Extraordinary General Meeting

Autopoietic

A solo improvisation for drumset and percussion from drummer and researcher Kevin Romain, employing his working biopsychological theory of Sensorimotor-Affective Polytemporality. This performance will be ~20-30 minutes in duration.

Biography

Kevin Romain is a drummer, improviser, composer, educator, bandleader, curator, and researcher based in East Vancouver. He is currently pursuing a Master of Fine Arts degree at Simon Fraser University. Since the early 2000s he has performed regularly across North America as well in Europe, West Africa, China and Japan. He has studied the drums with luminaries such as Tomas Fujiwara, Marcus Gilmore, Jeff Ballard, Mark Guiliana, Dan Weiss, Bernie Arai and Dylan van der Schyff.

Climate denialist as ethical subject? Mari Ruti’s Emancipatory Politics of Grief

How are we to confront the clusterfuck of the climate crisis, the rise in neo-populism/late fascism, settler colonial denialism, and contingent traumas of the singular subject? The late Mari Ruti argued that sublimation qua creativity can be a progressive way of encountering trauma and grief. This was a hard-won lesson she wrenched from her own terminal cancer diagnosis. Ruti died in 2023 and I extend the logic of her argument via 2023’s summer of forest fires: Canada’s worst ever, with ancillary smoke closing down Broadway and reaching Europe. Is grief fungible, I ask, does it stack or does some lack, as Ruti mused, actually help us deal with trauma? Ruti draws on Lacan’s theory of sublimation – “raising the object to the dignity of das Ding” as he memorably put it – and I follow this argument with stops in climate fiction, the art of Adán Vallecillo and Tita Salina (but also Cézanne and Hitchcock). Ruti points out a fundamental contradiction in Lacan’s theory of desire: on the one hand, we can only be guilty of giving ground relative to our desire – this is the fundamental Lacanian ethics. And yet, he also tells us that desire is “extimate,” is the desire of the other: we seek to desire the Other, to be desired by the Other, and to have the same desire as the Other. Does this mean that the climate denier is a Lacanian ethical subject, insofar as they do not give up their desire? Perhaps, but that is because, I argue, there is no grief without an emancipatory grief, and all the more so under conditions of the climate crisis, where the choice of which social condition to disavow is made for us. The climate denier must perforce disavow the extimacy of their desire, its social origins.

Biography

Clint Burnham teaches in the department of English at Simon Fraser University. He is a poet and a critic: recent books include Lacan and the Environment (Palgrave, 2021, co-ed. with Paul Kingsbury), The Goldberg Variations (poetry, New Star, 2024), and Mari Ruti and Climate Change: From Grief to Creativity (Routledge, 2026). His Dub Version Series: New and Selected Poems is forthcoming from the87press, UK.

Biography

Hyung-Min Yoon is a visual artist based in Vancouver, Canada, and Seoul, Korea. Her practice spans diverse media and forms, with a focus on language, translation, and the elemental origins of meaning. Yoon earned her BFA from the Korean National University of the Arts in Seoul and her MFA from Chelsea College of Arts in London. Yoon has held solo and two-person exhibitions in Vancouver (Art Gallery at Evergreen, 2020; CSA Space, 2019; Gam Gallery, 2018; grunt gallery, 2014) and in Seoul (Trunk Gallery, 2016). She is an active member of artist-run group Public Question, Seoul-based artist collective exploring innovative approaches to research-driven public art.

The Game of Worry

The Game of Worry is a playful self-guided tour of Extraordinary General Meeting, allowing visitors to encounter the bureaucratic poetics of the Disquiet Foundation through a gallery-wide game of chance and concern. 

Biography

Edie Fake is a painter and visual artist whose work examines issues of trans identity and “queer space” through the lens of architecture and ornamentation. Fake’s work has been exhibited nationally and internationally, including solo shows at the Everson Museum of Art in Syracuse, NY, and Marlborough Contemporary, NYC, and in group shows at the Museum of Arts and Design, NYC, and the Institute for Contemporary Art at VCU in Richmond, VA. His collection of comics, Gaylord Phoenix, won the 2011 Ignatz Award for Outstanding Graphic Novel and he was among the first recipients of Printed Matter’s Awards for Artists. Fake’s large-scale projects include murals for The Drawing Center, NYC, and MCA Chicago. He received a BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design in 2002 and he is currently represented by Western Exhibitions in Chicago and Broadway Gallery in New York.

On the Dimensions of the Volatile

This talk thinks with the idea of volatility as both a material and a theoretical provocation. Petrochemical volatile organic compounds are embroiled in increasingly socially, affectively, economically and politically volatile systems of late fossil capitalist techno-autocratic power. Just as its persistent disorientation catalyzes an ontological reckoning, it seems necessary to think past volatility’s negative valences. Volatility is also a propensity and capacity for social movement, wherein sudden and unpredictable movements can be a strategy for reclaiming and reconstituting other sociopolitical futures. Drawing from her book project underway, "Volatile Housing," Dr. Jaworski will share insights from her autoethnographic experiences and consider how art can enact 'volatility against volatility.' Perhaps anticolonial, antiracist, antiableist creative volatility might begin to build collective forms of relation that refuse the restablization of the existing structures of exposure, and sanitization.

Biography

Sophia Jaworski is a Faculty member in the Department of Anthropology at Capilano University. Her research brings together feminist science and technology studies, environmental anthropology, and critical disability studies to examine how air, chemicals, and infrastructures shape collective life. Since 2017 she has used experimental ethnographic methods, film, new media, and archival research in Toronto and Vancouver to study volatile organic compounds (VOCs), petrochemical pollutants, and the technoscientific politics of air. Her current book project, Volatile Housing (under contract with Between the Lines Press), theorizes "volatility" alongside questions of housing justice, environmental health, and tenant organizing in Canadian cities. Her work has been published in Catalyst: Feminism Theory Technoscience, Engaging Science Technology and Society, and films screened as part of Crosscuts Festival, and PleasureDome's New Toronto Works.