This FREE panel is co-presented with the Toronto Queer Film Festival (TQFF).

For registration/participation details, visit the TQFF website.

Digital and virtual spaces have become sites for queer and Indigenous world-building.

Systematically displaced identities have been empowering themselves through intentional community building via online and virtual placemaking, using technologies like augmented reality art and zoom workshops to learn cultural and material practices. This roundtable discussion will examine crafting and knowledge-building from a Two Spirit and Indigenous context and the re-emergence of queer and Two Spirit storytelling within online and virtual spaces. How has technology contributed to cultural revitalization and knowledge transfer, as well as influenced our traditional cosmologies and stories?

Discussion will center how online hubs provide safe social spaces to queer identities by establishing a third space (Bhabha, 2008) outside of the mainstream. What are the ethics and protocol related to preserving and protecting culturally sensitive knowledges and navigating closed communities? What are the similarities and differences between augmented reality and traditional material practices of body-based mediums, such as beadworking, as distinct cosmological practices?

This discussion will feature exclusive access to an augmented reality scene powered by STYLY where attendees can use their phone or laptop to experience a virtual exhibit on Two Spirit cultural art and sovereignty. The presentation will follow a Q+A period.

The workshop is presented as part of two overlapping programs:

1. Rhizomatic Pedagogies, a pilot project by InterAccess aiming to foreground the new media leadership and innovation of Black, Indigenous, and Disability Justice communities; and
2. Queer Wonderlands, TQFF's 2023 Symposium.

Moderator

Amanda Amour Lynx (they/she/nekm) is a Two Spirit, neurodivergent, mixed urban L’nu (Mi’kmaw) interdisciplinary artist and facilitator currently living in Guelph, Ontario. Lynx was born and grew up in Tiohtià:ke (Montreal) and is a member of Wagmatcook FN. Their art making is a hybridity of traditional l’nuk approaches with new media and digital arts, guided by the Mi’kmaq principles netukulimk (sustainability) and etuaptmumk (two-eyed seeing). Lynx’s artistic practice discusses land and relationality, environmental issues, navigating systems and societal structures, cultural and gender identity, (L’nui’smk) language resurgence, quantum and spiritual multiplicities. Their facilitation work focuses on designing community spaces committed to creating healthy Indigenous futurities, guided by lateral love, accessibility and world-building.

Panelists

Nathan Clark (they/ them) is a queer, nonbinary second year candidate in the Masters of Art History in Critical Curatorial Studies at the University of British Columbia, where they also received their Bachelors in Art History and Museum Anthropology. Nathan’s research focus is on the phenomenology and narrative poetics of virtual reality and queer digital immersive installations and the importance of embodied, affective relations between the viewer and the work of art. They also research digital queerscapes and the disembodiment of users within cyberspaces, and how artists are responding to this “Wild West” of new mediums and artistic processes.

Mel Compton is a mixed urban Mi’kmaw, Scottish, Irish person living in Toronto. Their spirit name loosely translates to ‘Strong Tree Spirit’ and she is part of the Caribou clan. She is a multilateral artist who uses lived experience, artwork and therapeutic skills to develop and facilitate specialized youth programs within the urban setting. Mel aims to embed CYC therapeutic perspective, creative/arts based activities and the L’nu concept of 2-eyed seeing (Teaching held in community by Knowledge keeper Albert Marshall) into programs to provide an environment of skill development, positive identity and engagement. Her work over the last 15+ years (as a peer support, frontline case manager, anti-human trafficking counsellor and Program development specialist) has enhanced her ability to create consistent therapeutic programming while also co-facilitating activities at conferences, survivor lead initiatives and youth harm reduction programs.

Sydney Wreaks (they/them) is an interdisciplinary artist educator. They are of Kanien’kehá ka & euro-settler descent, and they are currently finishing their graduate degree in Art Education at NSCAD University in Mi’kma’ki. Their current thesis work takes a community-based arts practice approach to memorialization of difficult sites of histories, focusing on healing and stewardship towards the land as a way to decolonize memorialization, and care for histories linked to colonialism in an effort to disrupt the cycle of colonial amnesia.