Innehållsförteckning för Winter 2021 från C Magazine

Dear C Mag, The season has come again with a cold, sandy wind that disables me from breathing well. I have had mild chronic asthma since I was 21, and the freezing wind in Canada that dries out each of my breaths has worsened the illness. When I cough excessively, I realize I am living matter. Then, my negative spaces hiding in my body and mind are finally revealed and recognized by my pain and the extreme loneliness in the struggle with the shortness of breath. It is bizarre that each confrontation of negative space entails an individual’s agony and solitude. This is probably why “Evaporative Losses” in your latest issue grasped my eyes. When Jenna Swift brought up an image of the negative space depict ed in the text,…

Perhaps the first suggestion to the presence of a haunting is the trace of something out of place, unsettled, or unsaid. Although I can’t say that I’ve ever definitively believed in spirits, other-worldly spiritual forces are a deep part of my family’s lived experience. Spiritual faith has been a life-saving, revelatory vigour for some; an older male relative of mine had an epiphany one morning while walking through the woods that awoke within him a new vision for life: to educate those around him about the all-delivering power of the Lord’s love. As for me—a closeted gay Black boy growing up in Southern California—I felt an internal conflict with notions of the spiritual, particularly the Christian worldview embedded so deeply within my family’s history. The burgeoning question of my sexual…

Ociciwan Contemporary Art Centre, Edmonton September 30–November 28, 2020 amiskwacîwâskahikan/Beaver Hills House/Edmonton is centrally located in the Treaty 6 region and is the traditional home of the Papaschase. From the rolling hills, aspen forests, verdant grasslands, and the flowing life way of kisiskâciwanisîpiy/North Saskatchewan River, the region has been a site of gathering for many Indigenous peoples sharing the land and resources since time immemorial. It is on this land, overlooking kisiskâciwanisîpiy, that the Ociciwan Contemporary Art Centre stands. Ociciwan, translated from nêhiyawêwin to mean “the current comes from there,” references the kisiskâciwanisîpiy, the people it has brought to this region, and the link between the past, present, and future. Ociciwan Contemporary Art Collective started in 2015 and over the years has undertaken a series of projects—including visual art exhibitions,…

Early in the autumn, we issued a rare call for pitches that didn’t lead with a theme, giving our communities and contributors a chance to have a say in shaping the next issue in a time of such trenchant irresolution. In response, we heard meditations on the rampant shift of the art world’s activities into online space; pained expressions of longing for IRL connection in the forms of exhibitions, openings, residencies, house parties, sex; ruminations on health and non-health of physical, mental, and psychic strains; and reflections on the now dramatically apparent reality that the self is an assemblage of continually unravelling experiences, many of which hinge on the involvement of others. Body language—that mysterious, intuitive social science and gestural repertoire that allows us to send and receive messages without…

Lauryn Youden’s survival and self-care strategies span a range of epistemic modes—be they witchcraft, spirituality and mysticism, medicine and alchemy, art and theory—each enormously loaded with internal plurality and complex, overlapping histories that have been distorted by such obfuscating forces as colonialism, racism, and patriarchy. Some methods are affirmed by Western science and others by some of the many different frameworks and systems of knowledge that exceed it, including tarot, divination runes, and herbalism. Each item on display in her most recent exhibition, Visionary of Knives at Künstlerhaus Bethanien, is selected based on both embodied evidence of what works for Youden and those with whom she is in relation, in a way that is guided by cultural sensitivity. Is there a way to engage with multiple sources of cultural knowledge…

[prelude] The following is meant to be read to another—human or other-than-human, perhaps more-than-human—at a distance of approximately 60 cm. Find this position in relation to them in space. Hold them in your peripheral vision, gently. Attune yourself to their materiality. What volume of space do they displace? What compression or expansion of your own body would be required to fill that volume? Can you sense their weight? What is the timbre of their vibration? Can you transpose this into audible tones? Do you pick up on the smell of them from this distance? Without touching, is there a discernment that can be made about their temperature in relation to your own? Mind this. [bodymorphing] You are moving. Dancing is happening. It’s slow. You’re horizontal to the floor and your…

National Gallery of Canada and Dancing Foxes Press, 2020 “Some things are only imaginable in the third person,” Moyra Davey writes, paraphrasing Roland Barthes in her new book, I Confess (2020). She acknowledges that, for both of them, writing in third person is typically “unimaginable.” But throughout her book, Davey refers to herself interchangeably as “I” and “she,” distancing herself from the autobiographical text through third-person narration. I Confess was published alongside Davey’s retrospective exhibition, The Faithful (2020), at the National Gallery of Canada. The book is a monograph of Davey’s new film of the same title; it includes stills from the film, a selection of Davey’s drawings and photographs, as well as the film’s script and two contributor essays. I Confess is a meditation on Davey’s upbringing in Catholic…

Twenty-two years ago, Gayatri Spivak largely denounced postcolonial theory, citing its stagnating effect on the work of its celebrated practitioners. Despite its failures, however, she maintained that by using it, we could opt for an ethics of alterity rather than a politics of identity to make our way through the climate of cultural polarization—seeing identity politics as an awkward tool that uses identities to account for histories, and forgoes multiplicity in the process. An ethics of alterity does not necessarily smooth out identity politics’ shortcomings but instead merges it with the sharing of time, space, and experiences with others; it is on the side of relations and linkages. Since encountering these theoretical positions, I have been consumed by locating this call for an ethics of alterity in the local and…

“The past does not influence me; I influence it.”— Willem de Kooning “Know amazedly how often one takes his madness into his own hands and keeps it.”— Lorine Niedecker The best thing I got from my relationship with Z was his description of Alvarado Street in Los Angeles being like a river, how the traffic just swims down it. The second best thing I got was that I was finally disabused of the idea that de Kooning was a genius. Z, a straight cis white boy painter from Texas, without one lick of irony or self-awareness at how ironic it made him look, worshipped de Kooning, idolized and wanted to be him, studied him with righteous devotion, hunted every scrap of biographical anecdote; de Kooning did it like this, de…

Semiotext(e), 2020 Love has been a central concern of writer, artist, and educator Masha Tupitsyn throughout her career, appearing in the titles of both her 2013 book Love Dog, a Roland Barthes–inspired collection of brief reflections initially published as Tumblr posts, and Love Sounds (2015), an imageless 24-hour-long video in which the black screen serves as a backdrop for an edited audio compilation of movie sequences related to love and romance. It’s unsurprising, then, that one of the most resonant moments in Tupitsyn’s new essay collection, Picture Cycle (2020), involves a discussion of onscreen kisses. “Kisses are always vérité,” she writes, the declaration related to an investigation into the nature of film and authenticity that stretches across several entries; “Does the kiss belong to the fiction of a film or…

Aaniin, Dayna Danger ndizhinikaaz, Métis - Saulteaux ndaa. waabi-mukwa dodem niinda’aw, Wini-nipi ndoonjibaa. My mother, Debbie, was the first one to teach me about what a bundle is, what its role is in Anishinaabeg and Métis protocols of care, and what it has meant in our family. Each bundle is different, but they all carry deep significance. It’s a gathering of precious and sacred medicines and objects. In mine, you will find one braid of sweetgrass, Redbird matches in a Ziploc, empty pill bottles full of ground lavender and weekay, an abalone shell for burning medicine, red broadcloth, a leatherbound goose fan, and a red pipestone pipe with an eagle engraving, wrapped in soft blue fabric. My mother taught me to care for my bundle like you would a small…