, but in flux based on hours of dedicated conversation
with aforementioned peers and mentors, particularly artist, collaborator and friend, Nura Ali.
Who’s in the Room?
The driving value of my art practice, equal to that of my teaching practice, is to exchange
acknowledgments of who is in the room. I take up this question not in metaphorical
circumstances that engage the viewer with an art object, but in a dialogical framework wherein
I come into a room as host, instigator, or voice in a collective. In the first instance, the
acknowledgement is nothing but hopeful, an attempt to experience presence with those in
company, an act of empathetically situating myself and others. This starting point allows us to
see one another before attempting any long or short term collaborations. The kind of first
In “Teaching as a Prophetic Vocation,” bell hooks recalls memories of the affirmation afforded by
certain learning communities, “. . . the memories can be more profound. We may remember when we
began learning critical consciousness for the first time. We may remember the moment when we first
learned to be existentially self-reflective . . .” She continues in the chapter to show how teaching and
learning are practices of critical thinking; a liberating strategy used to survive racist, sexist, class elitism
and further to kindle ongoing self-actualization (183).
1

Canto 4

encounter I aspire to experience and/or facilitate draws from Adrian Piper’s ​Impartiality,
Compassion, and Modal Imagination​. Modal imagination, which Piper defines as our ability to see
not only what is actual, but what is p
​ ossible​, is key in determining our ability to act with
compassion towards others (728). These possibilities apply not only to the complexity of the
single individual’s being, but to the potential to connect and create extending from the
interaction.2
In order to acknowledge who’s in the room, there is first commitment to modal
imagination, the compassion that amounts from the inability to grasp another. This extensive
imagination allows for a kind of compassion that can then be contextualized by the complex
hierarchical systems in which we live. Acknowledgment begins with the personal but cannot
stop at the individual. Like the empty chair that assumes attendance in different group
conversations, there must be an acknowledgment of who’s not in the room, what structures in
place rule power dynamics, what limits one and privileges another. With this kind of situated
acknowledgment as the baseline for working collaborations, it is possible to take up high-stakes
practices like institutional critique, community organizing, and ethical representation of a
collective voice.
In Audre Lorde’s prominent, “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s
House​,​”​ s​ he teaches us that difference is the personal power that brings communities together,
that strong communities are not built upon the shedding of our differences, but upon support
through mutual non-dominance that gives us the security to imagine new futures (112):
Only within that interdependency of different strengths, acknowledged and equal, can
the power to seek new ways of being in the world generate, as well as the courage and
sustenance to act where there are no charters (Lorde 111).

​Piper draws from Emmanual Levinas’ conception of the other to demonstrate the compassion necessary
when depicting the other, infinite in their alterity. In her notes on her performance piece ​Mythic Being​ she
writes, “. . . utterances of the Mythic Being . . . regain their specificity, their significance [and] mystery for
me: They are signs of someone else’s experience, to which I have only partial access.” While in this work
she is the originator of the character, Mythic Being, she writes of her experience of separation and
compassion that occurs when the character asserts more and more of his own difference. “The relation
between him and me is not that of denotation to the object denoted; the Mythic Being does not “stand
for” me. In some ways, he is me; but as an independent abstract object, he is only himself,” (Piper 112,
123-25).
2

Canto 5

Lorde’s essay was written in response to ​The Personal and the Political Panel:​ S​ econd Sex
Conference​ in 1979, where she discovered as an invited speaker that the majority of discussions
about feminism still ignored the many differences between women at the intersections of age,
race, class, and sexuality. She asks, “What does it mean when the tools of a racist patriarchy are
used to examine the fruits of that same patriarchy? It means that only the most narrow
perimeters of change are possible and allowable.” Lorde’s wisdom allows me to challenge my
space in arts discourse as arbiter of the scholarship I align with. Further, her teachings set a
foundation for principles that guide my decisions as an artist, both in upholding difference as a
source of interdependent strength, and in being critical of the constraints within social systems
that privilege some and delimit others.
In keeping with these values, it is imperative to acknowledge the grounds upon which I
work, learn, and collaborate as the traditional and unceded territories of the Coast Salish
peoples that is the xʷməθkwəy̓əm (Musqueam), Skwxwú7mesh (Squamish), and
Səl̓ílwətaʔ/Selilwitulh (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations. A first step to situating a body of work is to
understand its relationship to the histories of oppression that it is privileged by in order to inch
towards deconstructing said histories. To do this, we must realize that trying to understand
something only by engaging in Western theory is like insistently taking a cab during rush hour
when the subway system is just beneath the surface (Tuck 14). I’ve come to understand
territorial acknowledgement not as a strategy for imperial governments and settlers such as
myself to make their claims in the work of reconciliation, but as a method of honoring the
incredible, strenuous and ongoing work of Indigenous peoples as they fight for legal
acknowledgement and systemic accountability for atrocities made against their lands and
nations. I will not focus, in this text, on what decolonization means for the dominant cultures of
the university, but rather, how can we honour the longstanding work of Black and Indigenous
scholars and activists of colour who have asserted voice and rights in exclusionary spaces like
the academy. While I learn to account for my relationship to these Coast Salish lands, I aim to
critically situate my actions as an artist and educator by understanding the research I engage
with as a political act. The art practice outlined in this text cannot account for the privilege I
take up but can engage critical theory and long-term collaborations to guide my actions for
equity in my community.

Canto 6

Statement of Intent
As an artist, I interrupt spaces with installations that invite community members to
make zines or letterpress print together, to act out dialogues or to eat hot pot. My commitment
to building community comes from the desire to understand myself in relation to others, an
experience of many like me who, as Sarah Ahmed puts it, have been made to feel questionable in
the places we call home.3 I can carve out spaces for solidarity where interracial knowledge
creates belonging and difference is respected.
I could frame all the artworks of my period of study at Emily Carr as attempts to define
this tendency: discovering self and agency by embedding myself holistically in my community.
Share My Lunch​ is an example of a series of community events that cater to the interpersonal
connection often taken for granted by social superstructures. B
​ ACKTALK​ is a curatorial project
behind which hours of collaboration took place to thoughtfully represent the voices of
individuals in a collective call out of institutional inequalities. ​The Centre for Polite Dissent i​ s
both a physical and imaginary space where those who do not inhabit a norm (or don’t quite
inhabit a norm) can be praised for their acts of denial as diversity work.
Creating these spaces means understanding their separation from the bureaucratic work
of altering infrastructure. These projects can ignore institutional oversight and methods of
sustainability while presenting physical and conceptual interruptions for deeper connection,
community strength, and refusals of silence. But their realistic inefficacy doesn’t belittle their
power. I use theory-driven social frameworks to imagine new possible worlds free from
restrictions, walls, and hierarchies that limit the creation of necessary support structures. I
propose that an art practice can flourish in the middle ground between imagining new realities
and instigating institutional change. Framed by the inner workings of personal relationships
and social experiences, this thesis support document showcases different projects that attempt
In “Being in Question” from Sarah Ahmed’s Living a Feminist Life she explains the political and
embodied work of changing an institution with the metaphor of a room,
3

A norm is something that can be inhabited. I think of a norm as rather like a room or a dwelling .
. . Not to inhabit a norm (or not quite to inhabit a norm) can be experienced as not dwelling so
easily where you reside. You might be asked questions; you might be made to feel questionable,
so that you come to feel that you do not belong in the places you live, the places you experience as
home; you might turn up and not be allowed in or find it too uncomfortable to stay . . . Indeed, not
to inhabit a norm (or not quite to inhabit a norm) is often an experience of being thrown . . .
Diversity work is often the work we have to do because we are thrown (115).

Canto 7

to tread this middle ground by carving out community spaces that prioritize connection and
solidarity.
I.

Share My Lunch, No Really, I Brought Too Much
Facilitating and attending community events plays an important role in my art practice.

