Voices for VOCE!
A Teach-in
Thursday, February 13, 2025 | 9:30 AM – 9:00 PM
The Audain Gallery and SCA Lobby
SFU School for the Contemporary Arts
149 West Hastings Street, Vancouver
We protest the shutdown of VOCE (Vancity Office of Community Engagement) and demand its reinstatement. This teach-in is an action that pays tribute to VOCE and marks our determination to continue community engaged work that honors the original promise of SFU Woodward’s to become a vital community member. The groundbreaking and necessary work of VOCE, driven by Am Johal and a stellar team, embodies the mission of SFU as a university that has historically worked with community – across all disciplines and forms of knowledge – and has shaped important relations with the neigbourhoods of SFU's downtown campus.
Faculty and students from the School for the Contemporary Arts reject the closure of VOCE and this significant loss to Vancouver’s art and academic communities, and we reject the dismantling of this nationally and internationally recognized platform of engagement, a platform that is essential to creating and maintaining equitable community knowledges.
VOCE created a public potential which is crucial not only for artistic, creative and critical dialogue, but also for good relations with our neighbours and towards the imagination of a more just and livable city. Our protest takes the form of teaching and learning against extreme austerity measures that show disregard for the very principles that define our “Engaged University” and that imply a troubling indifference for the community in which we are located.
SFU, we call on you to do the right thing, the easy thing, and the most academically and fiscally sound thing, and reinstate VOCE. It's time for SFU to live up to the potential of its faculty, students, and staff and be a truly public institution.
Voices for VOCE!
Program of Events
Graduate Class on Authoritarianism
10:00 AM – 1:20 PM // Audain Gallery
Italian cultural critic, social theorist, philosopher, and translator Alberto Toscano brings his graduate students from SFU's School of Communication together with SCA Associate Professor Denise Oleksijczuk’s MA and MFA students to hold a class on authoritarianism in the gallery.
Screening: Wu Tsang’s WILDNESS
9:30 AM – 12:20 PM // SCA Lobby
SCA Term Assistant Professor Joseph Clark will introduce the film and follow it with a discussion on art and gentrification in marginal neighbourhoods.
Wu Tsang, WILDNESS, 2012, 74 min
WILDNESS is a resonant portrait of a Latino Los Angeles LGBT bar, the Silver Platter. The film integrates elements of fiction and documentary structures to vividly portray Wu Tsang’s multi-layered relationship with the bar, one that explores her role as an artist and activist, and a member of a younger generation introducing itself into a gay scene that started before the Stonewall riots. The impact of gentrification and a changing city on the bar’s working class, Hispanic and immigrant patrons is something Tsang implicates herself in when the weekly Wildness party brings art world crowds and attention. Watch the trailer HERE.
Artist/Activist Talk: Sandy Kaltenborn
12:45 PM – 1:30 PM // SCA Lobby
Spring 2025 Audain Visual Artist in Residence, Sandy Kaltenborn, speaking on Zoom from Berlin, discusses his work as an artist, designer, and activist. Kaltenborn will be introduced by SCA Professor Sabine Bitter. Sandy Kaltenborn, actually Alexander Sandy Paul Omar Abdullah Kaltenborn, is a communication designer and runs the design studio image-shift, which operates in social, cultural, artistic, as well as political and urban contexts. Kaltenborn has been living in Berlin since 1990. He also is a housing activist and co-founder of the rent and urban policy initiative Kotti & Co.
Performance/Lecture: Social Movements: The Electric Slide
1:30 PM – 2:20 PM // Audain Gallery
In this talk and collective dance session, SCA Assistant Professor Justine A. Chambers shares the eighteen steps of the Electric Slide line dance as a social movement, collective rhythmic pleasure and a potential container for multiple embodiments of self.
Screening: Small File Films
1:45 PM – 3:30 PM // SCA Lobby
SCA Professor Laura U. Marks will present "Tiny Hits" from the Small File Media Festival. At less than 1.44 megabytes per minute, movies can be light on infrastructure and strong to your senses. For useful background, please read this conversational interview with Marks.
Small-file movies fight austerity with caring, pleasure, and fun
Yuyan Song, JellyFun (Canada, 2022, 2 min)
Rachel Stuckey, Convalescing Camcorder and Two Cats (US, 2021, 4:30 min., 5 MB)
Laïssa Alexis, Panyen Banbou (US 2024, 12 min., 8 MB)
Tadeo Rios Davila, dr vicious’ trip to the moon on the sunny afternoon of april 19th, bicycle day (and other businesses of his) – a small film (Canada 2023, 3 min., 2.1 MB)
Inanna Cusi, Autumn in the City (Canada, 2023, 3 min., 4 MB)
Eric Butler, A Project for You (US 2023, Eric Butler, 24 min., 25.5 MB)
Monique Motut-Firth, N’oublie pas la crème (Canada 2024, 3 min., 3.1 MB)
Small-file movies prepare to fight
Adrian O’Connell, The cost of the cloud (Ireland 2023, 3 min., 4.1 MB)
Kimberly Cleroux, CUNTST (Germany/Canada 2023, 5 min., 6.8 MB)
Kofi Oduro (Illestpreacha), The Voyage That Came to Be (Canada, 3:00, 4.2 MB)
Mariana Sanson, My Niece is a Dragon (US/Mexico 2021, 5 min., 5 MB)
William Brown, App 666 (Canada 2024, 42 min. 55.5 MB)
Workshop: Activist Posters
3:30 PM – 5:30 PM // SCA Lobby
Together with SCA visual art students, SCA Professor Judy Radul will lead a poster making workshop.
Workshop: Ideas into Action
5:30 PM – 6:30 PM // Audain Gallery
Kay Higgins, the SCA's Professional Development Coordinator, will lead a workshop on how to activate the ideas raised during the teach-in by identifying goals, making plans, and carrying them out safely and effectively.
Reading: Do Trees Need Poetry?
7:00 PM – 9:00 PM // Audain Gallery
With Fred Wah, Jeff Derksen, Rita Wong, Dorothy Cucw-la7 Christian
Please join us for Do Trees Need Poetry?, with a talk by Dorothy Cucw-la7 Christian (Secwepemc and Syilx) on the relationship of Indigenous and settler knowledges and poetry readings from Jeff Derksen, Fred Wah, and Rita Wong. The poets will read new and published work that engages with the life of water and waterways, trees (urban and rural), and Indigenous knowledges. The readings are presented in the context of Oscar Tuazon’s exhibition, What Trees Need, presented as part of the SCA's Audain Visual Artist in Residence program, which continues until February 15.
VOCE: 2010 – 2025
The read the SCA's response to the elimination of SFU's Vancity Office of Community Engagement, who are our colleagues and friends, HERE.
Have your say
A website has been created for people to share their opinions about the closing of VOCE, and to voice support for Am and the VOCE's team's important work. You can find it HERE.
You can also add your name to an open letter shared via Google Forms HERE.