FUTURES/forward Mentee, Luca Cara Seccafien — cohort #3 duo, October 2020 to March 2021 — mentored by Sharon Bayly

LUCA CARA SECCAFIEN is an artist, teacher, facilitator, and community builder living on the stolen ancestral territories of the Squamish, Musqueam, and Tsleil-Waututh people. Luca is a cofounder of WePress Community Arts Space, an inter-generational, collectively operated non-profit organization offering historic and contemporary methods of print and art making in a safe and welcoming space, particularly to those marginalized by systems of class, sexuality, gender, race, culture, disability, mental health, addictions, and colonization. Luca has had the honour of mentoring under veteran artists and activists at organizations in Vancouver and beyond including: Powell Street Festival, Gallery Gachet, Heart of the City Festival, Queer Arts Festival & Sum Gallery, and The Works Art & Design Festival. In their art practice, Luca works with diverse media including printmaking, stop-motion, installation, drawing, and illustration. Often autobiographical in nature, their work is influenced by living in a queer, ill, femme body. Luca has exhibited their work across Western Canada and graduated from the University of Alberta in 2013 with a Bachelor of Fine Arts, specializing in printmaking. Luca was shortlisted for the Room Magazine Cover Art Contest (2019) and was awarded Honourable Mention in the Biennial International Miniature Print Exhibition (2014). Luca was artist in residence at the Electro Etching Residency Workshop (Spain, 2017), Paul Art Space (Missouri, 2014) and Malaspina Printmakers Society (Vancouver, 2013/14). Luca was recently awarded an Early Career Development Grant from British Columbia Arts Council for a forthcoming mentorship in 2021 with award winning graphic memoirist Nicole J. Georges.

project title: slow print for queers

project description: Slow print is a collaborative printmaking project facilitated on stolen Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-waututh territories for people and artists who:

• are queer, two-spirit, non-binary, trans, or somewhere on the 2SLGBTQAI+ spectrum
• want to learn (more) about printmaking, may have some experience or none at all
• have access to a computer or smart phone, an internet connection, and some kind of image capturing device (phone, webcam, scanner)
• live in the Lower Mainland, BC

We created our final report via a voice recording on zoom. Then we transcribed the voice recording and edited slightly for clarity and length. At the end (and throughout) there are images of the participants artwork.

Luca (L): This is our final report for the FUTURES/forward mentorship program. We’re both on Tsleil-waututh, Squamish, and Musqueam territories right now and the duration of the project took place on these territories. Earlier in the project in one of the cohort meetings somebody mentioned that we should consider acknowledging the traditional land upon which the servers for video chatting are located. It’s something I’ve been considering since then. We’re meeting on zoom right now and I googled where their servers are and they are all over the world, so I have no idea where this video is streaming through.

So, my name is Luca.

Sharon (S): I’m Sharon Bayly.

L: I came into the mentorship with an idea of a project I had wanted to do for a while. You and I discussed other possibilities, other kinds of projects I had done, what my areas of focus had been in the past. We decided to try and make this collaborative reduction linocut project happen and to focus on queer and trans communities.

So that project is called slow print for queers.

There were 12 workshops in total in the workshop series, and it was the same participants throughout. Some people dropped off. So, we started with 7, and we ended with 4. Well one person dropped out before even one workshop, I think. So really we started with 6, and those 2 who dropped off did come to a few workshops and learned a little and stayed in touch throughout.

In addition to that we [Luca and Sharon] met every two weeks and discussed how the workshop series was going and other things. Sometimes I’d ask for advice about my work with WePress, sometimes I’d ask for advice that was maybe more about my life.

S: *laughs*

L: Once the workshop series was going really well, we started to do these more discussion-based meetings where we watched videos form the Artist’s Speak series and reflected upon them.

Do you have anything to add?

S: It was a nice progression of our meetings, from dealing with logistics, and then feedback about the workshops, and then talking more about theory and practice of community arts.

