COHDS Storytelling Festival Exhibition

Join us from October 6th to October 9th to experience four different art installations exploring the festival's theme of storytelling and memory: The Soul of the Soul روح†الروح†(Ruh Al-Ruh): Stitching as Resistance and Remembering Lives, Living Rooms: une pièce partagée, Stories of Migration, and Fatness as a Method (for Movement and Subversion).

How can you participate? Join us in person.

Have questions or if we can make this event more accessible for you: Contact us at info.4@concordia.ca

The Soul of the Soul روح†الروح†(Ruh Al-Ruh): Stitching as Resistance and Remembering Lives

with Nasim Mogharab and Shahrzad Arshadi

The Soul of the Soul (Ruh Al-Ruh) is our quilt making and storytelling collective, started in November 2023 in Tiohtià:ke/Montreal—one month after Israel’s attack on Gaza—by women feminists and social justice activists, all originally from the SWANA region. From the very beginning, many individuals joined the collective, and our work quickly expanded beyond Montreal, reaching Trois-Rivières.

In the past two years, Ruh Al-Ruh not only witnessed and testified into genocide in Gaza, but war and massacre in Sudan, Iran, Lebanon, Rojava and many other regions. In contrast to all the darkness imposed on people from different parts of the world, our time together was reflective, kind, permissive and full of love and respect. The soul of the soul provided an intimate space to listen and to be heard as we collectively weaved stories, memories, hopes and dreams. We travelled with our threads, needles, and fabrics to engage young and old in various communities, and collectively created more than 200 stitching pieces in red, black, green and white, each carrying a unique personal and political story, all crafted with love and care. We are at the installation phase of this large project, creating five-meter pieces of all individual pieces, that will be hanged from the ceiling from different parts of the room and coming down to the ground like a tree and connecting to each other through roots that can symbolize solidarity and unity between people and struggles in all places.

Last March, we were part of a panel called “Creative Strategies of Joy in Oral History,” where we presented our project as part of the 2026 Emerging Scholars Symposium at COHDS. This time, however, we wish to take part in COHDS’s 20th birthday celebration by presenting the actual artwork as an installation for the Storytelling Festival. In some Arabic dictionaries, the word “Ruh” (Soul) is sometimes translated as the “breath of life.” As we came together to create, to remember, to tell, and keep alive hope, love, connection and patience. With each stitch, we tried to bear witness and breathe life into an untold and unfinished story. The final presentation of all the individual pieces is our collective message of hope, unselective solidarity, love and perseverance.

Living Rooms: une pièce partagée

with Naila Kuhlmann (project lead), Naomi Silver-Vézina (filmmaker), Anna Vigeland (RA), and the Piece of Mind Collective

How do the unique standpoints through which we inhabit our bodies and move through life cause barriers to connecting and relating with one another? Which of our bodily, sensory, and emotional experiences elude words—and how might live arts and technologies offer entry points into those unspoken worlds?

Living Rooms: une pièce partagée was a participatory research-creation project that brought together circus and new media artists, people living with Parkinson’s disease, caregivers, and neuroscientists to explore how interactive technologies and immersive performance might help us connect and relate across mindbody differences. Together, we co-created the fabric of an immersive theatre experience in which audiences are invited into a series of multi-sensory and multidisciplinary live arts vignettes that staged stories from circus, Parkinson's, and their intersections. Anchored in the metaphor of the body as a house, each "room" of the promenade-type performance brought to life angles of our research process through performing bodies, physical objects, audio clips, written participant citations, and prototypes of technological interfaces (e.g. biosensors, motion capture, wearable tech and virtual reality), prompting reflection on the ways we inhabit the body and how we might better connect across differences.

A pivotal point within this one-and-a-half-year project was the exploration enabled through two week-long residencies in the Acts of Listening Lab in Spring 2025. Facilitating the listening, sharing, and creating from often difficult stories was at the heart of this participatory research process, and was shaped both by the affordances of the physical space and the rich context of collective meaning-making at COHDS.

The project was made possible thanks to support from COHDS; Coeur des sciences UQAM; Mitacs; Inter-génie; HUPR: Research Centre for Human Potential; Healthy Brains, Healthy Lives (HBHL); and the Centre for Research on Brain, Language and Music (CRBLM). – Naila Kuhlmann (Lead Researcher / Centre HUPR), Anna Vigeland (Research Assistant / COHDS Student Affiliate), Piece of Mind Collective Video by Naomi Silver-Vézina

Stories of Migration 

with Eliana Hussain

Melita moved first, escaping her grief at the death of her father. Domingo followed soon after, escaping the aftermath of the April Revolution. They came together in Civil Rights era New York City. – This project recounts the narrative of Melita and Domingo’s immigration to the United States in a 15 to 20-minute podcast accompanied by photographs. As a work of research-creation, this piece examines their lives in the Dominican Republic and the events that led each of them to uproot their lives. It is supported by oral history interviews and archival audio that anchor the story in time and place.

This podcast reflects the conference’s call to look back on twenty years of oral history and creative practice while exploring new avenues for the field.  By combining a podcast structure with archival photographs, my project models the kind of innovative cross-media presentation format that makes oral history exciting. Testimony from people close to Melita and Domingo honors the field’s foundational commitment to the first-person voice as historical evidence, while photographs help provide an intimate connection with the audience. 

Throughout the podcast, story structure, sound design, and pacing will be used to shape the narrative into an engaging listening experience. Because the story is told through the memories of others, this project also grapples with questions about representation and interpretation that sit at the core of oral history: How do you honor a story when the subjects are no longer able to speak for themselves?

