Past EventSymposium

Gooey Connections

Saturday, January 1, 2022
In Person
Tranzac Club
Online
TQFF.ca
Available Now

The presentation/discussion will be available on Zoom (Registration required, button below) at 1 p.m. EST. You will receive the zoom link via email post-registration.

If you miss this presentation, fear not, this will be archived and available on our website post the event.

‘Queer’ is an amorphous goo that you cannot hold or control, that seeps into everything—it is both a deeply bad and good word. I love “goo” because it is profoundly playful, and profoundly gross. Goo sums up the stickiness, the slipperiness of boundaries, the ambiguity and tension. (Joëlle Rouleau, SQS Lab Foundedr, Introduction of Queer TV Special Section, jumpcut, 2021).

Gooey connections: little projects en route is a hybrid panel that will involve five unique presentations by research assistants from Laboratoire Sensibilites Queer (SQS Lab). Each presenter considers alternative forms of knowledge sharing such as mapping data, texts, video, micro-actions, social media, visual collages, gaming, etc. to illustrate to audiences various methods of queer sensibilities: El Marcelli will invite the audience to play a short video game they created that imagines how they—as a disabled person—survive a zombie apocalypse; Map will pose to audiences explorations of what it would be like to achieve equanimity and/or well being for themselves, creating a shareable digital collage from the responses; Sara Côté-Vaillant will interrogate with the audience the relationships present within the Cinéma L’Amour, a pornographic cinema located in Montreal; by considering the archive of film and screenplays as the working through of women screenwriters’ agency and subjectivity in the 30s and 50s, Zakia Ahasniou will compile a random collage of selected lines of these films in her audience-engaged performance. The presentations and discussions will be moderated by founder of SQS Lab, Joëlle Rouleau.

Our Partners:

Moderator
Joëlle Rouleau

is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Art History and Film Studies at the Université de Montréal and the founder of SQS lab. She specializes in Gender Studies, Queer Studies and Film and Television studies. As a queer documentary filmmaker, activist, researcher and committed artist, Rouleau is interested in issues related to representation and identity. Rouleau’s research is currently in part funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council for her work on mapping out queer sensibilities in mainstream film and television. Rouleau also pursues a research-creation project funded by the Fonds de recherche, société et culture. This experimental documentary focuses on queering genealogy through a collage of found footage, home movies and personal narratives.

Presenter
El Marcelli

is a researcher and artist interested in environmental, ecological and climate issues concerning current discourses on environmental change, with a unique perspective from critical disability studies and crip activism; specifically the way a disabled/crip lens helps us to question pressing matters—e.g., our survival—in the Anthropocene and pandemic eras. They notably contributed to the report on Deaf and Disability Arts Practices in Canada, commissioned by the Canada Council for the Arts, to document and improve knowledge of the barriers faced by d/Deaf, disabled, and mad artists around their art practice.

Presenter
Map

is a nonbinary mad and non-disciplinary autistic artist of action art. They are a BA graduate in Visual and Media Studies and currently a master student in Research-creation at Université de Montréal. They were exhibited in TiohtiàKe, Wôbanakiak, Nitassinan and Szczecin, Polska. They are recently interested in the performing act of creating situations as a hack in the operating modes of the dominant scientific and cultural circles. More specificly, to transform a well-known survival mechanism for autistic and queer people, “observation-masking-analysis-mimicry” of norms, into a everyday dismantling tactic of systems and their own biases of oppression.

Presenter
Sara Côté Vaillant

is a cinema master’s student at Université de Montréal. Her thesis is about the eroticization of sexual assaults in Quebec Cinema from the 1960s to today. Since 2019, she is working for the research-creation laboratory Sensibilités Queer Sensibilities directed by the professor Joëlle Rouleau (UdeM). Issues of gender and sexuality, queer theory, intersectionality and audiovisual installations are some of her fields of interests. They influence both her research and her practice as an artist.

Presenter
Zakia Ahasniou

is a formally trained actress who got sick of the lack of agency of female characters in theater and movies and decided to pursue a career in screenwriting to develop her own subjectivity and that of the characters who inhabit her realities. She currently focuses her research on the intersection of women and screenwriting and tries to identify the hinges through which agency can be invested in order to subvert the “universal” narrative.

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