L: Yea, that’s a really good summary. Because we didn’t start the workshops until January, so we did spend two months just dealing with logistics of the workshop. Which was good because it meant we were really prepared.

S: Yes.

L: So, I looked at what we had designated as measures of success and what we were seeking from each other in our learning agreements back in October. So, I made up a series of questions based on that, and we’re going to answer the questions as well as answer: “How do you know that that’s the answer to the question?”

Part of the workshop series (slow print for queers) was doing this mindfulness work. I remember starting slow print for queers with this theory that we could have online workshops that still allowed people to stay mindful of their body experience while making art if we just acknowledge their experience is bigger than the video screen.

Almost every workshop, not every single one, but almost every one, we did some kind of mindfulness exercise. Sometimes I tried to integrate mindfulness into the rest of the [workshop], but I actually found that quite challenging, that didn’t happen as much as I wanted it to.

We did these mindfulness exercises, and a lot of them revolved around skills of observation and how to observe things…how to observe yourself and your environment objectively in order to differentiate facts from interpretation. This skill is useful in visual art, but it’s also useful in just like…life. So that’s the skills we will be using when we ask, “How do we know?” We’re going to be stating the facts, the evidence, the real observations that led us to realize whether we were successful or whether or not we achieved our goals.

So, the first question is: “Have we developed a relationship of mutual trust, honesty, integrity, and good communication?”

S: I would say yes. How do I know? Gosh it’s so interesting to have to think about what the facts are as opposed to the feelings. My impulse is to say, “I can feel it between us”. There is an ease in our rapport. There is an ease in terms of disclosure. There is a mutual sharing, not just about work related, and this project related, but also our own stories, and our own lives. And that has led to a feeling of connection and trust.

I know for me, I look forward to these meetings. So, it doesn’t feel like, “Uggh, I gotta do this thing.” It’s more like, “Oh yeay! I get to see Luca!” I get to have a conversation with you. So I really appreciate the depths of conversation that we’ve gone to, and I really always appreciate your perspective. I’m veering off a little bit about relationship. That’s how I know, it’s more a feeling, but that feeling is the evidence.

L: I think feelings can be evidence. When we studied mindfulness in dialectical behavior therapy, feelings, thoughts, and [external] observations are considered evidence. So feelings count as fact too.

I agree. I have a lot of tangible evidence. I’m a very anxious person. When I’m building new relationships with people … *sigh *… when dusk falls, when nighttime comes, I replay conversations with those people in my head, with people that I don’t trust yet. I replay, I rethink. “Oh, why did I say that, why did I say this?” And I did that until maybe February, and then all the sudden, I wasn’t replaying our conversations anymore; I was just accepting them. And that’s how I could tell that I had moved past early-stage relationship-building and now I was in a trusting stage.

That said, prior to that, I was still being open and honest and sharing information that was vulnerable, but I was just stressed about it. *laughs* But now, I don’t feel stressed about it anymore, it just feels natural.

S: Yea, and full disclosure, me too. I was nervous at the beginning of our mentorship. And I think, you know, my own insecurities played into that. “Oh god, am I gonna be a good mentor? Am I gonna have anything to offer Luca? Was I the right pick?” You know, all that stuff was for sure part of the picture, but that just dropped away as we got more into the process. Like I said, it just became a feeling of ease, and that dropped away, which was really nice.

L: I think maybe I can start answering this next question. The question is “Do you think this work was more people-centred than past projects? Were the participants able to have their own experiences due to less perfectionism?”

This is in comparison to my past projects, but also in comparison to other community arts projects we’ve experienced. In particular, I’m referring to my past project called Queering Selfies, when I was such a perfectionist that it was hard for me to watch people enjoying their own experiences. I can’t say for sure whether or not the participants felt that. So it’s more about my own perception.

