14 December 2012, 5:30 PM – 10:00 PM (authors’ panel @ 6:30 PM)
Centre des arts actuels Skol
372, rue Sainte-Catherine Ouest, espace 314
w/ musical selections by Boncha Immigrantz
FB invite

The Artivistic collective, FUSE Magazine and Skol artist-run centre, invite you to the launch of FUSE 36-1/Promiscuous Infrastructures ou la lutte pour l’invention de possibles. FUSE‘s first-ever bilingual issue, guest edited by Artivistic, emerges out of the collective’s engagement with the Québécois student strike and social uprising of the past spring and summer, in relation to its ongoing project on “promiscuous infrastructures.” Rather than synthesize what happened or tell people what they already know, Artivistic approached the issue as an occasion to be self-reflexive and critical and to continue the struggle, investigating the (aesthetic) form of the strike, the capitalist history of universities, and contextualising the local anti-austerity struggle with those of allies abroad, and across time.

Join us in celebrating the launch of this special issue alongside local contributors, friends and allies of the Artivistic collective. A limited number of copies of the issue will be available for free at the event, with special offers on subscriptions to FUSE as well as Skol membership.

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Preview of the issue on CULT Montreal.

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In this Issue:

ANNE BERTRAND Re-enchanting the Institution

ANNA SHEFTEL et PATRICIA BOUSHEL Translating the printemps érable

CINDY MILSTEIN In the Street for Social Strike

ANNA ADAMOLO Anna Adamolo e l’onda anomala (traduit de l’italien par Eleonora Diamanti)

GRACE KYNE-LILLEY It’s Only Going to Get Worse: A report from London

PHILIPPE ENVER Autant en emporte le vent : Météorologie d’une GGI

MARK PASCHAL Whose University?

KEVIN YUEN KIT LO avec PHILIPPE et NANCY VERMES Atelier Populaire

Projects by THIEN V., FAIZ ABHUANI and ARTIVISTIC

Critiques de / Reviews of:
Insurgence par RONALD ROSE-ANTOINETTE; “Bill 78” by JONAH CAMPBELL, “Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship” by AMBER LANDGRAFF; “Porn O’Rama / CTV on TSV” by ANDREW JAMES PATERSON.

Four Minutes to Midnight table at Expozine

This year’s Expozine weekend was another smashing success, with an especially impressive roster of exhibitors, including many new artists and publishers, and a great vibe all around. It seemed slightly less crowded and chaotic than usual, which was nice, allowing people to engage more with the exhibitors. For this year’s edition, in addition to my normal organising duties, I also helped to redesign the website (code by Hello Everyone, full implementation still in progress…), and got to see my new logo silkscreened onto tote bags and t-shirts!

It was so nice to get to see all our self-publishing friends again (like seeing fam for the holidays without the emotional turmoil), and table alongside Billy Mavreas and Larissa from the Concordia Co-op Bookstore. An entertaining (to say the least) set of neighbours!

Though we didn’t have a new issue of Four Minutes to Midnight out for the fair, we had plenty of fun stuff available (pictured above). The Wu-Tang prints were incredibly popular, as was our new set of poems. We completely sold out of Riot and Capitalism Kills Love prints, which makes me feel that all is all right in the world (despite the current news headlines). We didn’t sell a ton of back issues (the Expozine Issue and Happy Hour), but I was really happy to share their stories with those that were interested. John’s Hard Mouse Best Mouse, an EP of quickly written and recorded song sketches, was also a really nice treat.

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Expozine 2012 poster by Simon Bossé

It’s that time of year again, the smell of toner is in the air and the copyshops are all a hustle. Expozine is taking place this weekend, and we’re really excited here at Four Minutes HQ. We’ve been working hard to organise the event and put the catalogue together, and things are crazy hectic right now, but this year’s festival promises to be a good one.

Unfortunately, we don’t have a new issue out, but John and I will still be pulling together a few smaller items for you, including a new “chapbook” of 2 poems, a rough-cut CD of music by John/Triangles, and a selection of prints I’ve produced over the last year (I’m very excited about the limited edition C.R.E.A.M. diptych). Of course, we’ll also have previous issues of Four Minutes for sale, including our special Expozine edition from last year!

