17 January 2021 12pm
Impossible Time
There are very limited words to discuss time in the English language. Time according to queer disability scholars runs differently depending on your positionality of privilege, and thus movement through the world. To question our relationship with time is to question our relationship with colonial understandings of a person’s milestones, their life path, their goals, and how we divide, distribute, and protect our time. Time poverty is a concept feminist scholars attribute to the unequal division of labour in the public and private sphere of family life. Time currency is well known through the phrase: “Time is Money”, used to legitimize the false meritocratic nature that is the unequal division of time, leisure, and the accrual of capital—one that has been particularly exacerbated under pandemic conditions.
Impossible Time is a participatory project to develop new lexicons for the colours, shapes, and nuances of time. Together we will facilitate this worldbuilding bi-directionally through letter writing, merging disparate timelines and finding overlaps, wormholes, and alternate universes in the process. Through our letters, we will paint a landscape of time in narrative, stretching apart new words for the new world we’ve been submerged in this past year as we enter the next. Writing together while apart, our explorations in Impossible Time will be guided by prompts that colour time in new and bold ways. Our writings may warp, flatten and loop time to better suit our needs and not the agenda of capital. We may seek collaborative time-travel and new clocks; or we may rid ourselves of clocks altogether. In Impossible Time we may look to our ancestral knowing to begin structuring time anew. [—Cassandra Myers]
This program will be facilitated through the postal service between January – March 2021. Participants in Canada will be provided with requisite materials and postage to partake in the project. Participants outside of Canada should contact the gallery to discuss arrangements.
To register, RSVP to Aamna Muzaffar at aamna@mercerunion.org by 10 January 2021
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Cassandra Myers (they/she) is a queer, non-binary, crippled, mad, South Asian-Italian poet, performer, educator, and social worker from Tkoronto, Ontario. A Masters of Social Work Candidate at York University, Cassandra is also a crisis intervention counsellor and youth worker, specializing in care for sexual violence survivors and the BIPOC LGBTQ2SIA+ community. Cassandra has performed poetry across the United States and Canada, and their debut collection, Smash the Headlights, is forthcoming from Write Bloody North Publishing in 2021. A Pink Door Fellow, her work can be found in ARC Poetry Magazine, The Shortline Review, UncommonYOU, and elsewhere.
SESSION is a project modelling itself after an incubator that invites cultural practitioners to engage with questions that emerge out of a given exhibition. /relay is a durational and distributed reframing of the project that untethers the incubator from a singular moment or site of gathering.
SESSION is made possible with Leading Support from TD Bank Group.