Community events act in multiple ways as opportunities to meet people while trying out
different sets of artist-facilitated directives. Because the directives in these events are
preconceived by the artist, and aimed to instigate intimate social experiences, I often refer to
these events as “conceptual” or “social frameworks.” Participants enact social experiences like
awkwardly sharing a fork or playing with food in order to encounter one another with
vulnerability through humor, eating, and attentive conversation. Frameworks I’ve facilitated like
Share My Lunch​ imagine new ways of being together that prioritize interpersonal connection.
These projects imitate existing gathering spaces like the dinner party, the coffee date, or the
community centre kitchen to imagine the potential of placing interpersonal connection at the
centre of working communities.

Share My Lunch, No Really I Brought Too Much ​2018

Canto 8

Share My Lunch, No Really I Brought Too Much Det. 1 2​ 018

In a series of participatory installations titled S​ hare My Lunch​, ​No Really I Brought Too
Much​, I experimented with different sets of directives to meet strangers and build connections
in my new community. In one iteration, I invited my newly acquainted MFA cohort as guests to
an uncomfortable banquet. We sat together questioning the viscosity of a flan or the use of a
shared spoon while reading printed scripts I had designed for the occasion. In pairs, the group
read aloud catty dialogues between sisters, spats between partners, and confessions between
close friends. The decisions behind the placement of each fork or the pairings of odd foods were
made to instigate vulnerability through the humour of social discomfort. The social cues of our
dinner party were off-kilter, giving us a common ground to laugh and fumble. Humour allowed
us to move past the nerves of not understanding our roles in relation to each other. We created
an atmosphere comfortable enough to allow us to eat food off shared plates and act out lines
like, “I love you, please don’t leave me alone,” or “let me get the sleep goo from your eye.” ​Share
My Lunch​ entailed a series of similarly awkward luncheons that allowed me to reflect on the
experience of coming into a new community. I understood connection as the impetus for my

Canto 9

return to university and created socially engaged frameworks to imagine the long term
relationships that form from those first encounters.
In a later iteration of S​ hare My Lunch​, I hosted one-on-one luncheons with passersby,
again as a reaction to my role as a newcomer to Emily Carr. I carted around a dining set up,
arranged the table and chairs in high-traffic areas and waited for strangers to inquire about my
lunch plans. In this iteration, I pushed my willingness to connect to a new level in order to
question what kinds of connections I was looking for. In the sixth of six shared meals with
strangers, I happened to meet who would become my close friend, collaborator, and accomplice
for the duration of the program, Nura Ali.

Share My Lunch Series 6/6 Meeting Nura Ali ​2018

These kinds of artist-facilitated interactions sit within the contemporary art practices
defined by Nicolas Bourriaud’s relational aesthetics and into the realm of socially engaged art or
social practice. Bringing the social aspect of my art projects to the forefront of critical
engagement with the work allows me to ask more topical questions about how to work with
others as opposed to how I work with media like food or bookmaking. In his 1998 book

Canto 10

Relational Aesthetics, ​Bourriaud examines the art practices of Rikrit Tirivanija and Liam Gillick,
arguing for a transition in art making that focuses more on creating an arena of social exchange
instead of a pre-established work for a viewer to interact with. Relational aesthetics depends on
social interaction as the core of the work, creating a different set of questions when engaging
with the artwork—but Bourriaud’s questioning process leaves little space for criticality. In
Claire Bishop’s examination of Bourriaud’s text, ​Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics​, she
criticizes relational aesthetics as a superficial imagining of new possible worlds when looking at
socially engaged art projects that are not critical of their context or the artist’s intention. For
example, Bourriaud places the value of the artwork in the viewer’s control when Tiravanija
interrupts the gallery to serve free food in his work ​Pad Thai.4 The art is only successful if people
come to eat. Critical questions about the materiality of the work, the artist’s intention in
creating the work, and the qualities of the social frameworks produced by the work are not
taken up in Bourriaud’s depiction of this relational art form. Bishop asks:
How do we measure or compare these relationships? The quality of the relationships in
“relational aesthetics” are never examined or called into question. When Bourriaud
argues that “encounters are more important than the individuals who compose them,” I
sense that this question is (for him) unnecessary; all relations that permit “dialogue” are
automatically assumed to be democratic and therefore good . . . If relational art produces
human relations, then the next logical question to ask is what types of relations are
being produced, for whom, and why (65)?
To critically understand the motivations behind relationship building in my practice, I have
approached Bishop’s critique in different ways. In many of my social frameworks, the success of
the work has leaned on audience engagement, determining projects like ​Share My Lunch ​as
spaces to connect encouraged by the loose sentiment that group fun equals community equals
good. In a more literal attempt to answer Bishop’s question, I’ve posited that the kind of
relations I’m producing are long-term collaborations that assert friendship and support as
central to art practice.5 But in a more thoughtful examination of my goals as a maker, I return to
the values that drive my actions. If the conceptual frameworks I build are founded on
acknowledgment of both the individual and the social context, then they must thoughtfully
4
5

Stokes, Rebecca. “MoMA | Rirkrit Tiravanija: Cooking Up an Art Experience.” InsideOut, 2012
See section II.A. “Collaboration and the Politics of Friendship”

Canto 11

engage with a community’s needs through modal imagination6 and an understanding of the
structures we inhabit. Hosting community-building events and attending pre-established
community spaces like forums, socials or governance meetings is a part of my practice that lets
me understand different desires and absences that motivate my community. Through these
kinds of local gatherings, I am able to find my role in working towards the needs of my peers
and how these needs often call for systemic changes within the institutions we inhabit.
Art criticism has attempted to define social art of the 1980s to the present with many
disparate phrases. Dialogical art, new genre public art, service aesthetics, art and social practice,
are strategic phrases that allow for new ways to understand the role of the artist in relation with
their audience, and further, to establish the artist’s gesture as extending beyond designated
spaces for art and into active engagement with their communities. In the ongoing
contextualization of my practice, I have come to identify with Pablo Helguera’s “socially
engaged art (SEA)” as it pertains particularly to collaborative methods that can be unpacked in
learning communities like the classroom.7
A. ​Pedagogy and Socially Engaged Art
Pablo Helguera, known for his contributions to socially engaged arts as an artist, writer,
and museum director attempts to consolidate a history of SEA in his book, ​Education for Socially
Engaged Art​. In a preamble about the interdisciplinarity of artists in his discourse, he writes:
Artists who wish to work with communities . . . can greatly benefit from the knowledge
accumulated by various disciplines . . . This objective is not to turn us into amateur
ethnographers, sociologists, or educators but to understand the complexities of the fields
that have come before us, learn some of their tools, and employ them in the fertile
territory of art (xiv).
Situating much of my artistic processes in the discourse of SEA allows me to understand how it
lends to and defies the criticism of thinkers like Bourriaud or Bishop. It allows me to be critical
of the collaborative methods that make up my art practice. Ultimately, I am intrigued by a
particular stream of socially engaged artists who work within different disciplines like
See section “Who’s in the Room” quote from Adrian Piper’s I​ mpartiality, Compassion, and Modal
Imagination
7
​Helguera, Pablo E
​ ducation for Socially Engaged Art (​ NewYork, 2011)
6

