1 PM | Tanha Gomes & Sandrine Côté - Petit guide pratique pour un banquet imaginaire

Tanha Gomes & Sandrine Côté present their project Petit guide pratique pour un banquet imaginaire and invite the public to create herbal tea sachets. Together, participants will reflect on issues of social justice while sharing a cup of tea. The Petit guide pratique pour un banquet imaginaire explores the notion of hospitality, particularly the act of having tea as a practice of care. This project emphasizes different ways of welcoming, caring, and creating relationships rooted in respect, equity, solidarity, and dignity. Since 2021, this project, in the form of meetings and workshops, has brought together groups of youth, elders, and families from neighborhoods such as Côte-des-Neiges, Notre-Dame-de-Grâce, and Pierrefonds.

The Petit guide pratique pour un banquet imaginaire has been presented in various exhibitions at Maison de la Culture Janine-Sutto (Nos maisons, collective exhibition, 2022) and at Maison de la Culture Notre-Dame-de-Grâce-Monkland (solo exhibition, 2022). In spring 2024, a new iteration of the project will be conducted both in Rivière-des-Prairies and in Pointe-aux-Trembles in collaboration with the Turbine centre.

2 PM | Victor Vargas - Postales Digitales

Victor Vargas presents his work Postales Digitales, a multisensory QR codes mosaic which uses technology to access the complex reality of seasonal agricultural workers from South America in Quebec. Through testimonies, personal memories, news, and photographs, the work weaves connections between them and their home countries’ communities. Following the presentation, Vargas will demonstrate how to generate QR codes and paint with natural inks.

The plant-based inks used by the artist are natural dyes created from fruits and vegetables grown by the workers in Quebec's fields, as well as with soil collected from various spaces in Mexico. Postales Digitales is inspired by the evolution of communication methods historically used by migrants: telegrams, letters, postcards, phone calls, and video calls. It recreates an allegory of cross-pollination of experiences and knowledge that travel from the South to bear fruit in the North.

3 PM | Maria hoyos - Memorias de azúcar

A member of the Intervals Collective, Maria Hoyos presents her project Memorias de azúcar (Sugar Memories). Maria’s field of research revolves around reflection concerning art and identity. Her installations involve drawings, photographs, videos, animations made with sugar, and object assemblages. She develops exploratory work that encompasses various expressions such as performance and installation. Her artistic practice revolves around historical and cultural questions related to her Colombian origins.

Art is her way of acting on the present, her way of analyzing, understanding, and sharing history. The persistence of historical, cultural, social, and economic inequalities of former colonies is deeply rooted within specific groups, creating social and racial categorization. This rootedness reveals the omnipresent colonial unconscious in daily interactions, which then feed into dynamics of domination and abuse in our societies. Our colonial past established a servitude in favor of the exploitation of labor, and the social hierarchy of power through racial inferiorization. Her practice seeks to address the implementation of four major ideological axes: the exploitation of labor, ethno-racial domination, patriarchy, and control of forms of subjectivity.

4 PM | Farzaneh Rezaei - Ruptures

Farzaneh Rezaei presents her project Ruptures, in which she uses saffron spice as pigment. She then shows the audience how to grind saffron threads into powder with the help of a mortar, and how to use natural inks and saffron broth on watercolor cards. The flower pistils are carefully harvested by the artist from her mother's garden. 

Her artistic practice explores issues related to immigration and her culture, addressing the identity link that connects her to food. The drawings in her Ruptures series speak of her experiences with immigration, and the contradictory nature of the immigration phenomenon - both a personal and universal narrative. Since completing her master's degree in Visual and Media Arts at UQÀM, the Iranian-born artist has embarked on creative projects related to food in projects such as "Grenade," which uses pomegranate, and "Khayyâm et le vin," which uses red wine.

All day | Salima Punjani - Tea, tea

Salima Punjani presents Tea, Tea, an ongoing installation in the form of a tea station where visitors are invited to prepare a cup of masala chai. Guided by instructions recorded by Salima, this experience is an invitation to reflect on how to preserve traditions while living in a world that seeks to appropriate them and drain them of any social and relational meaning. This experience is inspired by the feelings of comfort, slowness, and connection that masala chai symbolizes for her.

GUESTS 

Tanha Ghomes & Sandrine Côté met in 2017 during their master's degree in Arts Education at Concordia University, and have been collaborating together since then. In 2021, they received the "Des ponts culturels, d’une rive à l’autre" grant from the Conseil des arts de Montréal for the creation of a co-created work with residents of Longueuil. "Une pensée pour toi" is an artistic installation that addresses various perspectives on care and was presented in 2022 in different public spaces in the city of Longueuil. Visual artists and cultural workers, Tanha Gomes and Sandrine Côté are interested in inclusive practices that highlight the personal and collective experiences of diverse audiences. Their collaboration is centered on the idea of encountering the other. Together, they explore acts of tenderness, intimacy, and generosity.

Victor Vargas Villafuerte (born in 1980 in Mexico) studied actuarial sciences at UNAM, with a specialization in finance. After working for 5 years in actuarial-related professions, he decided to turn to photography. In 2005, he began studying photography and cinema at the workshops of Casa del Lago in Mexico City. He moved to Montreal in 2008 where he studied photography at Dawson College. With his documentary "Paal," he has won numerous awards at film festivals worldwide and was nominated for the Mexican Academy in 2013. His still photographs have been recognized internationally. Currently, he works as an independent photographer and filmmaker.

Born in Colombia in Cali, Maria Hoyos has been living in Montreal for several years. Art is her way of acting on the present, her way of analyzing, understanding, and sharing history. Her childhood was spent near the fields on the family farm rented for over 60 years to one of the main sugar mills that cultivates, harvests, and refines sugarcane. She remembers seeing the workers, their extreme and poor working conditions deeply marking her. She thus grew up with a profound sense of non-conformity regarding the established social models in Colombia, within society in general.

Farzaneh Rezaei is an Iranian-Canadian visual artist, born in Iran in 1983. Immigrated to Canada since 2014, she lives and works in Montreal. Her work is a place of introspection into the contradictory nature of the immigration phenomenon. While the distancing of immigrants from their homeland and roots saddens them, they thrive and begin to build new fragments of identity in the host country. Her works seek to manifest this dual life marked by multiple ruptures. Her lived experiences and deep sensations in the context of immigration serve as the driving force behind her creation. Farzaneh's work invites the viewer to explore a fragmented universe, marked by nomadic and migrant thought.

Born in Vancouver in 1986, Salima Punjani is a multisensory artist whose mediums include social sculpture, vibrotactile, spatial sound, digital video, photography, and relational aesthetics. Her artistic approach is rooted in trauma-informed care and disability justice. She uses multiple senses to expand the possibilities of welcoming disabled people into art spaces by creating artful experiences of empathy, intimacy, and connection. Her recent work explores themes such as softness and anti-urgency, collective grief, isolation, and resocialization processes related to COVID-19, rest as resistance to systemic injustice, as well as how medical data can be subverted into finding human connection rather than pathologies.