I just really, really think this was very different. How do I know? I mean, I was noticing that participants were just experimenting, doing their own thing, and it didn’t seem like a stressful thing for them. Participants were just playing around with the medium, and I was just letting it happen. And I couldn’t interfere because they were on the other side of a computer screen, so I just had to let it happen. And there were times where I was like, “I wish I was there so I could like, feel your paper.” But they just had to do it on their own. So, I didn’t really expect the online environment to sort of enforce my lack of perfectionism, but it totally did.

S: *laughs*

L: I think that people followed through tells me that they got to have their own experiences. Four people stuck with it all the way through, and it was kind of a complex concept, trading your prints, and I was like, “here’s my timeline, I don’t know if it’s going to work,” and we had to redo the timeline a couple times, and people were just still in it. When people did drop of, they were clear about why. There was one person that I didn’t know exactly why they dropped off, but kind of got the sense from their emails that they were just overwhelmed with life. The other person who dropped off said, “I got what I wanted out of this, I don’t have time to continue it.” And I think the honesty from the participants was telling.

I noticed, and I don’t know what to attribute this to, the artwork that came out of it was really awesome, and really unique. As you get to know the participants and you get to know their art, it felt their art was THEIR art. And that I hadn’t experienced before. I mean I have in big WePress projects, but not in projects I had independently facilitated. So that also felt like some kind of evidence.

S: Yea, it was interesting for me, because we would get together weekly and do our carvings. But it’s not like you can just look over and see, “Oh what are they doing? What are they doing?” There was a connection through the screen, but there was so much that we didn’t see online. So when everyone shared their artwork, it was just so exciting because it had been so hidden! It was a really strange experience to be working away…I see everyone working, and I’m working, but no one can see what I’m doing. And then that moment of sharing the work, was like, AHH! Just really exciting! It felt like another point of connection, through our art, through what we made, I could see the person. I could see another aspect of the person; I can understand them more. I can see them in another light. That was really lovely.

Definitely…were the participants able to have their own experiences?  Absolutely! I don’t know if it’s due to “the facilitators lack of perfectionism,” but definitely we had our own experiences, as did you!

It was interesting to watch you struggle with the technology, struggle with the camera, and yet you were able to show us everything. So things went south, but it never was a failure. Like, “Oh, okay! Well, this is a problem, but I’ll try that, or I’ll do it this way, or I’ll get Nina [Luca’s partner] to help me next week.” So there was always easy recovery, and I didn’t feel like there was over perfectionism on your part.

L: Yea I think was kind of an awkward way to write to that question, because [participant experiences and my perfectionism are] not necessarily related, but I just noticed that it was just so different. I noticed the participants having these really independent experiences, simultaneously with me slowly detaching myself from the final results. I don’t know if they’re correlated, but I was very pleased with that. I was like, “Okay I created this safe environment to experiment with not being a perfectionist and it worked! It was good!” It definitely felt different for me.

The next question is, “Did the project benefit Luca and Sharon, was it useful, how do you know?” It’s kind of a weird question too, but one of the outcomes [in our learning agreement] was, “We’ll know we were successful if we got something good out of it.”

S: Oh yea, Right!

I’d say I definitely got something good out of it! Absolutely! In terms of the experience of the art making. Just doing that snake! I didn’t know what I was gonna do. I was like, “Oh god, I gotta choose something!” because I had all these ideas. And then finally I kind of randomly landed on snake. The amount of detail in that snake was kind of intense. But I loved it! I just loved making those little marks, little marks, little marks…wow, I’m really committing to this. *laughs*

But, I really loved the process of that and the commitment to the making, the hands on making! I loved the way it just gave me time to be with the plate and be with the tools and experience it on a visceral level. That I loved, it was just great.

The connection through the art, sending it away to the other artist to see what she created. There’s an element of trust too, excitement and trust in your fellow participants / fellow artists. I just spent a lot of time on that snake, and a part of me just thought, “Is she just gonna carve it out completely? I mean she could!” I’d have to be okay with that. It was like “Okay what is she gonna do??” And then to see what was created, it was so delightful! So it was a really sweet little bond I feel there.