Canto 12

education to critically engage in community-based work. In my current work as an artist
working in an arts and design university, I can align my practice within the trajectory of socially
engaged artists who explore community work through the lens of transgressive pedagogy.
Connecting socially engaged artists with interdisciplinary practices in education gives
insight into systems of power that govern the classroom, the academy, and the wider world.
Encompassing the theory of educators like bell hooks, Eve Tuck, or Audre Lorde in community
spaces like the classroom means not only critiquing hegemonic discourses in curriculum, but
collaboratively restructuring educational spaces that marginalize or exclude people in the room.
This work of experimenting with the collaborative methods of the classroom mirrors the
expertise of socially engaged artists who create social frameworks for interaction through a
critical lens. Conversely, socially engaged artists draw from the activist writings of transgressive
scholars to understand the power dynamics in place in group work and methods for engaging
with a diversity of lenses.
For example, in ​Social Practice Studio​, a course at Maryland Institute College of Art,
artist/educators Katie Bachler and Scott Berzofsky drew from bell hooks’ ​Yearning: Race, Gender,
and Cultural Politics​, to develop topics and methods for their socially engaged art classroom.
Over the course of their work with students, they collectively experimented with the space and
function of the classroom in order to understand hooks’ concept of home as a site of resistance
(hooks 41-49). Drawing also from Audre Lorde’s book of essays A
​ Burst of Light​, in which she
depicts self-care/preservation as political warfare, the class focused on self-care as a political act
in a semester-long assignment to “make something for yourself, to nourish yourself [in] the form
of an object, ritual, or performance to share in class,” (Bass, Sholette 38). Over the course of the
semester, students and teachers discussed their domestic lives as a point of departure for
community building and methods of resilience. They cooked weekly meals together, made
sauerkraut, rearranged the space with pillows and sheets all the while discussing women of
colour feminist theory, politics, resilience and mutual aid (Bass, Shollette 40).
These are the kinds of artist-led social spaces that inspire my practice. As hybrid
artists/theorists/community organizers, the leaders in this classroom were able to facilitate a
space of deep interpersonal connection alongside the work of contextualizing self and others
not only in the designated space of the classroom, but as actors in the wider political and social
climate. Socially engaged art combined with this kind of collaborative pedagogy can come
together to imagine new ways to activate ourselves as engaged members of our communities.

Canto 13

While I hold fast to the words of hooks or the practices of teachers like Bachler and
Berzofsky as a reason to situate my practice within education, I wonder if it’s naive to have such
faith in the post-secondary arts classroom as a site for community activism or social criticism.
As a step toward contextualizing myself in the Emily Carr community, I attended curriculum
meetings, faculty meetings, and student club gatherings as a way to understand my new
environment. Over time, it became apparent that conversations about racial bias were missing
and possibly avoided in group settings. This meant instances of microaggression or what many
of us know as the “room of silence8,” had more potential to happen daily. I witnessed, heard of,
and experienced instances of othering in presumably safe spaces like art critiques, class
discussion, and general meetings. My friends and I became highly aware of a culture of unequal
working conditions, silencing of diverse perspectives, and general distrust as we unpacked the
bodily discomfort incurred in these academic spaces. Together with my collaborator and friend
Nura Ali, we saw the need to shift our culture by developing and facilitating a teach-in called
The Antiracist Classroom: Towards a Pedagogy of Consensual Learning.9 ​ W
​ e led our faculty, staff,
administrators, and incoming grad students through a process of accounting for implicit biases
first through the use of group agreements, then by discussing de-identified examples of students
being racialized in critiques and class discussions.
We wanted to present a method of teaching where all members of a classroom, with such
differing lenses, could decide the explicit social agreement that would help determine how the
community would function. In a period where xenophobic ideologies permeate global politics,
religious discrimination plays a role in majority legislature, and racial justice has to assert itself
in climate change discourse, education—specifically art education as a learning of languages for
self-reflection—should be the place to learn how to be active in our complex world. I bring up
this workshop and its motivations as an example of an artist collaboration that pushes the
boundaries of artistic practice through collaboration with other disciplines, in this case,

Student group at RISD, ​Black Artists and Designers (BAAD) i​ n collaboration with student filmmaker Eloise
Sherrid created the video T
​ he Room of Silence ​in the early 2000s to address the experience of students of
colour at predominantly white art schools.
8

The room of silence is when you make artwork regarding . . . race, identity, sexuality, etc. and
everyone in the room is silent and has nothing to say about your work be it because they don’t
know how to talk about it or they don’t want to talk about it. The crit is often offensive or doesn’t
address what the obvious emotional aspects or personal aspects of a piece [are].
See Appendix C. “The Antiracist Classroom: Towards a Pedagogy of Consensual Learning Resource
Packet Summaries”
9

Canto 14

education and antiracist work. While we don’t care to declare the work as art or teaching—nor
can we claim that the workshop was ultimately successful—we are artists who drew from
transgressive pedagogy to facilitate a space for community growth, a practice taken up by both
educators and socially engaged artists.
The methods and research taken up in the creation of T
​ he Antiracist Classroom​ are key to
my continued artistic endeavors. The work of collaboration in the proposed outcome of the
workshop is central to both my starting values and the culmination of any project. This type of
collaboration means being present in order to understand the various issues a community is in
need of addressing. It means acknowledging those who are in the room as well as the
hierarchies that govern the room, and it means decision making and ideation is not dependent
on the individual but always in conversation with others in a shared space.
II.

​Methods of Collaboration in Talking Back

BACKTALK​, title and accompanying distributables for exhibition, 2019

Canto 15

BACKTALK ​was the culmination of months of collective work. As a public exhibition, it
engaged its audience through validation of experience and community awareness. The methods
of collaboration behind the show provided insight into ways of working with others at different
levels; from politically-aligned friendship to working with communities with thoughtful
reciprocity. On all levels, the considerations taken into account when working with others relied
on situated acknowledgment and trust earned with dedicated time and shared vulnerability.
Through a collection of text-based works, ​BACKTALK​ asserted a place for peer-to-peer
solidarity within the exclusionary systems in place within arts institutions. As both co-curator
and exhibiting artist, I was situated as organizer and co-editor of the collective voice. These
combined roles required criticality and reflection on my part as I worked with others, in this
case, publically portraying a multi-perspective lens. In the experience of the show, the viewer
walked into the exhibition and was welcomed with a breadth of inviting colours and soft edge
fonts. The title spread horizontally across the first wall and was accompanied by a series of
zines, pamphlets, and the exhibition handout.10 In these first interactions, the viewer could
understand the exhibition’s theme in multiple ways. Whether they related on a personal level
with small-scale texts, engaged with the show catalogue that codified the space, or entered the
room to be confronted with the highly personal reactions to institutional racism, the viewer was
asked to confront their subjectivity. In the same way, collaborating on both the content and the
exhibition strategies of this show meant months of unpacking subjective relationships through
conversations about shared emotions, differences in positionality, and depth of friendship.
Coming up with the groundwork and collective voice of ​BACKTALK ​relied on a kind of
collaboration only practiced through solidarity in friendship. Through this work, I could
understand working together as much more than procedural. In a day, collaboration fluctuated
between processing experiences through collective making, sharing interracial knowledge often
unavailable in higher education models, and coming together in powerful public phrases.
Methods of working together developed from dedicated time, but the content driving our
collaboration in this instance came from the analysis of a shared experience in spaces that
lacked capacity for complexities of ethnic identity, inherited culture, or interracial knowledge.
A.

Collaboration and The Politics of Friendship

Holistic collaboration means leaving space for another’s needs while privileging the time
and commitment it takes to know someone. To act publicly on another’s behalf only seems
10

See Appendix A. “BACKTALK Exhibition Pamphlet”

Canto 16

ethical when the same kind of trust afforded to friendship is interwoven into the collaboration.
In her book, ​The Company She Keeps11 ​Celine Condorelli argues that alignment through
friendship doubles as a political act. “Being a friend entails a commitment, a decision, and
encompasses the implied positioning that cultural activity requires,”(7). Friendship enlists a
kind of support founded upon shared experience, alignment of ideas, and dedication of
time—qualities necessary for working community involvement and fulsome collaboration.
Condorelli’s writing complicates the altruistic notions of support as a political
alignment not without its biases. When the interpersonal relationship is declared, the
supportive action raises in stakes. The deciding moment of responsibility is crucial because it
throws the relationship into the public realm, the space of “words and deeds.” Supporting is a
political relationship, of approval and encouragement, not dissimilar to that of being a friend
(16, 17). By hosting group-making workshops and designing hospitable spaces for conversations
through text and food, my practice involves collective making and hosting in order to build the
connections necessary for solidarity and support. But I question where my motivation to take
part comes from. While providing support and working closely with others is built into the
methodologies of my art practice, I question my impetus and what that means for working with
others to strengthen community. How can a collective expression encompass all that we do and
do not share?
B. Group Making and Community Representation
Understanding the need for communal spaces of affirmation and comradery, one of
BACKTALK’s ​exhibition walls displays a constellation of collaboratively designed letterpress
posters. In a letterpress workshop advertised to work through concepts of structural racism, Ali
and I worked with different groups of students to poetically express experiences through text
and printmaking. Motivated by the affirmation we were able to afford each other in our
friendship, the facilitation of this poster workshop drew from women of colour feminist and
antiracist writing to build community through conversation and group making. Exhibiting the
work of a collective of voices meant consideration for the people represented by their works. To
​The Company She Keeps​ accompanied Condorelli’s exhibition H
​ ow to Work Together ​at Chisenhale
Gallery in 2014. The show explored how human action takes place amidst countless structures of support.
She draws attention to support structures as overlooked foundations for human action and experiments
with naming friendship as the support between people, objects and social systems. Whether support is
emotional, legal or physical, it is mostly taken for granted, and therefore often seeming to be invisible
(“Celine Condorelli at Chisenhale” 3).
11

