This panel gathers artists working at the intersection of spiritual, feminist, and caregiving practices to explore the witch’s generative re-appraisal of the more-than-human. Approaching things like plants and textiles as alive with information and intent for themselves, the witch goes beyond patriarchal colonial capitalist assertions about mere matter, in the process finding room to re-imagine the human experience as well.
Hannah Zbitnew is an interdisciplinary artist and writer working in textile and ceramics. Working from a broader practice of care, she analyzes the mutually shaping relationship between folktale witches and their clothes, using a theory of enclothed cognition.
Anastasia Ferguson is an independent mixed media artist, whose practice involves hand-processing film using both photochemistry and eco-solutions. Starting with the essentializing equation patriarchal society has made between women and nature, she explores her own film development as the location for playing with and against these gendered assumptions.
Kamee Abrahamian is a queer-feminist caregiver, practitioner of magic and folk art, and interdisciplinary creative-writer-curator-performer-producer-facilitator. They will present a piece of fiction/nonfiction writing wherein a botanist becomes obsessed with plant frequencies that carry the potential for a reclamation of intergenerational human and plant knowledges silenced by the Armenian genocide.
Speakers:
Hannah Zbitnew "A Stain, A Tear, Self-Declared Magic"
Hannah Zbitnew (b.1996, Toronto) is a weaver and writer based in Toronto. She works primarily in textile and ceramics, with a sideline in ancient ceramic illustration. Her work reflects on the close encounters that are necessary to shape our relationships with objects, the transformative power of cloth, and contemporary craft practices.
Anastasia Ferguson, "Archetypal Visions: Female Filmmakers as Witches and the Alchemy of Plants and Film"
Anastasia Ferguson is a Tiohtià:ke/Montréal based independent mixed media artist. She holds a BFA in Film Production and MFA in Studio Arts from Concordia University. Her practice involves hand-processing film using both photochemistry and eco-solutions. Using plants to develop film and create phytograms, her practice capitalises on the colourful alchemy of caffeic acid and film emulsion.
Kamee Abrahamian, "Ensouled"
Kamee is a supreme hyphenate who arrives in the world today as an interdisciplinary writer-artist-producer-performer-organizer and a non-binary, queer-feminist caregiver. They were born in Scarborough into an Armenian family displaced from the SWANA region. Kamee’s work is steeped with relational practices oriented towards ancestral reclamation, visionary fiction, and diasporic futurism.
