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Finding the Trachea follows a community of students and teachers “harvesting” 19 turkeys on a small, closed-circuit farm. The film’s subjects remain mostly unidentified by face—rather, the rhythm of their voices, hands, and bodies melt into the surrounding landscape as the formation of collective knowledge and memory unfolds against the backdrop of asynchronous voiceover. The film’s structuralist chapters slowly disintegrate, leaving a richly haptic investigation into life and death, work and play.
Seven excerpts of text, mostly taken from letters from the artist’s mother, are paired with ghostly cyanotypes and periodically interrupted by a repetitive act of self-portraiture. The piece’s sense of both rhythm and memory morphs from archival/textual in the first section to embodied/performed in the second.
This photo essay documents Kfar Kila in March 2025, following the Israeli army's partial withdrawal from South Lebanon. The images and accompanying reflection examine the coexistence of devastation and the slow return of the living: demolished homes alongside spring vegetation, poisoned soil beneath green shoots, ruination as an ongoing condition rather than a completed past.
This essay analyzes Fiona Apple’s 2012 single “Every Single Night” considering the musical and visual nocturne, calling attention to how the ethereal and melancholy spirit of the night is evoked through lyricism and musicality. The song speaks to the trials associated with sleeplessness and insomnia, while the music video employs night-time aesthetics to create a highly sensual listening and viewing experience, leading us to a deeper understanding of how music and visuals can work together to conjure the emotions of a restless night.
This paper considers contemporary Cuban visual media of precarity, from the genres of multimedia photography, performance art, and street art, arguing that they challenge discourses of progress, resistance, and decline to consider alternative futures during ongoing Cuban crises. I build upon past visual-materialist literature on Cuban ruination, considering how more recent media reflect new crises, requiring updated approaches to better understand their capacity for challenging prescriptive futures and a romanticized past by re-framing the political weaponization of utopia and dystopia.
This paper explores Chilean artist Cecilia Vicuña’s 1997 collection QUIPOem/The Precarious: The Art and Poetry of Cecilia Vicuña, examining her approach in poetry and visual art, particularly through her reclamation of the ancient Andean practice of quipu weaving, as a means of resistance against colonial erasure. Her work interrogates the possibilities of embodied forms of poetic resistance and explores how this defiance can materialize through her own reflections on the past as it intertwines personal and political narratives, and she thinks about environmental destruction and institutional forms of violence, considering the impact of colonization and dictatorship on cultural memory in Chile.
Building from the foundational work of Katherine McKittrick and Clyde Woods, Black Geographies is a field that critiques dominant ideas of Blackness and Black people as “ungeographic” by starting with an understanding that Blackness is always historically and geographically situated. It is a field that resists descriptive studies that reproduce Black suffering and Black death, and instead emphasizes Black livingness and humanness. Jovan Scott Lewis and Camilla Hawthorne’s new edited anthology, The Black Geographic: Praxis, Resistance, Futurity (2023), introduces students, scholars, and researchers from varying disciplines to both the groundwork and expanding edges of Black geographic study.
Cover Photo "to site, from memory" by Emily Draicchio
emily.dracchio@mail.mcgill.ca