Canto 17

bring together individual expressions in a show bent on disruption is to risk misrepresentation
of the many voices in the room. How can methods of collaboration prevent this kind of
overshadowing or misalignment? Perhaps through the trust afforded to dedicated time, and
through practices of reciprocity, group work can take on a curated collective voice.

Antiracist Letterpress Workshop and Poster Constellation, 2019

To understand how thoughtful collaboration is possible, I look to the work of Laura
Gaaysiigad Cuthbert, an artist and anthropologist who archives the untold histories of rural

Canto 18

communities based on vested personal stakes and trust earned with hours of dedicated time and
travel. In her ongoing project, ​Populous Map​, Cuthbert and collaborators look for and archive
what would otherwise be erased histories of different communities in British Columbia. She has
travelled to over three hundred ghost towns over the last eight years, spending time with locals
and land, always asking herself, who’s missing? When did the inhabitants of Japantown leave
Ocean Falls, or who frequented the Tong House in Quesnel Forks before the town’s population
dwindled to none (Cuthbert, “Shadow History”)? In reflections on her work, Cuthbert sits with
the need for reciprocity when working with the stories of real people:
Because only taking has created a disparity in our history that I see in every town I go.
Historical erasure exists because history is disgustingly colonial and owned by its
victors. Only taking erases living people and their experiences. (Cuthbert, “How We Got
Here”)
Cuthbert and her collaborators figure out different processes of reciprocity by commemorating
stories not only in their own archival methods, but in different projects that adhere to the
specific desires of the communities they work with. Similarly, as I work with
individuals/communities involved in projects like ​BACKTALK​, I aim to ensure affirmation and
connection extending from the first encounter as a reciprocal gesture towards those I work
with. In the work amounting to the show​, ​we were motivated by the exchange of stories for
affirmation and to build an archive of the difficult work we engage in day to day.
III.

The Centre for Polite Dissent
As an extension of the work done in ​BACKTALK, The Centre for Polite Dissent (CPD)12 i​ s a

longer-term installation with the intention to strengthen the community affirmed by the
exhibition. In this case, the project is not a public show, but a collaboratively-conceived space to
imagine a different kind of communal learning environment. We can create alternative syllabi,
gather for weekly potlucks, dedicate time for collaboration and contextualize our work in
current politics. ​The CPD w
​ elcomes individuals who have enacted dissensus as diversity work in
their learning communities.​ I​ t is a physical space that pops up in the hallways and libraries of an
institute to provide affirmation to BIPOC students through food, books, and collectivity. At the
12

See Appendix B2. Writing from the Centre of Polite Dissent

Canto 19

same time, it is an ideation space where members are given license to disagree with dominant
superstructures and imagine new possible methods for community growth, education, and arts
discourse drawing from a common experience of refusal. ​The CPD​ then acts as a self-publishing
centre through which collaborative ideation is distributed in zines and pamphlets. The
intentions and processes within this project bring together different ideas: collaboration seated
in friendship, situated community work, and socially engaged art frameworks as the imagining
of different realities. T
​ he CPD​ houses the material processes of zine making and self-publishing
as methods for group ideation, and community call-in.
A. Zine Production, Publishing Spaces and Calling In Before Calling Out
Through reflective writing in the forms of collaborative zines, letters, directives, and
recipes, ​The​ ​CPD​ is able to voice ongoing conversations through personal anecdotes and words
of support. The voice within the publications prioritizes the support of its community, calling in
before calling out. This kind of collaborative writing acts to siphon daily thoughts and
experiences in forms that may then be reproduced quickly for distribution. Hours of
conversations around social criticism are compressed into text-based collaborations that hope
to reach an audience experiencing the same absences in diversity work that manifest in absurd
experiences of othering within the institution. While the collective unwinding of the personal is
slow, methodical, and emotive work, the residual material forms involve immediate printing
processes. Collaborative unfolding of ideas takes time but the message is urgent. We find
ourselves spending late nights compiling thoughts and sketches in front of xerox or Risograph
machines in the hopes of communicating with students at an event the following day. The
physical manifestation of collective call-ins is then distributable. They may be experienced as
artworks in spaces chosen by viewers, giving them agency to experience the work at their leisure
in spaces more comfortable than white cubes. We hope they’ll be carried as anthems of
collectivity within often unwelcoming spaces. They connect us, like an intimate conversation,
through the sharing of like-hardships, acknowledgment, humour, and affection.

Canto 20

HANDBOOK I​ ssues 1 & 2. Collaborative writing, Risograph prints

Zines and pamphlets out of the C
​ PD ​distribute critical writing meant to call-out
normative spaces that misinterpret race-based experience. At the same time, they are primarily
distributed to the community for which they advocate, positioning them first as an invitation or
call-in; a space for affirmation and solidarity. Self-publishing spaces offer a kind of working
community that brings together a diversity of lenses under a common socio-political stance. For
example, J​ ustseeds​ is an artists’ run and worker owned cooperative that produces prints and
publications showcasing the transformative power of personal expression in concert with
collective action (“Justseeds”). Through collaborative projects, J​ ustseeds​ supports both its
members and external grassroots operations with artists’ prints and its publication network.
With a different framework, ​The Racial Imaginary Institute i​ s a publishing space collectively run
by poets Claudia Rankine, LeRonn P. Brooks, Monica Youn and a group of collaborators that
positions race as an enduring but invented concept, an imaginary force that limits movement
and imagination (Rankine). T
​ he CPD ​as a location and publisher replicates aspects of these

Canto 21

models in its attempt to locate and support a community through artist publications, common
agency, and community building.
Within the distributables proliferated by T
​ he Centre​ lie stories, directives and manifestos
that aim to validate and draw-in readers through humour and like-experience. In one of the first
zines to come out of ​The CPD​, H
​ andbook: Surviving Institutional Racism in the Art School, ​I
introduce Macadamia Nut in an advertisement for her comic of the same name. The anecdotes
Nut stumbles through are published as a strategy for calling-in, connecting viewers through
inside jokes and acknowledgment through shared and exacting experiences. She connects
viewers through humour and affection as she disturbs class critique in brash comments about
racism or shimmies her way out of awkward conversations in disco maneuvers.

