Enduring Futures: On Ecology and Justice

Kama La Mackerel is a Mauritian-Canadian multilingual writer, visual artist, performer, educator and literary translator who believes in love, justice and self and collective empowerment. Their practice blurs the lines between traditional artistic disciplines to create hybrid aesthetic spaces from which decolonial and queer/trans vocabularies can emerge. At once narratological and theoretical, personal and political, their interdisciplinary method, developed over the past decade, is grounded ritual, meditation, ancestral healing modalities, auto-ethnography, oral history, archival research and community-arts facilitation. Kama is a firm believer that artistic and cultural practices have the power to build resilience, to heal and to act as forms of resistance to the status quo. With wholehearted engagement in ocean narratives, island sovereignty, transgender poetics and queer/trans spiritual histories, their body of work challenges colonial notions of time and space as these relate to history, power, language, subject formation and the body. Kama has lectured, performed and exhibited their work internationally in museums, galleries, theatres and universities. In 2021, they were awarded the Canada Council for the Arts Joseph S. Stauffer Prize for emerging and mid-career artists in Visual Arts. Their award-winning book ZOM-FAM (Metonymy Press) was named a CBC Best Poetry Book and a Globe and Mail Best Debut. Kama lives and loves in Tio’tia:ke, also known as Montréal.

lamackerel.net // @KamaLaMackerel

She has gained practical experience and enhanced her skills through working with community organizations that address social issues at both the macro and micro levels. Recently, she has been developing her own projects, notably including L’environnement, c’est intersectionnel, an initiative she founded that combines arts, engagement, and popular education.

An intersectional feminist, speaker, and artist, Lourdenie continues to deepen her understanding of subjects that relate, either directly or indirectly, to social justice, sociology, and anti-oppression.  

A native of Rivière-du-Loup and candidate in the last federal election, she is passionate about the environment, mental health, and issues relating to the fight against racism.

Marie-Clarisse also loves writing and improv. In her free time, you might find this young woman on a ski hill in the Estrie region or browsing in a bookstore. Her most cherished dream is to climb Mount Kilimanjaro, her favourite colour is purple, and she’d love to play a queen on Bridgerton!

After that, she’d like to become a criminal lawyer and politician. Or a journalist. Or a writer. Or Ricardo. In other words, many things at once.

She loves cultivating food, communities, and food sovereignty. Along with her work in urban agriculture, she focuses on creating spaces for connection, healing, and growth as well as moving resources toward groups and movements led by racialized people.

Ulivia first learned to master traditional craft techniques during beadwork workshops held at the Aboriginal Youth Forum in 2017. She continued her apprenticeship in a self-taught manner, making earrings and other miniature three-dimensional objects. Her beaded Amauti is exhibited at La Guilde for the fifth edition of the Contemporary Native Art Biennial (BACA).

Ulivia also collaborated with Wapikoni Mobile, promoting the mandate, values, objectives, and outreach of this organization’s activities during awareness workshops held in high schools, festivals, and cultural events. She directed the short film Wearing my culture (2018), and Not just a Missing or Murdered Aboriginal Woman (2019). Ulivia also played in the TV-Series Épidémie and is a cast member of the award-winning play Aalaapi. She was previously program officer with Aumaaggiivik, the Nunavik Arts Secretariat at Avataq Cultural Institute, working to support and promote Nunavik artists. She currently works with Aaqsiiq, Nunavik’s first theatre company.