What brings you here? Print versions of this broadsheet include a postcard with a link to our first readership survey. With this milestone fifteenth issue, CONFIDING, we’re hoping to learn more from SDUK readers—what resonates with you, what draws you in to each issue (or doesn’t), and what might inform our future issues. Appropriately, this issue addresses trust and collaboration: the tools, methods, and strategies collaborators use to build mutual confidence while working together. With an international slate of largely co-authored contributions, this issue models forms of experimental and collaborative authorship through letters, exercises, interviews, oral histories, and more.
Our survey asks: Where are you located? Contributors to this issue pose this question—in its most expansive sense—to consider how individuals’ positionality affects their working methods. The Post-Film Collective, whose members include “refugees, asylum seekers, sans-papiers, documented citizens,” shares a letter exchange that sheds light on how they work together across difference. For quori theodor, similar considerations are taken up at the dinner table, where new shared experiences are occasioned by dining together.
If confiding hinges on trust and vulnerability, readers with an interest in the performing arts might wonder: How to build trust and consent in performance? For Jess Watkin, disability dramaturgy serves as a welcome intervention to rethink the relationships between performer, stage, and audience in the theatre. Describing his work with Partnering Lab, Ilya Vidrin theorizes the “thresholds of resistance” that mediate physical contact by dancers and movement artists—and how these negotiations shape interactions beyond the stage.
Questions of trust extend to public spaces as well, particularly those marked by racism and violence. Through process and practice, contributors to this issue ask, how can we feel more at home? Chronicling his practice with Ecatepec Museum of Contemporary Art, Tonatiuh López shares the group’s artistic responses to femicide in Mexico through public art and placemaking. In conversation with Tasha Beeds, Quill Christie-Peters discusses the artist residency program she runs in Thunder Bay, which offers Indigenous youth spaces to meet, relate, and make art.
In their essay, Indonesian art collective Performance RAR reconnects to deeper senses of home and place by drawing on local folklore. Their practice begs the question: What role can traditional knowledges serve in political struggles? For Performance RAR, myth serves as a “promise of the present” to mobilize for environmental protection. In Michelle Sylliboy’s poetry, Mi’kmaq language revitalization is a pillar of Indigenous resurgence, and land and water protection in her territories.
Trust, confidence, and collaboration are often thought of as cognitive practices, but throughout this issue, contributors highlight the role of embodiment. What can our senses attune us to? Elspeth Brown and Alisha Stranges describe methods for engaging all the senses in creating an oral history of a key moment in Canadian LGBTQ2S+ history, the Pussy Palace raid. In Heather Kai Smith’s drawings, the mind-body connection is visualized across diverse group dynamics. For London-based collective mother tongues, embodiment, craft, and movement practices all inform their ways of doing linguistic translation.
In this issue, the Local Useful Knowledge section returns in its original format, albeit in an expanded format to bridge connections to contributors’ localities. As usual, the web version of this publication includes additional content from this issue, including the original Spanish version of Tonatiuh López’s essay, videos from Performance RAR and the Pussy Palace Oral History Project, and a direct link to complete our readership survey.