Translocal Action Dialogues on Digital Archives (TADDA), in collaboration with the Toronto Performance Art Collective (TPAC), is delighted to invite you to The Work of the Artist-Archivist in the Age of Machinic Devouring. A Special Evening with Dinner, Performance, and Long Table Discussion
WHEN: Tuesday, 9th December 2025, 18:00 – 21:00
WHERE: Vtape, 401 Richmond Street West, Suite 452, Toronto
CONTACT: T.L. Cowan
(By invitation only)
PROGRAM OVERVIEW
18:00 – 19:00 Dinner from Palestine Bakeshop
19:00 – 19:40
Live-stream Performance with Artist Pam Hall (St John’s, Newfoundland) – Remaking the Archive
Live-stream Performance with Artists PACHAQUEER (Quito, Ecuador)
Introduction to TPAC’s public web archive project7a*mgr8 (curated by Paul Couillard), and the Cabaret Commons’ PACHAQUEER Exhibition Furia Monstra and Furia Monstra Parte 2 (curated by Stephen Lawson)
Q&A with Artists
19:40 – 19:45 Break
19:45 – 21:00 Participatory Discussion around the Long Table: The Work of the Artist-Archivist in the Age of Machinic Devouring. Facilitator: TL Cowan
About Pam Hall
Pam Hall is an interdisciplinary artist and scholar whose work has been exhibited and performed site-specifically across Canada and internationally, and is represented in many corporate, private and public collections, including the National Gallery of Canada. Her artistic practice is often research-driven and collaborative and engages communities distant from the pristine spaces of the gallery, the studio, and the museum. She has worked with doctors and medical students, settler and indigenous fishers on both coasts of Canada, workers in the food service and fish processing industries, knowledge-holders in Fogo and Change Islands, Western Newfoundland and Miawpukek/Conne River. Hall’s solo exhibition HouseWork(s) presented a decade of her social and collaborative practice at The Rooms Art Gallery in St. John’s (2014) and in Kamloops, B.C. (2015). She continues to work inside and outside of the museum context and in 2017 was commissioned by the inaugural Bonavista Biennale to create Reseeding the Dream East, an outdoor installation marking the anniversary of the NL cod moratorium, in a Port Rexton meadow. She completed that project during a 2021 residency on Fogo Island. She was the artist-in-residence in the Faculty of Medicine at Memorial University, was their Inaugural Public Engagement Postdoctoral Fellow, and authored a chapter in Performance Studies in Canada (2017), edited by Laura Levin and Marlis Schweitzer. She taught in the MFA in Interdisciplinary Arts Program at Goddard College in Vermont for 16 years and is the creator of the multi-year, multi-chapter art-and-knowledge project Towards an Encyclopedia of Local Knowledge (ELK).
About PACHAQUEER
PACHAQUEER are Andean witches, radical transvestites, and gender-terrorist monstras. Comprised of the two ‘gender monster’ artists CoCa and MoTa, the Ecuadorian art duo PACHAQUEER began collaborating in 2013. They create performances, demonstrations, parties, and music through what they describe as “self-managed practices based on anarchy-trans-feminisms” which function “against patriarchal violence” [taken from the Furia Monstra web page; citation from “12 artistas LGBTTTIQA+ locales que la Están Rompiendo”, Radio Cocoa, 20 June 2022.]
About Furia Monstra
This research analyzes the visual archive of PACHAQUEER, an artistic platform founded in Quito in 2013, as a critical space for the production of images and performances that challenge hegemonic bodily and aesthetic norms. Focusing on the period from 2014 to 2024, the study examines how the archive documents, confronts, and re-signifies the processes of erasure and disappearance that affect dissident sex-gender identities and counter-hegemonic artistic expressions in Ecuador. From the field of research, it is understood that these images are not mere records, but powerful tools for making visible bodies that challenge the normative order and for resisting official forms of censorship and oppression. The research pays special attention to the interactions between different levels of disappearance and contextualizes erasure and disappearance as manifestations of structural violence imposed by state and social institutions, which operate symbolically and physically to suppress dissident identities and artistic expressions. Ultimately, this study seeks to contribute to a deeper understanding of the role of dissident art as a form of counter-archive or anti-archive and as a tool for symbolic dispute in contexts marked by exclusion, repression, and necropolitics in Latin America.
About TADDA
TADDA (Translocal Action Dialogues on Digital Archives) is a new phase of the Cabaret Commons project, a work-in-progress gathering place for trans-feminist and queer artists, activists, audiences and researchers. Over the coming years, TADDA’s work will be to attend to and prototype frameworks, methods, ethics, and protocols for Exposure-Sensitive archival materials and digital archival projects, focusing on questions of risk, safety, liberatory consent, vulnerability, data autonomy, knowledge preservation, sharing, and connection. The overall goal of TADDA is to exchange critical-creative tactics for designing and building digital archives and exhibitions that are accountable to translocal contexts and communities, in our globally volatile technocultural contexts.
