COMMENT FAIRE UNE MANIFESTATION ECLAIR

COMMENT FAIRE UNE MANIFESTATION ECLAIR – Projet VideoQueer video launch

Je figure dans ce vidéo réalisé par le Projet VideoQueer "It Gets Better... Organized"

https://vimeo.com/66445545

Le vidéo original "Comment faire une manifestation éclair" est un outil web au sujet de comment faire une courte intervention en place publique dans l'optique de la médiatisation et l'efficacité politique. Il est le premier d'une série produite par Projet 10 de concert avec Radical Queer Semaine 2011-2012, grâce à une subvention du Bureau de lutte contre l'homophobie (le Ministère de la justice du Québec, 2012). La documentation originale, filmée entre août et décembre 2012, comprend un atelier facilité par Jordan Arseneault dans le cadre de la Pervers/cité, ainsi que la manifestation "Sashes Action" lors du marche-a-ton "ÇA MARCHE" en septembre 2012, et la Vigile du 1er décembre avec le Sérosyndicat. Il incorpore également des extraits de reportages d'actualités et la documentation indépendante de plusieurs groupes militants LGBTQ.

"Comment faire une manifestation éclair" du Projet VideoQueer est destiné à informer et à stimuler des discussions sur les stratégies de manifestations militantes paisibles, démocratiques et efficaces qui revendiquent la cause des personnes lesbiennes, gaies, transgenre et queer. Un accent particulier est mis sur la stratégie de communication et de présentation des revendications militantes dans le cadre d'une manifestation de courte durée ayant pour but la promotion ou le soulignement d'une cause spécifique de la communauté LGBTQ.

Réalisé par Rémy Huberdeau en collaboration avec Jordan Arseneault et Bruno Laprade


Montage par Rémy Huberdeau
Vidéo et son additionnel par Marianne Ploska, Daniel Rodriguez et Jadis M. Dumas


Recherche et conceptuallisation du projet VideoQueer "It Gets Better... Organized" par An Thorne avec Ian Bradley-Perrin, Jordan Arseneault et Bruno Laprade. (Revision par Billy Hébert)


Nous aimerions remercier tou.te.s les participant.e.s de leur précieuse collaboration. Traduction et sous-titres vers le français par T&S Coop Montréal

p10.qc.ca

À VENIR: d'autres outils militants vidéo sur videoqueer.org

Round Table on Socially Engaged Art for IT MATTERS HOW YOU GET HERE (Sat. April 6, 1PM)

I am excited and honoured to have been invited to speak at this round table event on socially engaged art practice for the Concordia Fine Arts forth year BFA ArtX final project It Matters How You Get Here. I will have the pleasure of sharing this conversation with play-back performance intervention artist Lisa Ndejuru, moderated by my friend and long-time supporter, Jessica MacCormack, and artist Ramona Benveniste. It's free and should be interesting!

Round Table Conversation on Socially Engaged Art 

what role can it serve and who is it really for?

IT MATTERS HOW YOU GET HERE (Sat. April 6, 1PM) 

@ CRCS St-Zotique, 75 Sir Georges-Étienne-Cartier Square, Montréal.  

event textE EN FRANÇAIS SUIT

itmattershowyougethere.com

For the last seven months, we have been working as a class both collaboratively and individually, on a group of projects that explore underlying theoretical concerns about the relationships concerning value and exchange, social inequality, and the determination of identity through popular culture.

The result is an exhibition in Saint Henri entitled,

It matters how you get here , consisting of multiple

site-specific projects located in the pool change

room, the community center, a storefront, online, the

park and the street.

Many of these projects reside in a critique of our current social habits and system – and some of these projects are structured to respond, producing alternative platforms to ‘perform’ society that include meetings, workshops, and collaborative compilations. Creating socially engaged projects that produce modes

of interacting instead of information, we suggest is

the challenge here.

And so we are exploring what art can do to facilitate

new opportunities for social interaction. And what are

the considerations and concerns that we need to address

when we work alongside communities and in

neighborhoods?

It is in this spirit that we would like to invite you, the

members, coordinators, facilitators and individuals

who live and work within the social fabric of this community.

Your experience and perspective we see as

vital.

In English - traduction chuchotée disponible

Au cours des sept derniers mois, nous avons travaillé

ensemble et individuellement en tant que classe sur

une série de projets explorant les préoccupations théoriques

sous-jacentes des relations relatives aux valeurs

et à l'échange, à l'inégalité sociale, et à l'évolution identitaire

à travers la culture populaire.

