Inaugural Event & Virtual Open House: Kama La Mackerel and Tranna Wintour
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Location: Online
Cost: Free
Please register for the event on Eventbrite by clicking here.
The Feminist Media Studio is excited to host our annual fall Open Studio to launch the 2020-2021 academic year. We welcome new students, prospective FMS members, and returning members to gather together online, Friday, September 25th, at 3pm. This year, Kama La Mackerel will join us, along with special guest Tranna Wintour, for a rich conversation and the launch of our new website.
Kama will guide us through a conversation to look back on the past 6 months, and reflect on life in the times of a global pandemic. The event will open with a reading from Kama’s new collection of poetry, ZOM-FAM, hot off the press! A conversation between Kama and Tranna will follow, where they discuss their particular experiences as artists in this time of ongoing crisis and powerful local and international social movements. Our guests will then open the digital floor to questions from the audience, so that we may reflect on our experiences collectively.
In celebration the Feminist Media Studio’s website launch, Kama has contributed art work and poetry to our new platform. The website goes live the day of the open studio.
Kama La Mackerel is a Montreal-based Mauritian-Canadian multi-disciplinary artist, educator, writer, community-arts facilitator and literary translator who works within and across performance, photography, installations, textiles, digital art and literature. Kama’s work is grounded in the exploration of justice, love, healing, decoloniality, hybridity, cosmopolitanism and self- and collective-empowerment. They believe that aesthetic practices have the power to build resilience and act as resistance to the status quo, thereby enacting an anticolonial practice through cultural production.
Kama has exhibited and performed their work internationally and their writing in English, French and Kreol has appeared in publications both online and in print. They have lived in far-flung places such as Pune, India and Peterborough, Ontario. ZOM-FAM, their debut poetry collection is published by Metonymy Press. lamackerel.net @KamaLaMackerel
Tranna Wintour is a spiritual, pop-culture-obsessed, fashion-hungry comedian, singer, producer, and writer. She was selected as one of Just For Laughs’ New Faces Canada 2019 and named by Fashion magazine as one of the queens of Canadian comedy. For the last two years, she’s been named Montreal’s #1 standup comedian by CultMTL. In addition to her work as a performer, Tranna co-hosts and co-produces CBC Podcasts’ Chosen Family with her comedy soulmate, Thomas Leblanc. It was named one of Apple Canada’s Best Podcasts of 2019 and 2018. Upon seeing Tranna’s solo show in New York City, legendary comedienne, Sandra Bernhard, proclaimed: “A star is born!”
DOING FEMINISM IN THE PANDEMIC
“Doing Feminism in the Pandemic” is conceived as a collective, process-based living archive. Based on the Slack platform, it invites in-process reflections, “hundreds”, keywords, conversations, prompts, and encounters amongst its participants. It is organized around four streams: “The Crisis was Already Here” (#thecrisiswasalreadyhere), “What does COVID-19 teach us?” (#emergentmodels), “What is the ‘Everyday’ of the Pandemic?” (#theeveryday), and “Reading Space” for sharing links, articles or other material (#whatimreading). Each stream includes some preliminary thoughts and questions to begin an open, process-based, collective conversation.
Alongside the living archive, the Feminist Media Studio is organizing a series of Zoom conversations, artistic prompts, and roundtable discussions with members of numerous communities (academic, artistic and activist) vital to doing intersectional, antiracist, queer, and decolonial feminisms, which participating FMS members can attend, and which will form a vital part of the living archive itself and its various collaborative contributions.