And then my relationship that has developed over these many months. I feel that that’s a huge benefit. I assume that I’ll see you beyond this. I certainly hope so.

L: Yea me too.

S: Yea. So there’s much good that came of this.

L: Yea, that’s great! It’s so lovely to hear you talk about the experience of participating because I was curious about that. For me, I didn’t participate as one of the people trading prints, so I didn’t have that experience. But, I just feel like this project and the idea for this project was a really long time coming. When I applied for this mentorship program, I was like, “What am I going to do with my life now? I’ll apply for everything.” I mean, I wanted to do this, but I didn’t know anything about the program, or whether or not it would be good. It really exceeded my expectation. It was really kind of exactly what I needed, and I think that’s so great. Because now I’m going into this [new] mentorship that really about my art practice, and I’m going to be doing less Community Arts, just for the next year. So it was just really great to reconnect with that before I start this big new project about my own art, and remind myself, you know, why I value this and what it can be. It was so useful. So beneficial, and I learned so much. I’m not really answering, “How do you know?” I think I just feel finished with the project. I never would’ve been able to describe what I thought this was gonna be at the beginning, and now I have this very clear picture of what it was. Still doesn’t feel like real evidence, but it feels real enough.

Okay so the next question is, “Are the results different from other projects Luca has done in the past? How do you know?” And they are! I think I talked about that quite a lot already. Very different.

The closest comparing project would be Queering Selfies for me. Nobody came back more than once or twice to any of the workshops [with Queering Selfies] so the prints that they made were limited. I really wanted people to get this experience of using the 3D printer for that workshop series. I don’t think people got the experience with the media that I had hoped for with Queering Selfies because it was so tech heavy.

Because slow print for queers is a long-term workshop series and semi mandatory (like we weren’t recruiting people throughout, so if they knew they got the spot and if they drop out, they know those spots are gone). So that kind of set up a different precedent.

There was a lot of trust building with participants. It took longer to teach the basics of lino than I had anticipated, so we were kind of just really responsive. Whereas with queering selfies, since people weren’t coming back there was like this urgency, “We need to give you this quick orientation on this!” And then they didn’t really get that long term sort of time to like play and redo and then learn from their mistakes. Definitely the results were different.

The most obvious difference is my stress levels were SO much lower, maybe nonexistent for [slow print for queers], which is great.

S: That’s huge! That’s a huge success right there! *laughs*

L: It was just so much credit to you, when I would I come to you and say, “I think maybe doing it this way will be stressful or unrealistic.” You would just give me like a really honest response. “Make it easier for yourself. Do it the way that is realistic.” You always sort of brought me back to that, especially when I was on the verge of going there myself, but I was like, afraid to, that was like AMAZING!

S: I like the road of ease. I’ve learned after many years of not taking that road, that that’s a better road to take. *laughs* So, it’s from personal experience.

L: So, the last question in this section is, “Is there continued growth beyond the project? How do you know?”

S: Well, I mean we have grown beyond the project. The project itself (slow print for queers) did grow beyond its own parameters, so that’s one thing. Who knows what is going to happen once all the prints get sent in? Will we be inspired, when weather gets nice, to go plaster some walls with our prints? I mean, that’s still to be determined. I think it would be fun! It will depend on what happens. So that’s a possible growth.

In terms of the project, I know you’re busy with your mentorship over the next year, but I’m just curious, do you see yourself running this again?

L: Yea, I definitely want to run it again. Which is also something different from previous projects. Previous projects, I’m like, “I’m done with that! I’m never doing that again!”

I’ve already started looking at grants. There’s this great grant that the City released that I think it’s not technically a COVID response grant, but I think it’s like the City responding to the changes in society. So, I might apply for that through WePress, and then run the project through WePress. Then there’s another grant also through the City, that would be more independent, smaller scale and that might be due in May, but it’s a really easy application.