Le résultat: une exposition à St-Henri intitulée “Il importe

comment l'on s'y rend”, constituée de plusieurs projets

spécifiques aux endroits suivants: les vestiaires de la

piscine publique, le centre communautaire, une vitrine

de commerce, en ligne, dans le parc et dans les rues.

Plusieurs de ces projets consistent en une critique de

nos habitudes et de notre système social actuel, et quelques

uns d'entres eux sont structurés pour produire des

plateformes alternatives pour "performer" la société tels

des meetings, des ateliers et des compilations collaboratives.

Le défi réside dans la création de projets artistiques

socialement engagés qui produisent des modes

d'interaction au lieu de simple information.

Ainsi, nous explorons comment l'art peut faciliter de nouvelles

opportunités d'interaction sociale. Quelles sont les

considérations et les préoccupations à avoir lorsque nous

travaillons avec les communauté et les voisinages?

C'est dans cet esprit que nous vous invitons, membres,

coordinateurs, modérateurs et individus vivant et travaillant

à travers la toile sociale de cette communauté. Nous considérons

vos expériences et vos perspectives comme

cruciales.

"They Built This City" Interview with filmmaker Nadine Gomez (The Horse Palace)

I interviewed filmmaker Nadine Gomez for Nightlife.ca about her new documentary feature The Horse Palace. 

This assignment was especially meaningful for me since I worked with Nadine over one very wild summer (2002) at a grocery store in Mile End, and along with many people from that time, we are still friends!

Menial labour / meaningful friends / big ambitions / beautiful conversations!

Bible Belt Prevention: DiAna DiAna

Concordia’s HIV/AIDS 20^th Anniversary Lecturer talks Curlers and Condoms 

March 21, 7pm at H110

There have been many illustrious and influential figures who have brought their stories and work to Concordia’s H110 auditorium for the Lecture Series on HIV and AIDS since its inception in 1993. Singer Diamanda Galas, dance legend Margie Gillis, General Idea surviving member AA Bronson, AIDS hero Steven Lewis, activist writer Sarah Schulman, South African documentarian Khalo Matabane, and recently, adult film actress Lara Roxx, to name only a few that come to mind. Fittingly, the Lecture Series team has chosen to invite a figure who was active at the height of the AIDS crisis for their 20^th anniversary lecture, and have gone somewhat far afield of the global AIDS celebrity and NGO milieu to bring us a fierce grass roots activist who started the radical, up-hill task of doing HIV prevention in 1980s Columbia, South Carolina. Meet DiAna DiAna, the hairdresser who knew too much.

“It was in 1986 that I became aware of HIV and AIDS,” DiAna tells me over the phone as she prepares for a day of cutting, styling, listening and teaching at her salon in a primary black neighbourhood of Columbia. “I just saw [AIDS] on the front of a magazine. Nobody wanted to talk about it because it was all sexual and needles and of course nobody in South Carolina does any of those things,” she tells me, her beautiful Bostonian accent still intact after decades of living and working south of Dixie. In 1991, DiAna’s then-unorthodox methods for talking about sex and condoms were documented in the short film DiAna’s Hair Ego, which will also be screened on Thursday. Today, Columbia has the forth-highest rate of HIV infection per capita in the United States, she says, and according to one Centre for Disease Control study, HIV infection is the leading cause of death for black women aged 25 to 34, the same age of many of the women who visit DiAna’s salon. Black heterosexual women remain one of the populations most affected by HIV in the US, disproportionately so.

The magazine DiAna read that day, perhaps Cosmopolitan or Marie Claire or one of the more liberal magazines of the period, had a cover headline about a woman who had contracted HIV from her boyfriend, and she got thinking about how this could and would affect her community. “Both of them were ‘straight’ she yet she still got infected. I started to get curious because it was something that nobody really knew about... So I got the information, and people started sharing the articles that I was getting. It snowballed from there, and I eventually started doing presentations and going into churches where they didn’t want to talk about sex or AIDS or anything, especially in the Bible Belt. They were quite shocked that I was able to talk about HIV and AIDS,” she tells me with the fluid verbal arc of someone who has talked about her activist beginnings many times, with concentration and generosity.