Macadamia Nut Ads​ risograph on newsprint, 2019

Macadamia Nut as a fictional character is able to make fun of the hypocrisy of the
progressive arts school in her alternate reality. Sarcasm, hand lettering, and inviting colours
welcome readers to take solace in knowing their experiences of microaggression are not only
real, but ridiculous. Like the community she is meant to affirm, she is tired of a culture of hot

Canto 22

air. She rolls her eyes at a system that can talk and talk, removed from the work of making
change due to bureaucracy and time management concerns. She pokes fun at nonsensical art
vocabularies and white progressive lullabies that justify performative awareness as enough.
After her introduction as an ad in H
​ andbook​, Macadamia Nut appeared in a poster series that
acted as a large scale comic to portray how instances of exclusion or racialization are processed.
Viewers were drawn in by a comic aesthetic to find all too real examples of how humour acts as
resilience when moving through an institution can be propelled by rage.13
Creating this character and the publications where she resides came from a desire to call
in with affection rather than call out with frustration. Facilitating ​The Antiracist Classroom
catapulted Ali and I into the politics of our institution, giving us agency to inhabit different
rooms as student representatives, resource people and willing collaborators, but our
institutional call-outs were received with stagnant optimism. Changes in the wider culture
became buried under institutional procedures and priorities that continued to belittle the
inequality experienced by students of colour. Out of frustration, we realized that the meaningful
impact of our collaboration was not based on the success of cultural changes within the
stubborn university structure, but rather in the affirmation we were able to afford each other
and our peers when acting in accordance with our common complaints. In the turn from
speaking out to calling in, we refused the system of power that left us and our peers out, instead
focusing on what we could do to support each other laterally. This act of dissent subverted our
focus with the realization that systems of power cannot act towards equity when movements are
instigated from the top down. In our case, supporting students with solidarity and community
connectivity needed to be the focus rather than attempting to induce cultural changes from the
level of faculty and administration.
B. Learning from the Processes of Refusal
In her text, ​On Race and Voice: Challenges for Liberal Education in the 1990s​, Chandra
Mohanty calls for a public culture of dissent that upholds rather than suppresses conflict in
order to make systems of dominance and privilege visible. In this process can an institution be
transformed to better suit spaces for all of its constituents (30). In her contemporary critique,
she shows how communities of difference within the institution are commodified by the
still-dominant powers in accordance with the hierarchical structures of curriculum, governance,
and unanalyzed pedagogy. ​The Centre for Polite Dissent​ produces publications and hosts events to
13

See Appendix D. “Get Down With Macadamia Nut, Funky Moves for Salty Mixed Nuts”

Canto 23

support a collective stance that says we’re onto it all, the institutional is personal, and our
community has taken its first step towards refusal. T
​ he Centre​ makes public a student-led
culture of dissent, formed in solidarity, in the face of persistent and oppressive cultural
hegemony. It attempts to disrupt a pattern of diversity commodification by resisting
assimilation through its roots in the imaginary. It is a space for solidarity, free from the barriers
put in place by dominant superstructures by its mobility in both physical and conceptual spaces.
The CPD ​draws its theoretical backing from Stefano Harney and Fred Moten’s T
​ he
Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study​. In Jack Halberstam’s introduction to their text,
he paraphrases the process of refusal that occurs as a precursor to imagining unprecedented
realities:
The path to the wild beyond is paved with refusal. In T
​ he Undercommons​ if we begin
anywhere, we begin with the right to refuse what has been refused to you. Citing Gayatri
Spivak, Moten and Harney call this refusal the “first right” and it is a game-changing
kind of refusal in that it signals the refusal of the choices offered (8).
The Centre for Polite Dissent​, is a space for students to be praised for this first step of refusal.
Members of the space come together through the act of disagreeing with a culture that acts in
aggregate ways to push and shove. Students can deny the choices offered by the institution that
claim to support the experiences of racialized students when it is evident that procedures
ultimately adhere to the preservation of a hierarchy that doesn’t serve its constituents. Through
dissensus, ​The CPD​ transforms into physical space, where manifestations of a diverse and
desired culture assert themselves in open spaces and pages; the library, the commons and
publications as places of resilience. Drawing from antiracist and women of colour feminist
theory, ​The CPD​ is a socially engaged artwork that finds footing in dialogue with other
disciplines such as pedagogy, institutional critique, self-publishing and fugitive libraries. As a
physical space, it borrows methods from community centred small publishers to circulate ideas
from transgressive critical theory to support the experience of bodies of diversity that inhabit
the institution.

Canto 24

Conclusion
As I reflect on my work within these two brief years at Emily Carr, I can begin to
understand how my methods of collaboration and processes of ideation are not limited to my
current academic context. Naming the ways in which support structures are key to my artistic
inquiry gives insight into the kind of work I aim to conduct in future communities as a socially
engaged artist. I am excited to see how my work will change based on the communities I work
with and how my understanding of presence with others will develop as I learn more about the
systems that govern our relationships. Humour, collective making, and community events will
continue to define the ways I engage with social politics. Community building through
interpersonal connection will change form but maintain its place as the central motivation of
my work.

Canto 25

Works Cited
Ahmed, Sara. ​Living a Feminist Life​. Duke University Press, 2017.
Aikens, Nick, and Condorelli, Céline. The Company She Keeps​. Book Works, 2014.
Bachler, Katie and Berzofsky, Scott. “Social Practice Studio.” ​Art as Social Action​, by Chloe Bass,
Gregory Shollette, and Social Practice Queens. Allworth Press, 2018
Bishop, Claire. “Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics.” October 110 (October 2004): 51–79.
https://doi.org/10.1162/0162287042379810​.
Bourriaud, Nicolas. ​Relational Aesthetics​. Les Presses Du Reel, 2010.
Cuthbert, Laura Gaaysiigad. “How We Got Here...” P
​ opulous Map​, 2018, populousmap.com/.
Cuthbert, Laura Gaaysiigad. S​ hadow History: Using Ghost Towns to Understand Our Own Cities​.
TEDxEastVan, Youtube.com, 2017, www.youtube.com/watch?v=cBPTWMwYzRs.
Harney, Stefano, and Moten, Fred. ​The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study​. Minor
Compositions, 2013.
Helguera, Pablo. ​Education for Socially Engaged Art: a Materials and Techniques Handbook​. Jorge
Pinto Books, 2011.
hooks, bell. “Homeplace: A Site of Resistance.” Y
​ earning: Race, Gender, and Cultural Politics​.
Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group, 2015, pp. 41–49.
hooks, bell. ​Teaching Critical Thinking: Practical Wisdom​. DEV Publishers & DISTRIBU,
2018.
Mohanty, Chandra Talpade. “On Race and Voice: Challenges for Liberal Education in the
1990s.” C
​ ultural Critique​, no. 14, 1989, p. 179.
Piper, Adrian. “Impartiality, Compassion, and Modal Imagination.” E
​ thics Col. 101​ No. 04, The
University of Chicago Press, 1991, pp. 726–757.
Piper, Adrian. “Performance Catalysis on the Street and in the World.” O
​ ut of Order, Out of Sight​.
The MIT Press, 1999.
Podesva, Kristina Lee. “KRISTINA LEE PODESVA.” KRISTINA LEE PODESVA, 2019,
www.kristinaleepodesva.com/​.
Rankine, Claudia. “TRII: An Interdisciplinary Cultural Laboratory.” ​Racial Imaginary Institute​,
theracialimaginary.org/about/.

