As our SSHRC-funded Partnership Engagement Grant on the Biodiversities of Gender comes to close, we welcomed the Year of the Fire Horse very appropriately – welcoming OG ecosexuals Annie Sprinkle and Beth Stephens to a Kelowna screening of their ecosexual/environmental film Playing with Fire in tandem with local artist Mariel Belanger and Sierra Belanger’s film snĢkÅcaĢŹsqĆ”xĢaŹ tkÅmĆlxŹ· Horse Woman (check out the trailer for Horsewoman here).
These films were presented as part of the New Leaves Festival, organized by our project partner Inspired Word Cafe. This three day annual festival features artists from the Okanagan, Canada, and further abroad (including writers, drag queens, filmmakers, musicians and more) to show how art can be used as a vehicle for sociopolitical resistance and community building.
Taking the idiom āturning over a new leaf,ā the festival’s theme changes annually, in response to a community-expressed need or topical issue. And this year’s theme was ABUNDANCE! In the Okanangan, this means considering local issues such as the growing disparity of wealth and the increasing effects of climate crisis, and asking: how might the arts engage the duality of abundance, locally, to affect positive change? In which ways are we taking too much, and in which ways might we give more?
Alongside the film screening, Beth and Annie also gifted a wider audience with ecosexual lessons-for-life as performers in the 10th annual Pony Cabaret – a queer cabaret evening that is the feature event of the festival. What a pleasure it was to see these icons share a stage with other performers being playfully-serious about the important intersections of decolonial and queer politics as expressed through art. Big shout out here to audience fave Madeline Terbasket, a.k.a. Rez Daddy, whose hilarious and heartwrenching drag performance kept us clapping and snapping!
The New Leaves Festival also included the final installment of our project’s workshop series – a zine workshop called Nature is Weird! Convened by Astrida and supported by IWC tour-de-force Britt McKenzie Dale (with contributions from local artist and educator Norah Bowman), the workshop was beautifully hosted in downtown Kelowna at This Space Belongs to You – . A packed room of participants shared personal examples of nature’s wonderful weirdness. We followed this with a speed-zining round that resulted in a suite of touching and hilarious mini-stories featuring all that nature’s queerness, weirdness, and out-of-the-box-ness can do to enrich our lives.
Each participant crafted a bespoke page for a collective zine, that was compiled by Astrida, to be mailed to everyone who attended (it is *literally* in the mail!) Additional copies will be available at future IWC events, or you can peruse the PDF here:
In line with our project’s aims to think about gender abundance as a positive response to climate crisis, the film night and the zine workshop both foregrounded these ideas.
The Biodiversities of Gender project (in its current iteration) will wrap up in June with a closing workshop for IWC board members and affiliates. Our aim is to craft a guiding principles document for IWC activities, focusing on how to ensure meaningful integration and action to support syilx-led land-based work towards (what some of us call) climate justice, through IWC’s mandate of inclusive, community-engaged queer creativity and performance.
Decolonize your Drag!
All Genders for Planetary Survival!
No Pride on a Dead Planet!
Earth is Mother and Earth is Lover!
Composting is Hot!
The FEELed lab 