Symposium Schedule

OCAD University, Main Building, Anniversary Gallery

Educate, Advocate, Agitate: The Mining Injustice Solidarity Network’s Creative Interventions exhibition documents the Toronto-based grassroots mining justice group’s performative actions and creative interventions, and a recent collaboration with JODVID (Jóvenes Organizados en Defensa de la Vida/Youth Organized in Defense of Life), a youth group based in Mataquescuintla, Guatemala that uses performance and creative tactics to resist Canadian-owned Tahoe Resources’ Escobal silver mine on their territory. The exhibition is realized through the curatorial support of Valerie Frappier, an MFA student in the Criticism and Curatorial Practice graduate program at OCAD University.

OCAD University, Main Building, Room 230

Following the gallery opening, at 7:30 pm, we will present Beyond the Extractive Zone, a film screening and discussion co-programmed with the re:assemblage collective and presented with the support of OCAD’s Culture Shifts, that explore anti-extractivism from Indigenous perspectives.

Kiruna – Rymdvägen (Liselotte Wajstedt, Sweden, 2013, 52 minutes, documentary)

The town Kiruna is to be moved. The mining activities underground threaten its foundation. Houses will be moved, or torn down, and new quarters will be built on another site. The director grew up on the Company Site and is in a hurry to catch up with her past, for soon its physical reminders will be gone.

Screening with:

The Case of Gran Colombia Gold – Crude Gold
(Monica Gutierrez, Colombia/Canada, 2014, 10 minutes, documentary)

To Stop Being a Threat and To Become a Promise(Carolina Caycedo, Colombia/UK, 2017, 8 minutes, two channel documentary)

OCAD University, Main Building, Room 190

On Saturday 2 March 2019 we open the symposium at 9:30 am with the Indigenous Environmental Justice project. Based at Osgoode Hall Law School at York University, IEJ works to develop a distinctive environmental justice framework that is informed by Indigenous knowledge systems, laws, concepts of justice and the lived experiences of Indigenous peoples.

Macarena Gómez-Barris is the author of The Extractive Zone: Social Ecologies and Decolonial Perspectives (Duke University Press, 2017) and the founder and Director of the Global South Center at Pratt Institute. Gómez-Barris will present a keynote address, “Living and Dying in Extractive Zones,” considering the spaces of ruin in the aftermath of extractive capitalism through discussion of three sites within the Americas, and asking: How does mining, hydroelectricity, oil extraction, tourism, and monoculture disproportionately impact Indigenous territories in the Americas? How do social ecologies find alternative sources of living within the space of catastrophic death? What forms of refusal and social and decolonial praxis find solutions?

Catered by NishDish. RSVP required.

OCAD University, Main Building, Room 190

The first panel (12:30-2pm), “Animating Objects, Performing Justice,” features Toronto-based Argentine visual artist Dana Prieto, artist and organizer Maggie Flynn, and Winnipeg-based writer, filmmaker, photographer and professor Warren Cariou, who will share their respective visual art and performance practices. It is moderated by MISN member Merle Davis (PhD candidate, Anthropology, University of Minnesota).

OCAD University, Main Building, Room 190

The second panel (2:30-4pm), “Legal Discourse as Performative Resistance,” features Anishinaabe actor and playwright Shandra Spears Bombay, Marion de Vries, playwright of The Last Walk of Adolfo Ich, and Isabel Dávila of JCAP (the Justice and Corporate Accountability Project). It is moderated by Sydney Lang, MISN member and law student at McGill University.

OCAD University, Main Building, Room 190

The symposium concludes with a keynote address at 4:30 pm by Kirsty Robertson, Associate Professor of Contemporary Art and Museum Studies at Western University (London, ON) and author of the forthcoming Tear Gas Epiphanies: Protest, Culture, Museums (McGill-Queen’s University Press, Spring 2019). Robertson will present, “When the Land Comes First: Oil, Museums, and (Missing) Protest,” a talk that considers demonstrations and performative activist responses to sponsorships from fossil fuel companies at museums and other cultural institutions—and the lack thereof in the Canadian context.