Canto 26

Notes
Bass, Chloe, and Sholette, Gregory. A
​ rt as Social Action​. Allworth Press, 2018
Bloom, Brett, and Mark Fischer. ​Group Work - A Book Investigating Group Work from the
Perspectives of Groups Themselves​. Temporary Services, 2003.
Caffentzis, G., and S. Federici. “Commons against and beyond Capitalism.” ​Community
Development Journal​, vol. 49, no. suppl 1, 2014, pp. i92–i105., doi:10.1093/cdj/bsu006.
Condorelli, Céline. Support Structures​. Sternberg Press, 2014.
Crews, Roz. “Center for Undisciplined Research.” Roz Crews, 2017,
rozcrews.info/#/center-for-undisciplined-research/.
hooks, bell. “Eating the Other.” B
​ lack Looks​. Southend Press, 1992
Jahn, Marisa. B
​ yproduct: on the Excess of Embedded Art Practices​. YYZ Books, 2010.
Lin, Jenny, and Eloisa Aquino. “B&D Press.” B&D Press, 2019, banddpress.ca/.
Lippard, Lucy. “Farther Afield.” B
​ etween Art and Anthropology: Contemporary Ethnographic
Practice​, by Arnd Schneider and Christopher Wright, Bloomsbury, 2014, pp. 23–33.
Lorde, Audre. ​Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches​. The Crossing Press, 1984.
Kelley, Robin D.G. “Black Study, Black Struggle.” U
​ fahamu: A Journal of African Studies​, 2018,
doi:​https://escholarship.org/uc/item/8cj8q196​.
Maravillas, Francis. “The Unexpected Guest: Food and Hospitality in Contemporary Asian Art.”
Contemporary Asian Art and Exhibitions: Connectivities and World-Making​, by Michelle
Antoinette and Caroline Turner, ANU Press, 2014, pp. 159–178,
www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt13wwv81.12. Accessed 28 Jan. 2020.
Mathur, Ashok, and Rita Wong. P
​ ossibilizing the Impossible: Equity in Postsecondary Arts Institutes​.
Linebooks, 2008.
Miller, Jason. “Activism vs. Antagonism: Socially Engaged Art from Bourriaud to Bishop and
Beyond.”​ Field: A Journal of Socially-Engaged Art Criticism​, vol. 1, no. 3, 2016, pp. 165–183.
Moraga Cherríe, and Anzaldúa Gloria. This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of
Color​. State University of New York (SUNY) Press, 2015.
Ormiston, Naadli Todd Lee. “Haa Shageinyaa.” I​ ndigenous and Decolonizing Studies in Education
Mapping the Long View​, by Linda Tuhiwai Smith et al., Routledge, 2019.
Piper, Adrian. “Two Conceptions of the Self.”​ Philosophical Studies 48​, APRA Foundation Berlin,
1985.

Canto 27

Simpson, Leanne Betasamosake. “Land as Pedagogy: Nishnaabeg Intelligence and Rebellious
Transformation.” D
​ ecolonization: Indigeneity, Education​; Society , vol. 3, no. 14, 2014, pp.
1–25.
Smith, Linda Tuhiwai, et al. “Introduction.” I​ ndigenous and Decolonizing Studies in Education
Mapping the Long View​, Routledge, 2019, pp. 1–25.
Thompson, Nato. L
​ iving as Form: Socially Engaged Art from 1991-2011​. Creative Time, 2012.
Wilson, Sean.​ Research Is Ceremony: Indigenous Research Methods​. Fernwood Publishing, 2008

Canto 28

Reflection: The Aftermath of Making Public
It has been two weeks since my thesis defense where I shared an excited conversation
with Justin Langlois, Diyan Achjadi, and Bopha Chhay that propelled the concepts and
practices of this thesis forward while working through its significance. The room was full
(virtually) of all of the supporters, mentors, and collaborators who had influenced the thoughts
recorded in this document, much so that the three aforementioned panel members had to
repeatedly ask people to leave the room as they showed up five or ten minutes early. I was
looking forward to the defense’s attendance, having sent personal invitations to everyone who
had so influenced and supported me. Nonetheless, when I saw the list of names of the people in
the room, I was overwhelmed. Their presence became a major theme in my presentation.
From the immense feeling of support that I experienced through collective presence, I
want to expand on the ideas of accountability, reciprocity, and shared authorship which were
complicated in different ways during my defense. I have been thinking about accountability in
relation to time. What are processes of sustaining relationships and seeing projects through
until a collectively decided end or until they transform into the next idea? Reciprocity comes
through in different practices of collaboration, and I’m expanding my understanding by looking
to mutual-aid structures that facilitate unilateral support. Shared authorship is taken up in this
thesis through acknowledgements and gratitude, but I wonder how the process of making
public or publishing can shift the conceptions of authorship through continued collaborative
methodologies.
With the unforeseen halt in the semester due to safety procedures for COVD-19, projects
like T
​ he Centre for Polite Dissent​ came to an abrupt end as physical gatherings became unsafe and
Emily Carr facilities began to close. While I would like to claim that socially engaged projects
such as these do not rely on the spaces that they are framed within, events within the Emily Carr
library had been the primary activation of T
​ he CPD​. We engaged the archive weekly and created
a more inclusive space for public engagement. When the support systems provided by the
institution fell away, ​The CPD’s a​ ctivities diminished and what remained was the baseline
support it offered through newfound relationships. The team that created T
​ he CPD ​now have a
sustained dedication to the support of each other’s work. The students who came to the
potlucks are now connected in this period of isolation. The faculty who supported the work have
become such good friends that we have weekly video discussions where we continue to share
stories of our lives and work. The books, films, and articles exist on our online platform as a

Canto 29

resource; an archive that continues to acknowledge undeniable BIPOC presence and resilience
in the fields of art and design. When collaborative projects come to a pause or undefined end,
what can be left is a lived accountability to the relationships they create. The support ​The CPD
claimed to provide is still present in the relationships we made in the process. What fell away, in
part, was the framework or name; the tools we used to make the work public. But we are excited
to see the framework morph into the next collaboration, this time with a broader network of
disciplines and expertise through the relationships we carry forward. I am curious now about
how the concepts built into ​The CPD​ will turn up in later conversations as it exists in the
institutional archive and in the headspaces of involved collaborators and participants.
As I move on with next projects, particularly in this period where our social
circumstances create a range of precarious circumstances, I have come to understand
reciprocity from a new and meaningful angle. In the chapter G
​ roup Making and Community
Representation​, ​I write about reciprocity as a necessary addition to collaborations with different
communities. With the example of Cuthbert’s ​Populous Map​, I wrote about the need to support
the communities that public projects claim to represent. In the collaborative show, ​BACKTALK,
artist Nura Ali and I determined that reciprocity meant giving voice to our community of
students. We supported our peers by providing a safety net—a form of coalition that made our
public expressions of institutional inequality easier to assert and address. This project’s
outcome focused mainly on the creation of a public exhibition that represented a collective of
voices, but criticality for the processes of creation and curation creates space for more
thoughtful forms of reciprocity. In recent projects I have been weaving in, more precisely, the
lateral support collaborations can embody in every step of the process.
Understanding the major criticisms artists working with communities have incurred in
public art initiatives, I am still reckoning with the politics of working within the structure of an
arts institution. The politics incited by institutional spaces creates higher stakes for those
involved due to the risk of replicating top down structures that misrepresent participating
communities. This loops back to Chandra Talpade Mohanty’s text, O
​ n Race and Voice: Challenges
for Liberal Education in the 1990s​ where she depicts the commodification of minorities within
arts institutions. Their work to critique different systems of oppression is weakened by the
dominant hierarchical structures that direct curriculum, governance, and decision-making. As I
step away from the university context, I am considering what kinds of organizations I’d like to
work within. As I make plans for next steps, I am connecting with value-driven groups that
think critically about their methods for working with others and working locally. As I research

Canto 30

artist groups and community-centred organizations in Vancouver in search of a place to
continue my work, I am interested in groups that build anti-oppressive policy into their
organizational procedures and group initiatives. With this in mind, I’m excited to begin
working and learning from local arts and culture cooperative, ​Vancouver Artist Labour Union
Cooperative (VALUCO-OP)​ and grassroots support network, C
​ OVID-19 Coming Together
Vancouver.
As I transition out of school and back into the working world, I have been studying the
structure of cooperatives, labour movements, and arts and culture unions as I join the union
board of ​VALUCO-OP. A
​ s my first lead role, I’m helping to coordinate a crowd-funding
campaign that provides work for artists and funding to C
​ oming Together Vancouver’s​ survival
fund/networking program. Artists and designers from V
​ ALUCO-OP​ are designing and
producing goods to sell and raise money for C
​ oming Together’s​ initiatives. As an
illustrator/producer and coordinator for this project, I am getting to see how the missions of two
different groups can come together in a mutual aid structure and how creative work can connect
resources, create relationships, and exemplify the cooperative values that drive community
practices whether or not we are faced with global crises.
Finally, I will continue to explore collective authorship in upcoming projects and
reflections of past work. I’ve begun to define my way of creating equitable systems of
collaboration by creating group agreements, by building trust through dedication of time, and
by creating titles and vision statements to name collective work. I am further processing the
kind of work it takes to build the foundations of a working arrangement and understand how
building social systems is a creative practice in and of itself. This concept has resonated in my
work throughout, putting the practice in line with the artists and collectives of the late 80s to
present who moved their work into community spaces questioning what public means for public
art. But through continued collaboration with disciplines outside of art from education to labour
organizing, I am excited to further develop the methods and processes outlined in this thesis in
new collaborations with local groups.
As I wrap up this MFA program with a developed sense of what drives my actions as an
artist and collaborator, I will continue to acknowledge the inner workings of my relationships as
that which inspires and gives form to my work. The processes defined in this thesis project rose
in an attempt to support and explore said relationships. And I take seriously this mutually
shared support as the fundamental groundwork for my continued endeavors in social critique
and collective action.

