Round-table discussion | Fighting Through Art: Approaches by Black and Queer Artists
To mark Black History Month, l’Espace de la diversité organized a round-table discussion entitled “Fighting Through Art: Approaches by Black and Queer Artists” on Thursday, February 6, 2025, at 6 p.m.
This literary discussion in French preceded the NFB’s free public screening of the film “Any Other Way: The Jackie Shane Story” (in English with French subtitles), by Michael Mabbott and Lucah Rosenberg-Lee (2024). The film recounts the life of trans soul singer Jackie Shane at a time when trans Black artists were completely marginalized. The literary discussion will focus on the journeys and struggles of queer Black artists past and present.
Address: NFB offices (1500 rue Balmoral, Montreal, Quebec, H3A 0H3).
Guests:
- Kama La Mackerel is a Mauritian-Canadian multilingual writer, visual artist, performer, educator and literary translator who believes in love, justice and individual and collective emancipation. Her practice blurs the boundaries of traditional artistic practices to create aesthetic spaces from which decolonial and queer/trans vocabularies can emerge. At once narratological and theoretical, personal and political, her interdisciplinary method, developed over the past 10 years, is rooted in ritual, meditation, ancestral healing modalities, autoethnography, oral history, archival research and community arts mediation.
- Élise Ross-Nadié is passionate about the intersections between digital cultures, intimacy and creative writing. She also has a keen interest in free software, the decolonization of knowledge and Afrofuturism. She’s had the privilege of taking her stories to over 15 countries, and her adventures have produced all kinds of artifacts: Wikipedia articles, a guide to identifying wild roses, quiches, annotated bibliographies, online training courses, great friendships, laughter, a collective work between Canada and Cuba, a collection of feminist texts and numerous dance sessions. Élise collaborates with Liberté and Tristesse magazines, and is an acrobatic communicator.
