Milko Delgado, El Club del SIDA, 2024. Commissioned by Visual AIDS for 'Red Reminds Me '
The next two weeks at NSCAD are going to be Severely Queer. And that's not a threat it's a whole vibe.
Severely Queer is two things: a caucus - comprised of queer NSCAD faculty members Karin Cope, Julie Hollenbach, Anton Lee, Mikiki, Nora Rinehart, Vajdon Sohaili, and Patryk Stasieczek - and a diverse slate of free lectures and screenings, culminating in a dance-event, that will take place from November 26 to December 6.
Conceived as an annually recurring series of events around World AIDS Day on December 1, the Severely Queer Gatherings address sexual and gender equity, health, accessibility, and coalition building for 2SLGBTQIA+ individuals and groups within NSCAD and beyond.
NSCAD student Mikiki will present 'ROSE BEEF: A Golden Girls Fandom Spectacular!'
'There has been a lot of desire for queer events and initiatives at NSCAD'
The concept arose from Anton Lee's desire for the school to mark World AIDS Day via Day With(out) Art, an annual day of action that began in 1989. Curated by the New York organization Visual AIDS, the program is a screening of commissioned video works by seven artists currently living with HIV/AIDS.
"The youngest generation of queer people don't think about HIV and AIDS as big of a deal as the previous generations," Lee says. "But the number of infections has been going up around Nova Scotia, so it is very important to keep acknowledging the challenges people are facing, as well as the history of activism and pain, which is a big part of the identity of being queer. It's not as grim as it was in the 80s and 90s, but it's still a big part of everyday life."
And the issue at NSCAD is even more pressing, Lee explains, where according to NSCAD's last census, nearly half of the student body [41%] identified as gender non-conforming.
"That is a huge percentage, and there has been a lot of desire for queer events and initiatives within the population here at NSCAD."
An opportunity to bring together perspectives from queer faculty and alumni
NSCAD hosted Day With(out) Art screenings in the 1990s, but Lee noted that no institution east of Montreal had done so recently. In bringing the program to Halifax this year, he saw an opportunity to involve the perspectives of other queer faculty and alumni, and so the Severely Queer Gatherings was born.
An ongoing display of 2SLGBTQIA+ literature will run through year's end at the NSCAD Library as a resource to support the conversations at Severely Queer.
The Gatherings themselves begin on Tuesday, November 26, with MONSTRUM, a reading from poet and MFA student Arielle Twist, a trans Indigenous artist. That evening, the drag artist and current NSCAD student Mikiki will present ROSE BEEF: A Golden Girls Fandom Spectacular!, a "searing polemical sermon" using the hit 1980s senior citizen sitcom The Golden Girls as its framework.
Mikiki moderates the panel Advancing Sexual Health with Chris Aucoin (Health Equity Alliance of Nova Scotia), Abbey Ferguson (Halifax Sexual Health Centre), and Milo Gray (Healing Our Nations) on Thursday, November 8, while the 2024 iteration of Day With(out) Art screens on Wednesday, December 4.
The series closes on Friday, December 6 with Club Pedagogy Club, a dry dance-event at FAB for NSCAD's teaching community and 2SLGBTQIA+ allies hosted by DJ Cleopatryk aka assistant professor of photography Patryk Stasieczek.
Teaching on the queerest framework the dance floor
December is Stasieczek's turn to present at Club Pedagogy, a NSCAD instructor support group led by faculty where they can share methodologies, experiences, and discuss the challenges of teaching. Stasieczek wanted to unite it with Severely Queer Gatherings, to take their session to "the queerest embodied curricular framework the dance floor."
"I'm a queer person who fully acknowledges the dance floor as a place with a queer history and a site for gathering and healing and belonging," says Stasieczek, whose nearly four-hour playlist includes house remixes of SOPHIE, Madonna, Deee-Lite, Robyn, Kylie Minogue, Missy Elliot, and Charli XCX. "The classroom as rave framework generates an increase in dopamine and serotonin levels, enabling moments to cultivate joy as we work together."
Lee and Stasieczek both believe that the creative angle the Severely Queer Caucus can approach this issue is only possible because NSCAD is an art school.
"If it were a larger university, it might be more research-based," Lee says. "But NSCAD is a dynamic art college, and it's also an experimental institution. Pedagogically, we can look at how to engage the student body and beyond to the issues that are important to us not only through scholarly research, but also recreation and storytelling."
The caucus is energized and engaged around these principles, Lee says, and believes that Severely Queer Gatherings will become an annual event and grow, "especially at NSCAD, with its huge queer population NSCAD will become the hub of this activism."
