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This session is held in the Art Gallery of Ontario, Seminar Room 3 West (Room 009)

Led by Leah Snyder, Cheryl L’Hirondelle, Camille Turner

Leah Snyder is a digital designer whose work centers on art as social practice and arts advocacy with a focus on new media activism, national narratives in a digital era, and developing communities in cyberspace. Cheryl L’Hirondelle and Camille Turner are artists/curators who activate spaces, both inside and outside the gallery, challenging historical erasure. They share an interest in the “mapping of public memory” and recently collaborated for Landmarks 2017 with their performance Freedom Tours that centered Indigenous and Afrodiasporic world-views at Ontario’s Thousand Islands National Park and Rouge National Urban Park.

In conversation with Cheryl L’Hirondelle and Camille Turner, Leah Snyder will facilitate a dialogue around the language we have come to use. Post Idle No More and the Truth and Reconciliation Commission words like decolonization, (re)conciliation, and sovereignty as well as indigenization, apology and treaty have become more familiar. Are they passive rhetoric solidifying the status quo, or can they be culturally transformative? Together we will explore what these words look like when we translate them into an active force for change. When we walk the talk, what can the future imaginary look like?