Artful Politics
Global Flesh Mapping/les draps parlent/la resistancia de las mujeres: 2011
Prostitution in a Globalized World
University of Ottawa, Ottawa, Ontario
I proposed a year- long collaboration between Vancouver Rape Relief and Women’s Shelter and Concertation des luttes contre l’exploitation sexuelle (CLES) to build internationally on abolitionist events in both solitudes of French and English. I conceived of a four-day discussion within Women’s Worlds 2011 to which I invited feminists from Haiti, Italy, Mexico, USA, Australia, Morocco, Japan, Korea, and First Nations. We facilitated and highlighted the concerns of women of the First Nations of the world, featuring within Canada, the Aboriginal Women’s Action Network of B.C., the Ontario Native Women’s Association, the Quebec Native Women’s Association and the Native Women’s Association of Canada, identifying modern prostitution as continued colonialism. In partnership with Diane Matte of CLES, we located prostitution within the frame of criminal violence against women but also within the neo-liberal globalized economy.
Flesh Mapping: vancouver markets pacific women 2008
Vancouver Art Gallery, Gallery Gachet, Vancouver Public Library
and on the Internet, Vancouver, B.C.
Faced with the crisis in women murders and inadequate criminal justice response and in conjunction with the exhibition WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution, I conceptualized and hosted a public seminar within the Vancouver Art Gallery. I invited women from around the Pacific Rim to discuss, over 16 days, international trafficking of women for the purposes of sexual exploitation and the demand for prostitution in Vancouver. The invited participants were from First Nations, Japan, Korea, India, USA, Mexico, the Philippines, and Australia. In addition, several dozen local women created art that spoke back to WACK! The art and the conversation were captured in video format and are now being used for public education.