By reconstructing a migration story after the subjects have passed, this project explores an approach that might prove suitable for researchers and others to draw on when working with family histories. It explores the potential of the podcast form as a scholarly medium, while contributing to a growing body of research-creation that treats genealogy and memory as legitimate sites of historical inquiry and opens space for future questions about how personal histories connect to larger political ruptures, and how communities pass down memory across generations and borders.

Fatness as a Method (for Movement and Subversion)

with Magdalena Hutter

Since 2023 I’ve been recording conversations and filming movement sequences with fat performers to think about fatness as a method – both for making movement art with and about fat bodies and for how I as a fat queer documentary filmmaker portray that art in moving images. Fatness, as an Othered, queer embodiment set up in opposition to a supposed ‘norm’, can serve to highlight the constructedness of naturalized structures of normativity, particularly regarding the perception, valuation, and treatment of bodies. Using fatness as a lens can bring into focus oppressive social structures and dynamics and help to zoom in on the ways in which these structures are embedded in and – crucially – affirmed by choices regarding representation and aesthetics in cultural objects. In this way, considering fatness while looking at artworks and the processes through which they are created can provide opportunities for the development of frameworks for art-making that are not only not in the (conscious or unconscious) service of oppressive structures, but that are actively invested in dismantling them.

Nasim Mogharab is a feminist activist and expert in women’s rights awareness-raising, education, and advocacy in restrictive environments. She holds master’s degrees in History from the University of Ottawa and in Educational Technology from Concordia University. Her activism focuses on resisting state-sanctioned violence against women and girls, including those detained during the Woman, Life, Freedom uprising in Iran, as well as the execution of women and sexual torture. She leads and collaborates on grassroots campaigns, human rights research, art and oral history projects, and trainings to strengthen resistance against state violence, patriarchy, and suppression.

Shahrzad Arshadi is a Montréal-based award-winning artist and feminist. In her artistic career Shahrzad has ventured into different fields of photography, documentary film, playwright and performance, enabling her focus on issues of memory and culture. Her latest work is Children of Fire, a book she co-wrote and recently published by Book*Hug Press in Toronto. Shahrzad is a core member of the Center for Oral History & Digital Storytelling (COHDS).

Naila Kuhlmann completed her PhD in Neuroscience at the University of British Columbia (2020) and her post-doctoral fellowship within the Biosignal Interaction and Personhood Technology (BIAPT) lab at McGill University (2025). Having studied the etiology of Parkinson’s disease in a wet lab throughout her PhD, Naila turned towards arts-based knowledge translation in her postdoc to bridge the gap between neuroscientific research and lived experience of neurodegenerative conditions. This led to the co-creation of two interdisciplinary performances, Piece of Mind: Parkinson’s and Piece of Mind: Dementia, and the Living Rooms: une pièce partagée public laboratory. She is now principal investigator on a social innovation project at HUPR: Research Centre on Human Potential (National Circus School, Montreal), in which she continues to explore how performing arts and technologies may serve to connect, communicate and co-create across body/mind differences when words fall short.

Naomi Silver-Vézina’s unyielding thirst for creation manifests itself in her passion for film, music and visual arts. Based in Montreal, she graduated from Mel Hoppenheim’s Film Production program in 2016. Since then, she has made a name for herself as director, cinematographer and editor of fiction films, documentaries and music videos. Her most recent feature as cinematographer, The Rebrand (2025), has earned the Best Feature Film title in five festivals, in addition to the Jury Award at the Salem Horror Fest. As a director, her work has received awards from the International Music Video Awards, the Nottingham Music Video Awards, the Experimental Dance & Music Film Festival and the Art Film Spirit Awards. She always finds ways to circle back to her love of animation, including with a stop-motion music video for her own song “In the Morning”, which received a Gold Medal at the UK Animation & Music Video Festival.

Anna Vigeland is a doctoral student in Concordia’s INDI program, where her FRQSC-supported research is driven by overlapping interests in oral history, circus histories, memory, performance-making, and translation. She began her PhD after close to 20 years in the circus field, graduating from Montréal’s National Circus School in 2007 and working by turns as performer, choreographer, dramaturgy collaborator, cultural worker, and translator for circuses. Drawn to experimentation and crossovers between genres, she’s also co-developed and presented devised, interdisciplinary performance collaborations in Bulgaria, Serbia, Norway, Germany, France, Italy, Greece, the US, and Québec. Her research and projects have been supported by TCG Global Connections, the International Theatre Institute-Germany, l’Observatoire des médiations culturelles, a Bread Loaf Katharine Bakeless Nason scholarship, a Carolyn and Brian Neysmith Graduate Scholarship, le Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec, and the Canada Council for the Arts, among others. 

Eliana (Lia) Hussain is a first-year PhD student in History at Concordia University and a former chef. Her research traces one family’s story of migration and examines their strategies for adapting to a new culture while preserving their heritage. She is particularly interested in the intersection of food, memory, and identity.

Magdalena Hutter is a documentary filmmaker, cinematographer, and photographer. A graduate of the University of Television and Film Munich, she has been making films since 2007 and teaching filmmaking since 2012. In her documentary film work, her focus is on projects about art and artists, as well as on themes of belonging. In her teaching she has worked with groups of diverse ages, ranging from teenagers to older adults, with an emphasis on documentary filmmaking as empowerment for queer and refugee youth. Magdalena is a PhD candidate in the Interdisciplinary Humanities at Concordia University in Tioh'tà:ke/Montreal, where she uses her film practice to do research-creation about fatness as method in dance and movement art and to develop frameworks for a fat screendance (supervised by MJ Thompson, PhD, Nadia Myre, and Stefanie Snider, PhD). She is an affiliate of the Centre for Oral History and Digital Storytelling, a member of the Textiles & Materiality research cluster at the Milieux Institute, and a member of the Dance Studies Association. The first scholarly collection of essays about fat performance, which Magdalena co-edited, is forthcoming in August 2026.