Body Cartography: Mapping Desires

Body Cartography is a workshop that highlights the intangible heritage of desire. Joints as places of movement possibility are also places of queer sensibility. Participants will leave the workshop with the ability to identify where desire lives in their bodies. Participants will be encouraged to draw maps of desire using movement, imagination, awareness, and transparency.

Jose Richard Aviles is an Angelino seeking ways to find movements that are authentic to all of their identities and skins. They hope to inspire and empower others to become activists in their lives all while unpacking the epistemology of queer bodies and policing of desire.

Accessibility

4TH SPACE, at Concordia University is located on the ground floor level and is wheelchair accessible. There is one wheelchair accessible, gender-neutral bathroom on the third floor. To raise other accessibility requests or questions please contact 4TH SPACE.

We acknowledge that to be “on site” requires that we question our relationship to the past, present, and future of the site on which we gather - Tiohtià:ke on the unceded lands of the Kanien'kehá: ka Nation. Tiohtià:ke is historically known as a gathering place for many First Nations. Today, it is home to a diverse population of Indigenous and other peoples. If this is not your land, how did you get here? How did your ancestors get here? How does race, gender, sexuality, citizenship, ability, and class affect the ways in which we relate to, move through, and create space? While the exhibition and corresponding programming is free of charge, we will be encouraging and collecting donations for The Native Women’s Shelter of Montreal.

While the act of queering space can point out the limitations of the ways in which the world around us is produced and normalized by and for certain bodies and not others, it is pertinent that we continuously reflect and act on the ways in which settler LGBTQI+ life is complicit in upholding ongoing colonial structures. As a pin on Queering The Map in Honolulu, Hawaii attests: “queer liberation must mean decolonization, and decolonization must mean queer liberation.”

"Queering The Map: ON_SITE" has emerged in collaboration with the Beyond Museum Walls Curatorial Residency program, hosted at the Curating and Public Scholarship Lab.

This project is generously supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council's (SSHRC) Connection Grant, the Sustainability Action Fund and the External and Mobilization Fund at Concordia University, as well as the Fonds de recherche du Québec - Société et culture.