Summer Window Exhibition : Opening & Discursive Activities
What Travels Through Us: Family History Workshops
SUMMER WINDOW EXHIBITION
July 5 to August 5, 2024 — Visible from our window on Plaza Saint-Hubert (6282, St-Hubert St.)
OPENING EVENTS
Saturday, June 22, 2024. From 2:30 PM to 9 PM at articule.
Free and open to all. LSQ interpretation available from 4 to 7 PM.
Since Fall 2023, Super Boat People has been running the What Travels Through Us: Family History Workshops project, in collaboration with articule and Concordia University's Centre for Oral History and Digital Storytelling. The What Travels Through Us exhibition is the fruit of this project, which enabled a cohort of fifteen participants of Cambodian, Vietnamese and Laotian origin, whose families had experienced war and refuge, to reappropriate their family history.
In ten sessions led by documentary filmmakers and artists from these communities, participants delved deeper into the journeys and experiences of their families and themselves. The exhibition brings together personal reflections, archives, artworks and objects created during this process. Join us for the opening of the exhibition on June 22 at articule, with the program, from 2:30 p.m!
OPENING EVENTS PROGRAM:
2:30 PM: Round-table discussion on the transmission of family histories in the context of exile, with Rémy Chhem and Marie-Ève Samson (Super Boat People), Viet Tran (Sticky rice magazine) and Zeina Ismail-Allouche (CHORN), moderated by Eva-Loan Ponton-Pham.
4:00 PM: Screening of short films by filmmakers and artists Kim Sanh Châu, Pascal Huynh, Carol Nguyen, Chittakone Baccam Thirakul and Paul Tom, followed by a Q&A moderated by Ky Vy Le Duc.
6:15 PM: Opening and presentation of works and exhibition by the group.
Until 9:00 PM: DJ set by Hazy Montagne Mystique, accompanied by food and drinks!
Super Boat People & their co-facilitators
Super Boat People is a collective whose mission is to inclusively mobilize Cambodian, Laotian and Vietnamese people of origin and alliance in Quebec to commit to reclaiming their histories, reconnecting with their culture and communities, ensuring that they are fairly represented, and defending and promoting the interests of immigrants and refugees. To this end, the collective develops and implements various initiatives, around history, literature, social mobilization, urban agriculture and cooking.
Super Boat People’s co-founders Rémy Chhem et Marie-Ève Samson are behind this project. Collaborators Eva-Loan Ponton-Pham and Naomi Frost have joined the team, helping to develop further and implement the project. Rémy and Eva-Loan act as co-facilitators of the workshops.
Rémy Chhem is a Cambodian-born social scientist specializing in governance and natural resource management in the Mekong region. In his spare time, Rémy works as a researcher and organizer for Asian communities in Montreal. He co-coordinated the Cambodian component of the Montreal Life Stories project in the early 2010s and has since organized various mediation projects focusing on community history, memory transmission and intergenerational relations. In 2021, he co-founded the Collectif Super Boat People, whose mission is to foster cultural reconnection and highlight the history and experiences of 'Indochinese' communities through a renewed perspective. Within Super Boat People, he is in charge of several initiatives related to history, food and horticultural culture.
Eva-Loan Ponton-Pham is a multidisciplinary artist with a degree in Art History & Visual Arts from Concordia University. In all her projects, whether as co-founder of Atelier La Coulée, member of the feminist publishing collective Les Bêtes d'hier or as a cultural mediator in various community projects, she is committed to putting forward voices that are too often marginalized, by focusing on personal and collective narratives that complicate dominant discourses. Of mixed Vietnamese and Canadian origin, her personal work deals with confluent identities and the complexities of cultural transmission in diasporic contexts. Her concerns are conceptualized and shaped primarily through the mediums of photography, fanzines, documentaries and sculpture.
Marie-Ève Samson is a doctoral candidate in Anthropology at the Université de Montréal and is of French-Canadian Quebecer origin. Her research interests focus on the experiences of ageing, end-of-life, accompaniment and care for immigrant elderly and their caregivers, in the context of transformations in Quebec's social protection and healthcare systems. Co-founder of Super Boat People, she was also involved in the Montreal Life Stories project in the early 2010s. Her thesis draws on these various commitments and focuses more specifically on the intergenerational issues in elder care among families of Cambodian, Vietnamese and Laotian origin in Montreal.
Artists
Marie Diễm Trang Huynh
Laura Lưu
Sokphanévyna Mackay Chao
Emilie Nguyen Ngoc
Minh Tam Nguyen
Thérèse Nguyễn
Tina Nguyen
Latsami Sanakounphet-Boisclair
Kingkèo Savejvong
Shavonne Somvong
Elizabeth Trần
Maya Lan Anh Trần
Ewin Truong
Sokhorn Uon
Aline Yip
In partnership with Super Boat People, Concordia University's Centre for Oral History and Digital Storytelling (COHDS) and the Centre d'histoire de Montréal (MEM). This project has also been made possible thanks to the financial support of the Government of Quebec and the City of Montreal, as part of the Entente de développement culturel de Montréal.
