Moderator / Animé par: Barry Freeman
Location: Silver Room, Atlas Hotel

• Gabriel Friday, “Ar(c)tivism: Examining the ‘R’ as a Catalyst for Justice in Postcolonial Contexts”

Artivism, the fusion of art and activism, has emerged as a potent force for justice in postcolonial societies, challenging systemic oppression and fostering transformative change. This study examines the “R” in Artivism—Resistance, Resilience, Revolution, and Reclamation—as a framework for understanding how creative expressions drive social and cultural transformation. Drawing on postcolonial theory alongside decolonial methodologies, digital anthropology and ethnography, the research explores artivism’s role in resisting systemic injustices, sustaining marginalized communities, igniting revolutionary movements, and reclaiming cultural identities eroded by colonial legacies.
Through case studies of movements such as Nigeria’s #EndSARS, the United States’ Black Lives Matter, Bangladesh’s mass uprisings and Canada’s Indigenous resistance, the study highlights artivism’s capacity to amplify local struggles while fostering transnational solidarities. Data collection includes analysis of artistic outputs, interviews with artists and activists, and digital ethnography focused on hashtag activism. By critically engaging with protest art, murals, songs, viral videos and performances, the study highlights the dynamic interplay between art, politics, and activism in postcolonial contexts.
This research contributes a robust theoretical and practical understanding of artivism, offering insights into its transformative potential as a tool for systemic critique, identity reclamation, and societal transformation. The findings provide actionable frameworks for artists, activists, and policymakers seeking to leverage artivism for justice, equity, and decolonial futures.

• Mariah (Mo) Horner, “Rehearsing TransformativeJustice: Richard Lam’s The Candlemaker’s Game”

As a chapter in my recently completed PhD dissertation Abolition Dramaturgies, this paper positions the process-driven space of “rehearsal,” as a kind of transformative justice arena that rehearses potentials for anti-carceral punishment as a response to harm. In this paper, I consider the ways that rehearsals have the capacity to both rewind the past and imagine new futures, theorizing rehearsal practice as a space to both analyze the past and imagine alternative futures. Influenced by Leanne Betasamosake Simpson and Robyn Maynard’s book Rehearsals for Living, this paper considers the very real way that abolition futures are rehearsed into existence in everyday moments of resilience and survival. Thinking alongside Maynard, a radical Black feminist scholar, and Simpson, an Anishinaabe Kwe scholar, I consider the ways that the theatrical concept of rehearsal is central to abolitionist practice. To counter a discussion of the bourgeois theatre’s intended function of rehearsals (perfection, symmetry) I consider Augusto Boal’s interpretation of theatre as a potential manifestation of the future, or “a rehearsal for a revolution,” and consider the ways that theatre can be understood as a rehearsal hall for relation, conflict management, and responding to harm. As a case study, I examine Richard Lam’s The Candlemaker’s Game, a participatory table-top role-playing game about personal conflict, as an example of the ways that rehearsal can look like transformative justice. 

• Hannah Link, “‘The Personal is Political’: Büchner’s Danton’s Death and Female Subjectivity”

Georg Büchner’s Danton’s Tod (1835) takes place in the period of social upheaval known as the Terror, the most extreme phase of the French Revolution. The play dramatises an erosion of the borders between the public and private, depicting intimate discussions about the nature of art and existence juxtaposed with speeches at the Jacobin Club and the National Convention. It contains several long monologues and soliloquies by female characters in which their personal desires and physical sensations are described. A prostitute named Marion delivers a famous monologue to Danton in which she recounts her sexual awakening. As a girl, she says, “Things happened all around me from which I was separate” (act 1, scene V, translation by John Reddick), describing a feeling of alienation from the external world. Then, after her first lover has drowned himself, she says, “That evening I sat by the window letting the waves of evening light engulf me: I am all sensation, I connect with the world around me through feeling alone.” She has become so much a part of the outside world that she is “engulf[ed]” in it, and there is no effective distinction between her internal experience and the natural world that surrounds her. Through readings of this and monologues by other female characters (Lucille’s soliloquy in act 2, scene III, and Julie’s soliloquy in act 4, scene VI), my paper shows that Büchner conceived of revolution as an externalising process, a necessary breaking down of the divide between subjective and collective experiences.

Biographies

Gabriel Friday

Friday Gabriel is an experienced media practitioner with a strong academic foundation in Mass Communication and is currently undertaking a Master’s in Media and Artistic Research at the University of Regina. He has over eight years of experience working across various domains of the media landscape, including television, print journalism, radio, and public relations, advertising and film making. 

Mariah Horner

Dr Mariah (Mo) Horner is theatre artist, musician, abolitionist, and Adjunct Assistant Professor in the DAN School of Drama and Music at Queen’s University. Along with Dr. Jenn Stephenson, Mo co-authored Play: Dramaturgies of Participation and co-edited Canadian Theatre Review 197: Participation. She currently co-facilitates a Philosophy and Creativity Discussion Group in Collins Bay Institution.

Hannah Link

Hannah Link is a recent MA graduate of McGill’s Department of English. She researches plays about the French and Haitian Revolutions, and combines methods from performance studies and theatre history to explore why this subject returns again and again to the world’s stages. She lives in Montréal/Tiohtià:ke.