Contemporary Poetics of Trans Women of Colour Artists feat. a.a., Arielle Twist, Gwen Benaway, Kai Cheng Thom, Kim Ninkuru & curated by Kama La Mackerel Doors: 6pm Performance: 6:30pm SHARP (doors will close at 6:30pm and no one will be allowed in after) Performance duration: 50-60 mins
FB event: https://www.facebook.com/events/2184014578481260/ Studio 303 372 Ste-Catherine W (3rd floor) Montreal, H3B1A2 As vocal & public trans women of colour, we have a lot to say, IRL and URL. We make our presence and points of view heard through incendiary essays, truth-telling interviews, poignant tweets, tender poetry collections, ferocious performances & sassy Instagram stories. We push through every single barrier that seeks to silence us & render our lives invisible: we rise, we spit, we spit back, and claw our truths out of our throats so we be heard. Contemporary Poetics of Trans Women of Colour Artists is a collective poetic performance featuring a.a., Arielle Twist, Gwen Benaway, Kai Cheng Thom, Kim Ninkuru & curated by Kama La Mackerel. In this piece these contemporary yet intergenerational poets, artists, performers & media-makers interweave personal narratives, political rants, poetic renditions & didactic lectures to create intellectual, aesthetic, and embodied spaces of expression where trans women of colour voices are centred. Through poetry, performance, storytelling and spoken word, the artists create a live immersive environment within which they foreground their distinct subjectivities as well as their collective voices. This piece comes out of a collective multimedia storytelling workshop facilitated by Kama La Mackerel. This piece also comes out of years of friendship, mentorship, peer support, deep love and shade throwing. About the artists: a.a. a.a. is a brown femme who writes and performs about disclosure and duality. She is a producer and performer of stage and screen. a.a. co-wrote and performed in a multi-media theatre piece with the AMY Project, and wrote, performed in, and co-directed a short musical film that has toured in several festivals. Arielle Twist Arielle Twist is a writer and sex educator from George Gordon First Nation, Saskatchewan, based out of Halifax, Nova Scotia. She is a Nehiyaw, Two-Spirit, trans femme supernova writing to reclaim and harness ancestral magic and memories. Within her short career pursuing writing she has attended a residency at Banff Centre for the Arts and Creativity and has work published with Them, Canadian Art, The Fiddlehead and PRISM International. She also works as a freelance editor with GUTS Magazine and Her debut collection of poetry ‘Disintegrate/Dissociate’ is forthcoming Spring 2019 with Arsenal Pulp Press. Gwen Benaway Gwen Benaway is a trans girl of Anishinaabe and Métis descent. She has published three collections of poetry, Ceremonies for the Dead, Passage, and Holy Wild. Her fourth collection of poetry, Aperture, is forthcoming from book*hug in Spring 2020. Her writing has been published in many national publications, including CBC Arts, Maclean's Magazine, and the Globe and Mail. She is currently editing an anthology of Fantasy short stories by trans feminine writers and working on a feminist Queer poly-amorous memoir, titled trans girl in love. She lives in Toronto, Ontario and is a Ph.D student at the Women and Gender Studies Institute at the University of Toronto. Kai Cheng Thom Kai Cheng Thom is a writer, performer, wicked witch and lasagna lover based in Montreal and Toronto, unceded Indigenous territories. Her poems, essays, and fiction have been published widely online and in print. A two-time Lambda Literary Finalist, she is the author of the novel Fierce Femmes and Notorious Liars, the poetry collection a place called No Homeland, and the children's book From the Stars in the Sky to the Fish in the Sea. She is currently working on a collection of essays titled I HOPE WE CHOOSE LOVE: A Trans Girl's Notes From the End of the World. Kim Ninkuru Kim Ninkuru is a multimedia artist from Bujumbura, in Burundi, currently residing in Toronto. She uses performance art, digital art, spoken word and movement to create pieces that give her the chance to explore and express rage, love, desire, beauty, or pain in relation to her own body and mind. Her work heavily questions our preconceived notions of gender and sexuality and is grounded in the firm belief that blackness is past, present and future at any given moment. She started creating performance pieces in 2014 and in late 2015, began to experiment with digital art. Since then, her work has been exhibited in art galleries around Toronto and she has performed on many stages in both Montreal and Toronto. She is dedicated to creating spaces where trans and gender non conforming people of color can thrive, and to the liberation of black women, especially black trans women, around the world. Kama La Mackerel Kama La Mackerel is a performance poet, storyteller and multi-disciplinary artist whose work explores performative and poetic practices as resilience, resistance and healing for marginalized communities. Her projects are community-informed and community-driven. She is an artist mentor with the Artists Mentoring Youth (AMY) Project, as well as the Artistic Director of AMY’s Performance Poetry Program for Trans Women and Femmes. She is the creator and Artistic Director of GENDER B(L)ENDER, The Self-Love Cabaret: l’amour se conjugue à la première personne and Our Bodies, Our Stories: a creation & performance mentorship program for QTBIPOC youth. Kama has performed locally and internationally at venues in Montreal, Toronto, Ottawa, Halifax, Burlington, New York City, London, Amsterdam, Paris and beyond. Kama was born and raised in Mauritius, immigrated to India as a young adult, and then immigrated to Canada in 2008. She she has been living in tio’tia:ke (Montreal) since 2011. This event is presented by the Institute for Gender, Sexuality and Feminist Studies, in collaboration with QPIRG-McGill, LGBTQ2I+ History Month @ McGill, The Arts of Trans, Gender Diverse and Two-Spirit Lives and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.