The exhibitors list this year looks really impressive, and I can’t wait to discover everyone’s new creations and hang out with my fellow zinesters.

See you there!

Promiscuous Infrastructures are a strategy of resistance within a political and economic environment hostile to creativity. PI are about community building across practices, disciplines, categories and identities. PI are affectionate, trustworthy, anticapitalist, antiauthoritarian, experimental and fun.

Artivistic‘s Promiscuous Infrastructures project continues with a deep collaboration between Artivistic, Skol, and Fuse magazine. We’ve been working very hard over the last few months, as the guest editors for the next issue of Fuse; a special bilingual edition, that engages with the current social uprising in Québec against neoliberal austerity politics. The issue interweaves elements of the material culture and imagery of the strike, while presenting a broad-ranging analysis and contextualisation of the student-led movement. Beyond acting as a document of the strike, we wanted to look at the complex network of issues surrounding it, including a thorough historical critique of the university itself, reports from student struggles abroad, and the role of artistic practice as resistance.

More info here (including some great subscription deals!)

I was really excited to notice that my Gaza poster has been included in a post by Rick Poynor over at Design Observer about activist posters. Rick has long been a hero of mine for his longstanding and critical contribution to design writing, so needless to say, I’m honoured to be recognised by him here.

This poster was the initial trigger for the Imaging Apartheid project, which has recently been brought back to life with the hard work of the collective members. More on that very soon…

I’ve just returned from a wonderful 2 week trip to Dundee, Scotland — where I participated in Sarah Boris’s 48 Hour Splash project, and Porto, Portugal — where I kicked back and relaxed. Many thanks to Sarah (and Creative Scotland) for bringing me over there, to Dundee Contemporary Arts for hosting our project, and to Tamara for putting me up in Porto.

I’ll be posting more soon about the poster workshop, but for now, here are some photos documenting my too-short time abroad, edited with dbox’s “intsagrammy” photohsop actions, which I’ve been having a little too much fun playing around with of late.

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Tonight, I’m off to Dundee, Scotland to participate in an international artist residency entitled 48 Hour Splash, organised by Sarah Boris, to be held at Dundee Contemporary Arts. I’m honoured to have been invited to this incredible workshop/residency, alongside a group of talented and politically engaged graphic designers, affichistes, and artists, including: Glenn Orton, Siôn Parkinson, Edwin Pickstone, Nancy and Phillipe Vermes (whose book, Beauty is in the street, provides the contextual inspiration for this project), Pascal Colorat, Catalina Quezada Ortega, Constantin Demner, and Sarah herself.

The residency will consist of us working collaboratively for 48-hours straight (from the 7th-9th of August) to create a folio of silkscreen posters that will address our collective socio-political concerns, exploring the medium of the poster as a means of both personal expression and political resistance. I hope to be able to bring the context of the student/social strike here in Québec to the group, and learn from their individual experiences of struggle. I’m particularly excited to get the chance to meet Nancy and Phillipe, whom I sure will have much insight to share from their experiences of May 68.

Download the (working) project presentation here.

Stay tuned…

I’m a little late posting this, but the results for this year’s Memefest on the theme of Debt are in! I was invited to act as a curator for the visual communication and beyond… categories, and it was a challenging process, with a lot of work to go through, and to be honest, many projects that I felt missed the mark.

The topic, from a communications perspective, was certainly a difficult one, but I was surprised to see so many projects that focused on literal or superficial interpretations of debt, given that David Graeber’s excellent text was central to the festival outlines. I felt many projects subjectivised debt as an individual problem/responsibility related to consumption, ignoring the systemic nature of debt as social relation that was central to the outlines, where it was asked “can we imagine a different relationship to Debt?”

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The last few months here in Quebec have been tumultuous ones, with a massive student movement taking to the streets on a near daily basis to oppose tuition increases, and in doing so, giving birth to a ” Printemps érable” that is drawing the links between broader social justice struggles and a firm rejection of the logic of austerity economics.

These are inspiring and challenging times, and as the unrest causes the social and political landscape to change, so too has the visual landscape of the city. Montreal is seeing red, the colour of the student movement, with giant banners hung from balconies, red squares popping up on all surfaces, telephone poles wrapped in red cozies, and countless other creative interventions visualising solidarity with the students.

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