ABOUT THIS EPISODE
CP Spacetimes | Speaker Series is the adjacent programming connected to the CP Spacetimes film screening event curated by Library of Infinities founder, Shaya Ishaq. Award winning artist and scholar Camille Turner was invited to showcase her film project Afronautic Research Lab. This powerful work invites the public to consider evidence of colonial Canada’s links to, and participation in, transatlantic slavery and its aftermath. Since starting this project in 2016, she has been traveling across the country gathering local histories. Turner’s Newfoundland Edition meditates on research undertaken in Atlantic Canada, focussing on 19 purpose-built slave ships constructed in Newfoundland and Labrador.
In this artist talk, Camille shares the origins of her research methodology, the intentions behind the Newfoundland Edition of the film series as well as insight into the continuation of this ongoing series in her art practice.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Camille Turner is an artist/scholar whose work combines Afrofuturism and historical research to explore race, space, home and belonging. Her most recent explorations confront the entanglement of what is now Canada in the transatlantic trade in Africans. She puts into practice Afronautics, a methodological frame she developed to approach colonial archives from the point of view of a liberated future. Camille is a graduate of OCAD and has recently completed a PhD at York University’s Faculty of Environmental and Urban Change. Currently, she is a Provost’s postdoctoral fellow at University of Toronto’s Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape and Design. Turner is the recipient of the 2022 Artist Prize by the Toronto Biennial of Art awarded for her video installation Nave.
Artist website: www.camilleturner.com
ABOUT THIS EPISODE
CP Spacetimes | Speaker Series is the adjacent programming connected to the CP Spacetimes film screening event curated by Library of Infinities founder, Shaya Ishaq. Writer, artist and guerilla theorist Neema Githere was invited to give a talk on their work related to Afropresentism but they took this as an opportunity to expand upon their ideas and its connections to artificial intelligence and Black diasporic ancestral relations. Please read the description below to read Neema’s words about the offering of their talk Afropresentism: On Incantation and the Machine:
"Afropresentism is you channeling your ancestry through every technology at your disposal – meditation, conversation, love, the Web – and turning absolutely everything into a portal that takes you precisely where you need to be, in this moment, towards the next. Until finally, the space between the dream and the memory collapses into being your reality – now." - Neema Githere
As Black diasporic people living in the age of Big Data, how do we navigate what Kodwo Eshun terms the “Age of Total Recall”? Coming together as archeologists of buried histories and architects of the future’s fossils, we meet in the Present tasked with alchemizing our displacement into transcendence. This talk explores the machine as a site of incantation–theorizing on Black diasporic engagements with new and ancient media as a blueprint for interrogating the relationship between ancestral and artificial intelligences.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Neema Githere (b. Nairobi, Kenya) is a writer, artist, and guerilla theorist whose work explores love and indigeneity in a time of algorithmic debris. Githere has been building a research-based embodiment practice since 2016 as an undergrad at Yale University, beginning with a project called #digitaldiaspora which traveled to over a dozen countries exploring how Black cultural workers were articulating renaissance identities on- and offline. Githere’s concept of Afropresentism––a term they coined in 2017 to explore diasporic embodiment in the age of Big Data––has influenced conferences and exhibitions across four continents. Githere is a 2023-24 Practitioner Fellow at the Digital Civil Society Lab at Stanford University, where they are working on a project entitled “Data Healing: A Call for Repair”.
Artist website: www.findingneema.online
ABOUT THIS EPISODE
In the fall of 2021, Francesca Ekwuyasi was invited by Shaya Ishaq to visit SAW Centre to give a writing workshop, participate in a panel, and do a reading from her debut novel Butter Honey Pig Bread. The reading was filmed during the exhibition run of Library of Infinities in the fall of 2021. In this video she introduces viewers to the characters in the work, themes within the novel and a glimpse into the world she’s written.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Francesca Ekwuyasi is a learner, storyteller, and multidisciplinary artist from Lagos, Nigeria. She was awarded the Writers’ Trust Dayne Ogilvie Prize for LGBTQ2S+ Emerging Writers in 2022 for her debut novel, Butter Honey Pig Bread (Arsenal Pulp Press, 2020). Butter Honey Pig Bread was also a finalist for a Lambda Literary Award, the Governor General’s Literary Award for Fiction, and the Amazon Canada First Novel Award and was longlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize and the Dublin Literary Award. CBC’s Canada Reads, an annual “Battle of the Books,” selected Butter Honey Pig Bread as one of five contenders in 2021 for “the one book that all of Canada should read.” The novel made it to the grand finale, where it placed second.
Forthcoming in the fall of 2023 is Curious Sounds: A Dialogue in Three Movements, a collaborative experimental non-fiction book with Roger Mooking.