Canto 31

Appendix A. ​BACKTALK​ Exhibition Pamphlet

Canto 32

Canto 33

Appendix B1 and 2. Writing from T
​ he Centre of Polite Dissent

Talking to your Students About Diversity Work ​and T
​ he Centre for Polite Dissent​ Risograph pamphlets on
construction paper 2019
B1. ​How To’s From the Centre of Polite Dissent: Talking to Your Students of Colour About
Diversity Work
Diversity Work is a phrase borrowed from hero, Sarah Ahmed, “​[Diversity work can be described] as a
‘banging your head against the brick wall job.’ Even if you are appointed by an institution to transform
the institution, it does not mean the institution is willing to be transformed.” She calls diversity
practitioners “​institutional plumbers​; they have to work out where the blockage is or what stops something
(for example a new policy) from moving through the system.”
You may be witness to diversity work happening at your school. You may even have students
rambunctious enough to take up some of the work themselves. You can surely imagine that this work is
draining, impossibly time consuming, and scary (these feelings might be the things stopping you from
taking up the work yourself.)
So how can you talk to your students about diversity work right now?

Canto 34
Inquire With Caution
When you know that someone is going through a difficult time, it may be habit to ask them how they’re
doing. But asking your students how they’re doing—showing emotional concern—can often be
interpreted as a warning, an act to caution them out of their diversity work. Your student might be tired
of people asking if they’re okay because it diverts the conversation from antiracist institutional critique to
methods of self care. Your students want social change, not advice on where to get bubble bath.
But if your student understands your intentions, asking basic questions like “How is your work going?”
can allow your students to share as much as they feel comfortable. If your student says something like,
“Great!” and leaves the conversation as quickly as possible, it’s a sign that you are not in the inner circle.
If your student says something like, “OMG I can’t wait to graduate, this place’s antiracist policies are
archaic to me and I can’t wait to never return to academia.” Then you’re in. Silently hoorah, then put on
your listening pants.
Are You Listening to Understand?
Listening is step one of allyship (though we have much contention with this word). Listening means not
interrupting. It means making eye contact, nodding your head, and saying things like, “You’re so smart
and capable.” and “I hear you and I’m sorry you students have to make up for such huge institutional
absences that I personally refuse to contend with.” and “Wow, you’re inspiring and I’m going to start a
peer to peer teacher education working group.” (This last response would require you to step past allyship
and into an active role. A role much preferred, a step towards working as an accomplice.)
Practice Introspection (Elsewhere)
Many of you have likely sat idly by, saying nothing when faced with wacky racist shit. That is how
implicit bias and cultural hegemony work. Sometimes you don’t even know how racist shit is until your
saintly racialized peer or student shocks you into recognition. There is much work to be done in
untangling your racial biases through owning up to your transgressions. Do not do this work with your
student. Best case scenario, they will roll their eyes at you and hand you a copy of W
​ hite Fragility​.
Do Not Make It All About You
You must accept that your students of colour often know a garbage heap more than you about living in a
superstructure devoid of tactical antiracist resources. Don’t say things like, “yeah, I get it, it’s rough in
here.” This implies that you understand their experience, which—as empathetic as you may be—is untrue
and more importantly comes across as condescending.
Worse, if you cannot sit with the idea that racism could be causing such an unbridled ruckus in your
institution’s halls, do not get defensive. While you or your peers have likely made mistakes (that your
students w
​ ould love ​to see you own up to) your guilt is getting in the way of real social change.
Don’t Tell Them It’s Gonna Be Okay
Unless you have proved yourself to be an antiracist superworker, do not try to comfort your students by
saying things like, “It’s gonna be fine.” You don’t get to be the one to make your students feel better if

Canto 35
you are sticking with level 1 listening status. They will enjoy this realization with their accomplices and
collaborators. Their rage is not something you can diffuse through platitudes. Honour their rage.
Make Their Lives Easier (It’s Possibly Your Job)
The barriers faced by students of colour in your institution can be eradicated by you! Consult them often
and take their complaints to work towards lasting institutional change. Connect them with other
diversity workers, mentors who don’t need this pamphlet because they’ve been doing and living this work
for years.
Commit Yourself, They’re Asking Nicely
Step one of all this is listening well, but as good teachers you’ve been practicing this for years. The real
work is to commit yourself to racial justice in your chosen field. You can make the world a more equitable
place for everyone and you don’t even have to leave your schoolhouse! Familiarize yourself with racialized
peoples’ issues and perspectives—that means reading books and articles and not relying on your students
to explain everything to you or your class. Demand policy revision with your colleagues. Make a fuss in
faculty meetings about upholding words like “intersectional” and “decolonization.” Make everyone
actually read Crenshaw and Fanon. Create a network of peer to peer education to stop the aggregate
microaggressions incurred by students of colour in your classrooms. Find resources (texts, opportunities,
connections) for your students doing diversity work, because your job is to inspire, activate, and
continuously learn. You have the power to help make a more equitable culture of education: work that
will extend beyond your classrooms and into the world.
This pamphlet lovingly cites
Sarah Ahmed’s C
​ omplaint as Diversity Work, ​Robin DiAngello’s ​White Fragility, M
​ arian Bull’s ​How to Talk to
Women in Your Life Right Now, K
​ imberlé Crenshaw’s ​Defining the Intersection, F
​ ranz Fanon’s ​The Wretched
of the Earth, ​And Indigenous Action Media’s A
​ ccomplices Not Allies: Abolishing The Ally Industrial Complex

B2. THE CENTRE FOR POLITE DISSENT

Where do we go when we are not learning enough? To self-directed study? To our communities?
To our friends? What do we ask when we don’t know what is missing? Our bodies, our frustrations, and
our appetites shoved so we can enter the classroom.
In the Centre for Polite Dissent, we look to misbehaviour as flourishing scholarship. We disagree,
we are mismanaged, we so frequently have to chip off bits of ourselves to fit into white spaces. As we
move through the institution, to different degrees, we start to dissent. We edge by in hegemonic course
structures, we smack gum during lectures about doric-ionic-pilar-trash. We snicker too loudly when the
profs mix up our names. Sometimes we visibly disagree and in these moments we give our proposed
leaders a chance to show themselves. For this, we can be praised. These forms of polite dissent excite the
conversation and challenge our classmates and educators to rebut. Conversational classroom dissent is
polite while heated, it is methodical and emotional, it unveils systemic flaws through the personal. In
these moments, you scholars, overcome the fear of hostility in public, you overcome unsure looks towards
defiance, you give our leaders a chance to re-evaluate dehumanizing behaviour, you demand a place in

