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Think Tank: Towards New Worlds
20.10.23 — 1:30 PM (1: 00 PM Doors open)
PHI Centre Espace 4
For this think tank, participants gather in groups around an artist, an author and a filmmaker who will share fragments of the futures they foresee. Together let’s create a vision for a sustainable world.
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Langue: FR
PARTICIPANTS:
Sylvain Neuvel dropped out of high school at age fifteen. Along the way, he has been a journalist, worked in soil decontamination, sold ice cream in California, and furniture across Canada. He received a Ph.D. in linguistics from the University of Chicago. He taught linguistics in India,
and worked as a software engineer in Montreal. He is also a certified translator, though he wishes he were an astronaut. He absolutely loves toys; his girlfriend would have him believe that he has too many, so he writes about aliens and giant robots as a blatant excuse to build action figures (for his son, of course). His debut, Sleeping Giants, was described by NPR as “one of the most promising series kickoffs in recent memory.”
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Erin Manning studies in the interstices of philosophy, aesthetics and politics, concerned, always, about alter-pedagogical and alter-economic practices. Pedagogical experiments are central to her work, some of which occur at Concordia University in Montreal where she is a research chair in Speculative Pragmatism, Art and Pedagogy in the Faculty of Fine Arts. Recent monographs include The Minor Gesture (Duke 2016), For a Pragmatics of the Useless (2020) and Out of the Clear (forthcoming, minor compositions). Her artwork is textile-based and relationally-oriented, often participatory. She is interested in the detail of material complexity, in what reveals itself to perception sideways, in the quality of a textural engagement with life. Her work often plays synesthetically with touch, of recent in acknowledgement and experimentation with theProTactile movement for DeafBlind culture and language. Tactile propositions include large-scale hangings produced with a diversity of tools including tufting, hooking, knotting, weaving. 3e is the main direction her current research takes - an exploration of the transversality of the three ecologies, the social, the environmental and the conceptual. An iteration of 3e is a land-based project north of Montreal where living and learning is experimented. Legacies of SenseLab infuse the project, particularly the question of how collectivity is crafted in a more-than human encounter with worlds in the making.
Pascal Raud Born in France, Pascal Raud settled in Quebec twenty years ago. He is a literary translator (novels and short stories), but also literary director for, among others, the francophone magazine Solaris, of which he is also co-editor-in-chief. As a writer, he has published close to twenty short stories in magazines, collectives and web magazines, mainly in the science fiction and fantasy genres, as well as detective stories. He also sometimes dabbles in poetry. His fantastic short story “The Memory of the Butterfly” won the Aurora-Boréal Prize in 2021. A trans man, he is interested in so-called atypical and minority voices, but also in what concerns major transformations, both external and internal. This fall, we owe him in particular the French translation of C.L. Polk’s novel “The Midnight Pact”, published by VLB, as well as Wayne Arthurson’s “Dishonor at Camp 133” published by Alire. Pascal will be guest of honor at the Congrès Boréal this weekend. He is currently working on a fantasy novel that fits into the hopepunk genre.
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HOST:
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Mathieu Lauzon-Dicso has been a college professor, founder of the Prix des Horizons imaginaires, co-director of the VLB imaginaire collection and program coordinator at the Salon du livre de Montréal. He is the owner of Saga Bookstore, founded in 2020, and a literary agent at Omada.