S: What’s the first grant?

L: It’s the CASC grant. I don’t remember what it stands for. They just had an intake and then they’re going to have another intake in the Fall. For that grant, it could be like something with WePress where we’re funding other things and slow print for queers at the same time. It just kind of depends on WePress…we’re waiting on a grant that if we get it, it will determine our budget for the next few years.

And then there’s always Canada Council, but the ones that would work for this aren’t due ‘til the fall, so I have some time to think about that.

S: Good. Well, it’s a good sign that you’re even thinking about it. That you’re wanting to do it again.

L: Yea and the WePress collective knows I want to do it again, and they’re down for that.

S: Great. Yea that makes a big difference, actually having an organization, having a non-profit that can support the work, support you and the work.

L: Yea, it’s really amazing.

When I read this question [“Is there continued growth beyond the project? How do you know?”] I thought actually more about how we listened to all those videos and we reflected on them and that stuff is going to carry forward I think more than slow print for queers, for me, because so much of that went into my WePress work. I brought stuff up at collective meetings that I heard on those videos, and I sent videos to Helen who does a lot of developmental documentation, and she listened to them. It’s going to inform our grant writing, and how we do community arts moving forward. So that’s the bigger one for me.

S: Yea, right on. Yea and I don’t know if you are interested in doing this, but I did think, you know, maybe we want to do a monthly…watch a video and have a monthly conversation about a particular video if you want.

L: Really? I would love to!

S: Me too. I really enjoyed the conversations. I really enjoyed listening to other artists talk about their work, what it brought up for me, and your reflections on it. So yea, I would love to.

L: Yea me too. I would love to.

S: Okay.

L: Yeay!

S: Let’s do it!

Alright, well there’s continued growth right there.

L: I will also mention that I had considered running a weekly queer drop in to continue the project. But something interesting happened. There was a point in the project where I was talking to you about the value of exclusively queer spaces. We have this drop in at WePress that’s called “Weekly Art Drop In” that has major queer vibes, just because a lot of the folks who come are queer. Also, something about this project gave me more confidence to bring those conversations into our day-to-day practice. Something about that just makes it feel like, all the spaces can become queer.

At that time, it felt like there was this urgency to me to make sure WePress stays queer. And then now I kind of feel like, I can take a step back from that a little. I’m on the collective. I’m queer. A lot of our contractors are queer. I don’t need to freak out. Queers are around. They’re going to stay around. Queer community isn’t built by someone hyper vigilantly holding the doors.

Something about this project let me just like take a breath about that. So, even though I’m not going to be running the drop in, it doesn’t feel like the same emergency in my head that it was 5 months ago or 4 months ago.

S: That’s good.

L: So, I thought we could talk a little bit about the participants.

The reason that I included this was because in the guidelines for the report they asked questions about the experiences of the participants.

And you were a participant. You already talked about your experience a little bit.

I spent some time thinking about, “How do we talk about the experiences of people who aren’t in this reporting meeting?” and I thought we discuss: “How did the participants influence the project, and how do we know?” because that felt like something that we can muse on without making too many assumptions.

Some of the obvious ones were that when people said, “I want to learn this,” or, “I think you should do this differently next time,” or, “We wanna have a gathering,” we just always brought that stuff to the whole group and asked what everybody thinks. Almost everything that was suggested got integrated into the project. So, that’s the most obvious.

S: In terms of personalities, and also just people showing up. Everyone showed up, you know, the ones who were able to fully commit, they really did show up. I appreciated that, because I was wondering, are people going to start dropping off. Like, I didn’t know.

There was a real sense of momentum and commitment to one another in showing up in the room. And then everyone’s energies. Some participants had [printmaking] experience of their own to bring forward and that was great to hear, and their enthusiasm. You know, and some participants seemed just really grounded, and focused. I don’t know what I want to say about it, but I really appreciated people’s energies and commitment and their own kind of personalities that they brought to the space.