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conversations that have historically left us out. One could even say, these moments of disagreement, of
resistance and rebellion, are acts of love.
Paradoxical though it may seem—precisely in the response of the oppressed to the
violence of their oppressors that a gesture of love may be found. Consciously or unconsciously,
the act of rebellion by the oppressed (an act which is always, or nearly always, as violent as the
initial violence of the oppressors) can initiate love. Whereas the violence of the oppressors
prevents the oppressed from being fully human, the response of the latter to this violence is
grounded in the desire to pursue the right to be human. As the oppressors dehumanize others and
violate their rights, they themselves also become dehumanized. As the oppressed, fighting to be
human, take away the oppressors’ power to dominate and suppress, they restore to the oppressors
the humanity they had lost in the exercise of oppression (Friere 56).
In our case, we speak of our comfortable leaders, those acting without questioning the values of
our oppressive superstructure, as oppressors (harsh, we know). When we disagree, digress, revolt against
what is accepted as true by nature of our academic hierarchy, we give our oppressors a chance to unlearn
or become. The kind of oppression we experience, privileged as we are as art students, is that of aggregate
aggression. It is the accumulation of weird interactions that act to isolate us because of ignorance at
difference. We experience barriers to the growth of our creative practices when our mentors and peers
aren’t able to talk about race or cultural knowledge. We start pointing to our teachers and peers to say,
“Maybe no one has given you the tools that some of us have necessarily learned to wield in order to talk
about race. Here, take a tool.”
In the CPD (commonly mistaken for your Continuing Professional Development Office), we feed
you because we know this work is exhausting. We spend time with our favourite dissenters, Audre Lorde,
bell hooks, Sarah Ahmed, Paulo Friere, Octavia Butler, Eve Tuck, James Baldwin. We elbow in to find
space for the education we missed. We leave campus and go to the club or the park or the party, more
classrooms mistaken for distractions. We have cushions and carpets and peer to peer counsel because our
bodies are more than vessels for swallowing up white ideals.
You may ask, why the politeness? We are organizing for radical change. Well, we’re polite
because we’re seasoned. We’re jaded but know how to play. We know how to smile and nod, to fight the
institution without burning bridges, to have our work validated by underqualified respect. We have little
power but will continue nonetheless to deploy collective maneuvers to transgress. We want to end the day
with a not-quite-threat/not-quite-invitation saying, “We dare you to hire us.”
The Centre for Polite Dissent is soon to be situated in your public library. It exists to support you
when fear of solitude creeps in. It is a place to complain (a hair louder than is respectable) about your
teachers and admin with trusted accomplices. It is a place to turn your disquiet into public action,
solidarity, and friendship. It is a place to study what you want in a community with no hierarchy, led by
students for students misheard.

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Appendix C. ​The Antiracist Classroom, Towards a Pedagogy of Consensual Learning Resource
Packet Introduction

The Anti-Racist Classroom: Towards A Pedagogy Of
Consensual Learning (Workshop)
August 28, 2019

A big big thank you!
We would like to say a big thank you to everyone who attended today’s workshop and hope that the
conversations we have started today will go on to create meaningful and lasting changes to the spaces
we share. Though by no means an exhaustive list, we have compiled some resources that deal with
critical race theory, racism in education, and anti-racist pedagogy. We have created this resource for
all those who believe that we can and should be doing better.

Group Agreements
Group agreements are agreements that we enter into all the time. An implicit group agreement is one
that you enter into without it being put into words. An explicit agreement is an agreement you enter
into knowingly, whether verbally or in writing. When thinking about the classroom experience one of
the fault lines seems to arise when two people believe they are operating from a similar
understanding (or agreement) only to have experience show them that that was not the case.
Group agreements are not a magical cure all for all things but a way of having everyone be clear and
on the same page for what we all agree to as the baseline for our interactions as a group. The beauty
and the simplicity of group agreements is that it rests on two simple tenants;
Ownership​ (&) ​Accountability​.
Through group agreements we must take ownership of the impacts of our own actions and
acknowledge our responsibility to others around us and to the principles that we decide together.
Through group agreements we are stating our accountability to the space we are all inhabiting and
stating that the group discussion, the critique, and indeed the classroom is not a neutral space.
An explicit group agreement can be constructed at the beginning of any new class and read aloud
anytime there is a group discussion (i.e critiques, group presentations, etc.). Group agreements can be
a powerful tool to make a disparate group of individuals into ​active participants in that space
(consensual learning/participatory education) and set the tone for the subsequent discussions. They
can also be a great teaching tool in helping the group ​talk through next steps ​following instances of
bias, racism, and prejudice that will inevitably occur, creating spaces that welcome difficult
uncomfortable conversations and work collaboratively to resolve them.

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Similarly, implicit agreements have incredible potential to set the tone and baseline for interactions
in a classroom setting. Teachers and students come into the classroom with a set of assumptions and
expectations. Implicit agreements allow an avenue for both teachers and students to make those
implicit assumptions explicit so that everyone begins from a place where the expectations of
behaviour are clear, transparent, and easily referenceable.

Explicit Group Agreements
Example Agreements
We Agree,
●
●
●
●

To conduct ourselves respectfully in this space knowing that our words and actions have
impacts (sometimes wider than we expect).
To be held accountable for our words and actions knowing that we have a responsibility to
ourselves and to those who share this space with us.
To acknowledge that the classroom is not a neutral space and that we are all entering this
space with our own unique set of experiences, knowledge, values and biases.
To acknowledge and understand that we are in an institution that is not divisible from the
outside world and how we are in the classroom is how we are in the wider world.

Agreements Made at the August 28th Workshop
We Agree,
●

●
●
●
●

●
●

To acknowledge the differences in power held by the people at the table. To acknowledge the
context in which we are meeting and understand our actions and motivations differ due to
our subject positions.
To acknowledge our separate and unique positionalities, subjectivities, responsibilities, so
that we may better understand the perspectives we bring as individuals to the group.
To give each other permission to fumble, to make mistakes in our use of language and ability
to express difficult and sensitive thoughts.
To realize and account for those who are ​not in the room and understand the privileges
afforded to those invited to participate at the table.
To give everyone enough space to share, whether that means pausing in dialogue for time to
reflect, passing the conversation to one another in a guided manner, or simply being aware of
how much space we each take up with our voices.
To listen to hear, not to talk. To realize it takes time to formulate thoughts.
To agree to disagree with respect in order to further difficult conversations. To disagree
without disregarding another person’s perspective.

Canto 39

●

To try, to the best of our abilities, to sit with our unsureness and be brave with our
vulnerabilities. To, further, understand that vulnerability looks different for different
people, is accepted differently when shown by different people, and that trust takes time
and presence.

Implicit Group Agreements
Example: The Implicit Agreement Made Explicit by the Skowhegan Administration for Incoming
Students
In accepting admission to skowhegan you are choosing to participate in a community that celebrates
artistic voice and artistic freedom in every capacity. You are choosing to participate in a program that
is a school and fundamental to our pedagogy is an understanding that diversity of voice, making,
experience, ethnicity, gender, physicality, and class is critical in opening our eyes, vocabularies and
practices to those outside of our own. We believe that through this exposure we become better
artists. Inherent to being able to see and hear each other, respect, patience, non-judgement, education
and understanding even in the most challenging of circumstances is our shared responsibility. While
we dont all enter Skowhegan with the same experiences, interests and concerns we arrive with a
shared interest in discourse, and in expanding our individual practices. No matter what we make we
enter the space as artists in pursuit of freedom of voice, freedom to make mistakes and freedom to
rebuild. Skowhegan will be one of the few places in your lives as artists and as citizens that will offer
that freedom.

Implicit Agreements Made Explicit by the Emily Carr Student Body for Their Educators
In accepting a position as a teacher at Emily Carr you are choosing to assume responsibility. You are
choosing to enter into an agreement with your students, to be responsible to and for your students, to
show up for them and be present, to be generous, patient, inquisitive and thoughtful. You are
choosing to model behaviours that will teach your students how to cooperate, how to share, how to
listen to each other and how to have patience in the face of difficulty. You are choosing to commit to
being responsible for your own role as a person who comes into the classroom with your own set of
unique experiences and biases and how you impact others and how they impact you. You choose to
participate in an institution understanding that the institution is not divisible from the wider world,
that the classroom is not merely a place to acquire skills or a stop gap to elsewhere but a place to
model values, learn behaviours and methods of collaboration that allow us to become better artists,
better students, better educators, better humans and better citizens.

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Appendix D. G
​ et Down with Macadamia Nut, Funky Moves for Salty Mixed Nuts

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