“I had to figure out a way for people to start using condoms. So I started wrapping them up in wrapping paper so that clients would start taking them home. You didn’t have to be a client, you could just come and get condoms and information and see videos on HIV and AIDS,” she says with a smile her voice. She knew she was onto something: she had found a way past the sexual shame that prevented women from asking their male partners to use condoms, and eventually men would come into the salon and elaborately ask for condoms for their “friend,” or more sadly, to demand that DiAna stop giving out condoms to girls who would ask for them. She went on to found the South Carolina AIDS Education Network (SCAEN), which then spun off into the South Carolina HIV/AIDS Council, a drastically underfunded charity run by her friend and one-time trainee Bambi Gaddist “I asked her ‘Do you wanna be the VP of a company that pays nothing?’ And she said yes,” DiAna laughs warmly as she recalls inviting her BFF to helm the organization that started in a salon and went on to do workshops in schools, and safer sex outreach with sex workers and with men in cruising parks. She would do HIV saliva tests in her salon, but found that people were reluctant, as they still are, to come in for their results.

“I gave the whole thing [until] 2000: by then everybody should be cured and we should know what AIDS is, right? It was very difficult to deal with agencies that didn’t want to give any money. Some of the politicians didn’t want to talk about AIDS at all because it would be bad for their election, and they gave no support,” she tells me with more than a hint of despair. Many of the men who opposed her grass-roots prevention methods are still in power in the heavily Republican state, and continue to defund and oppose her and Gaddist’s efforts to provide prevention at the grass-roots level. In the years since DiAna has stopped working on the front lines of radical sex ed in Columbia, South Carolina’s bureaucrats have shown even less support for initiatives that she and her peers have begun, even though grass-roots prevention and peer support has proven to be more effective than top-down methods.  

“I’ve had clients come in and ask me ‘Is the AIDS thing still going around?’” she laments. The lessons DiAna learned go deep. The effects of misogyny, homophobia, religious conservatism and bureaucratic public health policies lead to only one thing: more illness, less knowledge, and a crisis that may never end unless we stop it ourselves.

DiAna DiAna "Curlers & Condoms: Grassroots Prevention Then and Now"

Thursday March 21, 7 p.m. // Room H-110 of the Henry F. Hall Building, 1455 de Maisonneuve Ouest. FREE, followed by reception with DiAna DiAna and former guests of the Lecture Series

Interview with Ange Loft from YT//ST on #IdleNoMore

Ange Loft is an artist and member of Canadian No-Wave band Yamantaka//SonicTitan. She hails from Kahnawake Nation outside of Montréal and is the instigator of the Idle No More Documentary Performance Project, an oral digital archive about the movement which she sees as intricately catalyzed by working mothers, older women, and youth involved in the struggle for First Nations justice. I  reached her via telephone at her home in Toronto on Jan 21 to talk about what she calls the “vibration behind this movement” and how youth, women, and knowledge-sharing are central to its power and expression. 

http://archives.ckut.ca/64/20130130.08.00-09.00.mp3

The 26-minute interview (Starting at 12min, edited from a 48-minute original) aired today (Jan 30, 2013) on CKUT’s Wednesday Morning After. Special thanks to Courtney and Marc from CKUT for production assistance.

FUCK THE CATHOLIC CHURCH

Image via gandystuff.tumblr.com

"Pope's Christmas present to gays: you're (still) a threat to human nature"

by Jordan Arseneault (originally published on 2Bmag.com)

In his December 21^st message to cardinals and the upper bureaucracy of the Catholic church, Karl Ratzinger, aka Pope Benedict XVI, claims that gay marriage is part of an attempt to “manipulate” human nature, and that modern gender theory is all wrong. Merry Christmas from the Vatican!

Karl Ratzinger, aka Pope Benedict XVI, the head of the most corrupt and homophobic organization on the planet, said in his speech to church officials at the Vatican today that the institution of the family is in the midst of a “crisis that threatens it to its foundations – especially in the western world.” Like a well-trained logician in the tradition of Thomas Aquinas, Ratziger outlines a series of propositions which attempt to invalidate the rights of same sex couples to marry, a constant thorn in the side of his organization, which relies on heterosexual family structures to maintain the teachings of its misogynist and homophobic system of thought and domination.

“The family [is] the authentic setting in which to hand on the blueprint of human existence. This is something we learn by living it with others and suffering it with others. So it became clear that the question of the family is not just about a particular social construct, but about man himself – about what he is and what it takes to be authentically human,” Ratizinger told the cardinals and other unmarried priests in the chapel known as the Clementine Hall. The irony that, in preventing same-sex couples from forming legally recognized families, his church is actually fighting the creation of families, was obviously lost on him.

