Sabina Gámez Ibarra
Desire Paths
— Montreal Monochrome XI — TRANSIENT
Participatory performance-workshop with Sabina Gámez Ibarra.
Saturday, September 5, 2026 from 5 to 7 PM.
Montreal Monochrome is an annual conference series for Indigenous, Black, and artists and cultural workers of color, organized by articule's Fabulous Committe. This 11th edition, which will take place from September 2-6, 2026, will expand to welcome guests from across Canada to explore our theme: TRANSIENT. Details about this edition of Montreal Monochrome and the full program.
Desire paths is a participatory performance examining the friction between digital mediation and the physical body. The work opens with a solo performance in which the artist mimics systematic labor through rigid, mechanical movements and gestures, set against a projected backdrop of Montreal’s high-speed metropolitan landscape. Using handheld mirrors to refract the projected video onto the walls, ceiling, and audience, she seeks to liberate the body from the digital plane and rigid boundaries. As the performance progresses, these rigid movements shift into a frantic effort to track and ground her own reflection. This struggle to follow a slipping image captures the anxiety of a body attempting to remain present under the weight of a system that demands constant utility. Within this interaction, humor and absurdity become tools of resistance, exploring how presence becomes ephemeral when trapped in a loop of constant production.
Following the performance, the work shifts into a collective exploration. Participants are invited to intervene in the digital environment by first suggesting videos or photos of places that evoke for them a sense of rigidity or entrapment. Then, using a DIY, green screen setup, participants are invited to record their own movements, gestures, and interpretations of breaking these patterns. These recordings are live-keyed and projected directly into the suggested landscapes, allowing the participants to transform the spaces they wish to subvert. By exposing the technical process and live editing, the work emphasizes community-based accessibility over high-tech polish, centering the body as the primary site of intervention.
Lastly, using mirror fragments to refract their projected images, participants dissolve rigid boundaries to transform the digital landscape and their own bodies into a live collage. By choosing what is revealed, distorted, or withheld, the body is reclaimed as an autonomous territory rather than a regulated machine. This collaborative expansion transcends the singular unit of labor to form a collective body, a flock of movement that embraces the coexistence of the Pluriverse. Ultimately, the work unfolds as a communal act of witnessing the ephemeral
Artist
Sabina Gámez Ibarra’s artistic practice examines how the female body is perceived and recontextualized through digital media and the environment. She creates video installations and performances that employ diverse audiovisual techniques to explore themes of self, self-recognition, and remnants in digital media.
She explores alternative practices inspired by the sun, adopting a Symbiocene approach that emphasizes a positive reevaluation of our relationship with the world and its influence on human and ecological systems. Her most recent research investigates the multi-dimensional role of the sun, examining its geopolitical, social, and environmental implications. Her work is informed by Solarpunk theories framing solar energy as a guide to re-evaluate pressing climate and social crises. Her work has been exhibited in Colombia, Mexico, South Korea, USA, and Canada.
MMXI Schedule
Wednesday, September 2, 2026
Opening Reception & Performances
— Starting at 5:30 PM.
Thursday, September 3, 2026
Threading Frequencies: Longtable discussion
— At 1:30 PM: Featuring artist-run centre leaders: Abedar Kamgari (SAVAC), Sanaa Humayun (Hamilton Artists Inc.), and Alana Traficante (Gallery 44), co-facilitated by researchers Madeline Collins and Suzanne Morrissette (OCAD University).
Open Discussion
— At 3 PM: Open Discussion, continuing on with the themes from the long table discussion all participants are invited to contribute to an open discussion.
Keynote Address
— At 5:30 PM. In English but live translation to French will be available.
Performances
— At 7 PM: Dani Carter — SWIRL/SADDLE.
Friday, September 4, 2026
Keynote Address
— At 5:30 PM: Keynote Address featuring Daniela Andrade & Fern — p(B)ajubá e a proteção de pessoas trans e travestis. In French but live translation to English will be available.
Performances
— At 7 PM: Joliz Dela Peña — Trespassing the Timeline
Saturday, September 5, 2026
Workshops
— At 3 PM: Sabina Gámez Ibarra — Desire Paths
Sunday, September 6, 2026
Terms and Conditions: a workshop and discussion
— Starting at 1:30 PM: Presented by Collective Collective and COco - Centre for Community Organizations.
Three artists will present their installation works during Montréal Monochrome: Maya Amoah, Nathalie Batraville, and Anna J. McIntyre.
TRANSIENT
TRANSIENT refers to what circulates under pressure: diasporic bodies, minoritized languages, unstable archives, trans/queer and racialized practices that resist regimes of fixation, measurement, and categorization. Against colonial, institutional, and statistical logics that flatten difference into acronyms, metrics, or singular narratives, TRANSIENT foregrounds relational, embodied, and collective forms of knowledge. It creates a space where identity is understood as a process rather than a stable fact, where memory is activated through use and gesture, and where movement becomes a strategy for survival, care, and continual remaking.
TRANSIENT names a situated condition shaped by movement, constraint, and political timing. It is neither a temporary state nor mobility for its own sake, but a mode of existence formed in the in-between: between appearance and disappearance, inside and outside, visibility and erasure. Perhaps we all find ourselves there—in the liminal, fuzzy, and fluid—either momentarily or temporarily. What have we been doing in the interim.
Montreal Monochrome is an annual conference organized by articule's Fabulous Committee (anti-oppression). It addresses the misrepresentation and under-representation of Indigenous and racialized people in the current Montreal arts scene. The event aims to imagine and nurture new and existing connections, solidarities and friendships between Indigenous artists, thinkers, cultural workers and racialized allies. Artists, cultural workers, researchers, community organizers and others are invited to apply. The selected projects may take the form of workshops, round tables, debates, collective works, actions in the public space, interventions, performances, demonstrations, lightning gatherings, among others.
The Fabulous Committee is a space for Black, Indigenous and/or racialized articule members, as well as Black, Indigenous and/or racialized queer and/or trans members, to come together, to have a space to care for each other, to exchange ideas, to share their practice and to see art together. The activities of the Fabulous Committee change according to the needs and desires of the members.
This year’s edition of Montreal Monochrome is made possible, in part, by the Government of Canada, and by the support of the Canadian Race Relations Foundation.
The Canadian Race Relations Foundation is committed to building a national framework for the fight against racism in Canadian society. The CRRF will do this through knowledge-sharing and community support in the pursuit of equity, fairness, social justice and systemic change.