Artist website: www.ekwuyasi.com/cv
ABOUT THIS EPISODE
In the fall of 2021, Francesca Ekwuyasi and Shaya Ishaq sat down for a conversation at Club SAW. The two discussed various subjects connected to what they were exploring in their artistic practices at the time. We touched on Francesca’s debut novel, Butter Honey Pig Bread, the process of storytelling, collaboration as a vehicle for openness, creative expression as a journey, and more.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Francesca Ekwuyasi is a learner, storyteller, and multidisciplinary artist from Lagos, Nigeria. She was awarded the Writers’ Trust Dayne Ogilvie Prize for LGBTQ2S+ Emerging Writers in 2022 for her debut novel, Butter Honey Pig Bread (Arsenal Pulp Press, 2020). Butter Honey Pig Bread was also a finalist for a Lambda Literary Award, the Governor General’s Literary Award for Fiction, and the Amazon Canada First Novel Award and was longlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize and the Dublin Literary Award. CBC’s Canada Reads, an annual “Battle of the Books,” selected Butter Honey Pig Bread as one of five contenders in 2021 for “the one book that all of Canada should read.” The novel made it to the grand finale, where it placed second.
Forthcoming in the fall of 2023 is Curious Sounds: A Dialogue in Three Movements, a collaborative experimental non-fiction book with Roger Mooking.
Artist website: www.ekwuyasi.com
Shaya Ishaq is an interdisciplinary artist, designer, and writer whose research interests span craft, diaspora, design anthropology, and (Afro)futurism. Devoted to materiality, she works with textiles and clay to create wearable art, jewelry, and installations. Through the meditative processes of craft-based work, she explores the nuances of her positionality and liminality of rites of passage.
She has studied Fibres & Material Practices at Concordia University and has exhibited her work at Patel Brown (Toronto), Khyber Centre for the Arts (Nova Scotia), and Art Gallery of Burlington (Burlington). Her writing has been featured in Canadian Art, Studio Magazine, and Public Parking.
Artist website: www.shayaishaq.com
ABOUT THIS EPISODE
Library of Infinities TV is a web series that showcases the work of emerging Black storytellers in Canada. Each episode features a guest with special offerings to share with viewers while inviting you into the vibrant world of the Library of Infinities.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Ayo Tsalithaba is a visual artist originally from Ghana and Lesotho. Their primary mediums include film, photography and illustration. Their work explores questions of home, (in)visibility, liminality and (un)belonging as they relate to Black queer and trans* African diasporic subjectivity. Ayo has been featured in Huffington Post Canada, The Fader, Flare Magazine, Manifesto, TFO, The Kit, the University of Toronto magazine, Munch Magazine and they have made music videos with Queer Songbook Orchestra, Lydia Persaud, Tika, Bernice, Desiire and Emma Frank. They have screened their films and appeared on panels at the TIFF Bell Lightbox, Free, University of Toronto, George Brown, the Revue Cinema, Xpace Cultural Centre, and more.
ABOUT THIS EPISODE
In this first episode, we are introduced to the work of multidisciplinary artist, Assiyah Jamilla Touré. They read selected poems from their debut collection of poetry called Autowar and walk us through the process of building a shrine.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Assiyah Jamilla Touré is a multidisciplinary artist of West African descent. They were born and raised on Skwxwú7mesh land and lived for many years in Kanien’kehà:ka territory (Montreal) and are now based on the lands of the Mississaugas of the Anishinaabe, the Haudenosaunee Confederacy and the Wendat (Toronto). In 2018 their chapbook feral was published by House House Press. Autowar is their first full-length collection.
Purchase Autowar here.
ABOUT THIS EPISODE
In this third episode, we are introduced to Sahra Soudi aka DJ Smooth Transitions. They share with us their perspective on vinyl as a way of carrying memory, the origins of their DJ name and a special mix.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Sahra is a multimedia artist, curator, educator, and community organizer based in Hamilton, Ontario. They have advocated for the participation of Black and radicalized creatives from artist-run centres to national galleries and DIY venues. They are an emerging curator who is interested in disrupting ableism and colonialism through practices that empower marginalized communities.
Check out their online community radio project, Total Niceness here.
ABOUT THIS EPISODE
In this episode, we meet emerging writers Omi Rodney and Kais Padamshi. The two were a part of a cohort of writers who published new works in Griot: Six Writers Sojourn into the Dark. Omi and Kais introduce us to their work and each share an offering for viewers to engage with ideas they explore in their writing.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Omi is a Jamaican writer weaving stories from Tkaronto. Their artistic focus lies in documenting and reimagining the Black Atlantic, with an emphasis on the Caribbean. They are surrendering to history as their ancestors tell it.
Kais Padamshi is a Black East African-Mixed settler based in Tkaronto/Toronto (Treaty 13) working as a visual artist, published writer, playwright, equity consultant, arts administrator, wellness facilitator and community worker. His writing practice encompasses academic, research-based texts, curatorial essays, poetry, and exhibition reviews centering African Diasporic narratives. His writing practice focuses on themes of cultural identity, belonging, de-colonial futures in addition to individual and collective healing.
Purchase Griot: Six Writers Sojourn into the Dark here.