He goes on to say that gay marriage is a threat to the notion of “commitment,” echoing the widespread prejudice that gay relationships are not as lasting or “real” as straight ones : “First of all there is the question of the human capacity to make a commitment or to avoid commitment. Can one bind oneself for a lifetime? Does this correspond to man’s nature? Does it not contradict his freedom and the scope of his self-realization? Does man become himself by living for himself alone and only entering into relationships with others when he can break them off again at any time? Is lifelong commitment antithetical to freedom? Is commitment also worth suffering for? Man’s refusal to make any commitment – which is becoming increasingly widespread as a result of a false understanding of freedom and self-realization as well as the desire to escape suffering – means that man remains closed in on himself and keeps his 'I' ultimately for himself, without really rising above it.” Riiiiight. So the desire of LGBT people to form lasting relationships somehow contradicts and undermines God's plan for humans to engage in lasting relationships. Fascinating!

Then comes the big whammy: gays are contributing to the loss of “essential elements of the human experience.”

“[O]nly in self-giving does man find himself, and only by opening himself to the other, to others, to children, to the family, only by letting himself be changed through suffering, does he discover the breadth of his humanity. When such commitment is repudiated, the key figures of human existence likewise vanish: father, mother, child...” Sounds like Karl wants us all to be bottoms, but doesn't want us to ever find a top!

With the marked rise in support for same-sex marriage in France, Mr. Pope made a predictable shout-out to the French community, notably by quoting renowned feminist philosopher Simone de Beauvoir. Ratzinger begins by discounting: “one is not born a woman, one becomes so” (on ne naît pas femme, on le devient),” quoting the famed existential writer of Le Deuxième sexe, before offering us a primer on contemporary gender theory.

“These words lay the foundation for what is put forward today under the term 'gender' as a new philosophy of sexuality. According to this philosophy, sex is no longer a given element of nature, that man has to accept and personally make sense of: it is a social role that we choose for ourselves, while in the past it was chosen for us by society. The profound falsehood of this theory and of the anthropological revolution contained within it is obvious.” Clear as day. What exactly would compel us to believe anything that he has to say about gender and sexuality, when his business still bans women from occupying positions of priesthood, the basic middle management position required to occupy the upper echelons of his multinational corporation?

Then comes the kicker: “When the freedom to be creative becomes the freedom to create oneself, then necessarily the Maker himself is denied and ultimately man too is stripped of his dignity as a creature of God, as the image of God at the core of his being. The defence of the family is about man himself. And it becomes clear that when God is denied, human dignity also disappears. Whoever defends God is defending man.” Yep. All of those people who have killed and raped and pillaged in the name of “God,” they were “defending man,” while the simple and demographically marginal fact of men wanting to marry men, women wanting to marry women, and of transgender people even existing is the real threat to human nature and civilization?

Thanks, Karl. It's all clear to me now. You really do hate us. The official theological highest authority of half of the world's Christians has officially singled out gays, lesbians, and transgender people who support same-sex marriage and embrace the fluidity of gender are a threat to the human race. Let there be no mistaking who is the real threat here: the Catholic church has and will always have the upper hand on destroying and violating the human. The hierarchical, heterosexist, hypcritical ideas that Ratzinger expounds barely mask a message of hate and exclusion towards the LGBTQ people of the world that feeds into laws like Uganda's “Kill the Gays” bill, and all of the violence and exclusion that gay people face and will continue to face the world over. This Christmas, if you celebrate it, remember who loves you, and remember who doesn't. The world is apparently worse off with us in it. Happy holidays from the Vatican!

A Rosary for the Holy Innocents of Newtown

A Rosary for the Holy Innocents of Newtown, Connecticut: A Liturgay for Peace

Make a sign of faith or meditative readiness.

            Prayer Refrain:

            O Goddess make speed to save us, O Creation make haste to help us.

First Meditation:

A voice was heard in Newtown,

sobbing and loud lamentation;

America weeping for her children,

and she would not be consoled,

since they were no more.

            Prayer Refrain

Second Meditation:

May all evil sleep,

May all good awake.

May bright wisdom prevail,

May deep peace dwell in our hearts.

            Prayer Refrain

Third Meditation:

From division, keep us

From hatred, shield us

From scorn, relieve us

From vengeance, turn us.

            Prayer Refrain

Fourth Meditation:

May hard choices be made

May the greater good be known

May peace be our rock

May loving-kindness, healing and Justice be among us.

           

            Prayer Refrain

xoxo,

N. Sr. Aloysius Hardon

Sister Aloysius Hardon of the Montréal Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence