“Complaints and firecrackers: feminist labour within and against the AWC’s Open Hearing,” in Open Hearing, edited by EMILIA-AMALIA (Vancouver: Filip Folios).
This chapter is an anecdotal and citational rethinking of the historiography of the Art Workers’ Coalition’s Open Hearing, held on April 10, 1969, at the School of Visual Arts, New York. Reading the contributions of Lee Lozano and Lucy R. Lippard to the Hearing alongside each other, this short, troublemaking chapter refocuses feminist gestures and politics that developed around and/or were catalyzed by the AWC’s event.
Organizing against the genocide in Gaza, artistic and political censorship, politically-motivated funding cuts, and longstanding labour issues lay bare the pre-existing problems at the heart of our cultural structures, with the necessity to continue demanding and dreaming better paths forward. EMILIA-AMALIA held its own “Open Hearing: Dreaming in Dark Times,” bringing together more than 30 speakers and collectives who shared statements about the future of the Toronto arts ecosystem and connected urgencies in our cultural work, nationwide and beyond.
On March 2, 2025, couple hundred community members crowded inside an independent venue in Toronto’s west-end over the course of four hours, chilly from the winter air. The kids’ table brought irreverent energy, along with the day’s host, artist Kiera Boult. We shared food and wine and spun in our wheels: how do we persist?
EMILIA-AMALIA is an intersectional, intergenerational, feminist experimental working group, initiated in Toronto in 2016 by Cecilia Berkovic, Yaniya Lee, Annie MacDonell, Gabrielle Moser, Zinnia Naqvi, Leila Timmins, Joy Xiang and Shellie Zhang.
“Béatrice Cloutier-Trépanier on Cindy Hill,” (Toronto: The Centre for Experiential Research, 2025)
Both an experiment and its diary, this text was published on the occasion of Cindy Hill’s solo exhibition titled “Mirror-Reverse” on view at Pumice Raft, Toronto, from May 24-June 29, 2025.
Excerpt:
“May 7 , 2025
I look at Cindy’s diaries again. Were they pale pink? Leather? Covered with stickers? I intended yesterday to be my last log, but I worried that it might not be as light-hearted as I thought it would, or actually not at all. I don’t know where I got the idea that it should be. I struggle to find in myself the authority to write, to not be a good girl, to not shut up.
Rereading Sara Ahmed’s The Feminist Killjoy Handbook (2023)—to light a tiny fire.
Other killjoys I turn to always—Lozano, Lonzi and recently—Wark. I long to be a bad girl with them, to obsess and be unreasonable, to get in the way out of love.
Asking for a friend: “What can I do about my emotions which are excessive?” (The question is from Lee, on the last written page of her last Private Book. I’m happy she gets the last word.).”