Contested Territories and Dislocations

Video screening of the works of Jenny Cartwright and Solidarity Colombia

Conversation with Annie Jubinville, Mathilde Capone (Solidarity Colombia) and Catherine Lussier (Comité d’Action de Parc-Extension)

Moderator: Sophie Le-Phat Ho

Thursday, February 22, 2018, 6-8 pm

Free entrance!

Contested Territories and Dislocations gathers two projects exploring different issues related to gentrification, land use, and oppression dynamics through the style of documentary. JennyCartwright’s Trajectories highlights her ongoing engagement with different communities in Parc-Extension. Solidarity Colombia presents a series of short films about the regions of Quebec involved in resource extraction.

The video projection will be followed by a discussion with Catherine Lussier (Parc Extension Action Committee), Annie Jubinville and Mathilde Capone (Solidarity Concordia).

Jenny Cartwright’s Trajectoires is a hybrid video installation directly inspired by documentary filmmaking. It explores the different paths taken by seven residents of Parc-Extension, one of the country’s most diverse neighborhood. The work scrutinizes the neighborhood’s own trajectory as gentrification looms ahead. How will Université de Montreal’s new science campus affect the lives of local residents? Matching the size of 38 football fields, and set to attract 10 000 every week, the new site will significantly impact the urban enclave of Parc-Extension and it’s mostly immigrant population.

Solidarity Colombia’s Des-terres-minées is a series of short films carrying the voice of women, as well as other subjects who experience gender-based oppression and aim to express their experiences of territory exploitation. Conducted in several regions of Quebec central in resource extraction, these shorts movies present intimate testimonies that are true springboards for collective reflections.

Grounded in anti-colonial feminist analysis, Solidarity Colombia explores the interconnections and influences between gender(s) and territory(ies). Artistic creation presents itself as a potentiality for social organizing and autonomy development, in the face of the disintegration of the common.

The core of these shorts films are experiences of dislocation as a non-choice. Current multiplication of extractive projects implicates a variety of policies that cause the breakdown of ties to the territories of multiple communities. Processes of colonization (past and present) have led to the forced displacement of indigenous communities, in conjunction with cultural genocide and territorial disintegration. Ecological disasters, caused by human excess and exploitative outrageousness, bring about multiple movements of bodies to locations where they are not always welcome. How can we transform these processes and regain power over our lives, our environments, and the territories in which they are embedded?