You know I think about doing the mindfulness exercises, and how people really committed to it, and were fully in it. I just thought, “Oh this is great! This is really great!” No one is like just pretending or doing it half-assed. People are really, REALLY participating, REALLY doing it, in a good way, in a deep way. Which I really appreciated. And so, yea how does that influence it? Well, it influences it in terms of giving it life, giving it momentum, and building trust, and connection.

L: Yea, and everybody was really honest with each other and friendly with each other. People were like sharing what they had learned about the medium with each other. That was a big thing, at some point it felt like I didn’t have to teach anymore and everyone was just teaching each other. And sometimes if they were like stuck on a thing, I’d be like, “Let me just clarify because I’ve experimented with that many times.” That was really cool.

You know I didn’t tell anyone this, I kept writing this in my notes for the class and forgetting to tell people, but I have been printing with my feet ever since one of the participants discovered that.

*laughs*

I had never even considered it before, but it works so much better.

S: Yea, I know, I tried it too it was really good!

*laughs*

L: It definitely started feeling like a peer sharing environment at some point, and that was really cool.

S: I really appreciated that too.

L: So, the last question is just a space for any remaining thoughts or any unexpected experiences that you haven’t talked about yet.

S: Nothing is really coming up. I guess the one thing that was frustrating for me, and this wasn’t with the project itself, but with the larger project, was the whole cohort meetings that I wasn’t always able to get to. So there was some frustrations there, although I really appreciated that Kim recorded them and we could watch them afterwards. That was really helpful.

L: Yea that was really helpful.

S: Yea, there’s nothing else that’s really jumping out for me. What about you?

L: Well, when I wrote the examples those are actually more like notes for myself because I had been thinking about thigs related to those things. So, some of those things were:

The collaboration with WePress was easy. I was really stressed about it when it started, which is so odd because really WePress is my own collaborative project that I have been very involved with. But it was like, not a problem at all. I updated the collective in meetings, they almost never asked about it unless I forgot to update them. They were just happy it was happening. Everybody was fine. And we never really came up with a solid budget, but I manage the [WePress] budget and I know how much flex funds we have, and we have more than enough this year because of CEWS and all these resilience funding from the province, and I think I spent like $500 or something of WePress money, and they were willing to pay for an ASL interpreter for the whole project if we needed one, so it was well under budget in that sense.

So that was kind of surprisingly easy.

And the other surprisingly easy thing was the online stuff. It was maybe the first two workshops, and a little in the middle, I had technical issues, but I thought it was going to be such a huge barrier, but it was actually fine. I think that’s because I’ve done a lot of printmaking teaching at the Anvil Centre, so I’ve started to figure out how to describe things now. I don’t think it would have been easy a few years ago. It wasn’t a big deal to be online.

S: And for me, that’s just feedback / reflection I would give to you. Your ability to describe things in detail is really great! You are really able to describe things in great detail in terms of like the texture, the feel, the sound, the weight. There’s lot of ways that you gave us all kinds of description of what it should feel like, what it should look like, what it should smell like. So that allowed us to get it since you weren’t in the room. That was really helpful.

L: Thank you. Because I think of that as a strength so it’s nice to have that validation. And it worked. I thought, “I think I’m good at this.” And it turns out I was. So that was great!

S: You were!

Professional development objectives?

L: Oh yea, so I had this very lofty professional development objective in the learning agreement that was related to power imbalances in community arts. I was just at a point where I was feeling so negative about community arts where most of the power is still in the facilitator and the participants don’t get that agency. I had this theory that if we develop a culture in the workshop that feels very equitable then maybe we can unpack that, but I wasn’t sure if it would work, because I had been trying to do that for many years and it wasn’t quite working…

I think through the workshop series, what I learned was to just sort of just trust the participants, that if they say they’re having a good time, just believe them. The bigger unpacking of that happened when listening to the [artists speak] videos. The reason I put that note in there was because before we started the workshop series I had no idea how that learning was going to happen, or if it was even possible to unpack that. And I also didn’t know what your perspective was, so I didn’t know if it was going to happen with you.

Once we were into February territory, we really had this trusting relationship, we were listening to these artists speak videos, we just had these really honest conversations. Also, like everybody in those videos were also grappling with this, and that was really validating. I didn’t know if we were ever going to even talk about it, and we really did, and I got a lot of space and time to think about that stuff. I don’t feel like I have solutions, but I feel like I have inklings of how to move forward, which is great.

S: And in terms of power imbalances in this project, how did that feel in slow print for queers? Could you say anything about that, you as the facilitator?

L: I think, early on when we had people dropping out, we had people not responding, I thought, “Oh this is the same thing again, where I don’t know what people’s capacity and what resources they don’t have access to, and I can’t offer access to this if people don’t feel safe enough to talk about what they need to get access to this project.” And that was stressful. But, you just kept reminding me that there’s only so much I can control and do. And we’re still working within this same framework. This is still capitalism. This is still a white supremacist society. There’s only so much you can achieve quickly as an individual. Once you’ve reached out to someone you know, 3 or 4 times, that’s it, you know?

So there was that part of it, and then once we were actually in the workshop series, and people were participating. I mean I can’t say for sure how the participants felt, but it just felt really casual and natural and fun. I was very afraid of resolving conflict, somebody saying something that hurt someone else and resolving it, but that didn’t happen. Everybody was kind and respectful to each other. I think it helped that it was a really small group, and we got to know each other and figure out each other’s boundaries. I think that what I learned was that if you bite off literally the amount you can chew, then it’s easier to unpack those really complex things. It’s harder to unpack them when you’re trying to do something that’s bigger than what you can manage.

S: Yea, it almost prevents you from being present in the room when it’s just overwhelming and stressful. As a participant, besides the technical stuff that was a little jangly in a moment, I didn’t find you stressed out. You really set a good tone; we were all welcome to bring who we were and what we knew to the room. You have certain expertise obviously; you’re holding the space for that. But you were welcoming and encouraging all of our experiences to come to the table. People could share what they knew, I brought up a couple things. There was a real sense of sharing, and mutuality. It didn’t feel like a big oppressive power imbalance by any means.

L: I think sometimes there are barriers in community arts. With Queering Selfies, there were issues with software, it was hard to use the software, it wasn’t possible for people to become completely literate in the software in the 3-hour workshop, people weren’t coming back and learning. It wasn’t fun either to learn how to use the software, and we wanted to build new software that was more fun to use but we didn’t have the funds to build that software.

So, those barriers exist and they almost just kind of reemphasize systemic barriers sometimes.

And when we just reduce the barriers, and whatever barriers are there we’re just really, really honest about at the beginning like: “You’re going to need a webcam. You’re going to need an internet connection.” And then beyond that we just reduced the barriers, reduced the barriers, reduced the barriers. Then the only barriers that are left are the systemic barriers. Once we were all in the room together, it was just human to human connections.

 image credits:
Daniela Roman Torres
Krusheska
Sharon Bayly
Rachel

To get more graphic detail on the printing process, view and/or download the PDF: https://icasc.ca/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/luca-seccafien-sharon-bayly-blog.pdf

To view the project description and the sign-up form, go here: https://luca.caraseccafien.com/2020/11/06/slow-print-for-queers/

Slow print for queers in WePress: https://wepress.ca/2020/12/30/slow-print-for-queers/
https://www.instagram.com/p/CIfVYNsBX3Y/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link

FUTURES/forward gratefully acknowledges that Luca’s mentorship thrived due in part to the generous support of the BC Arts Council, Judith Marcuse Projects, the Government of Canada’s Emergency Community Support Fund and Community Foundations of Canada.