Call for Participants
What Travels Through Us: Family History Workshops
A series of workshops to tell, learn and create from our family stories
Deadline to apply: Saturday, October 19, 2024, 23:59 (11:59 PM EST)
Location: Tiohtiá:ke ("Montreal")
Registration Form
Super Boat People presents, in collaboration with articule, the Centre des mémoires montréalaises (MEM) and Concordia University's Centre for Oral History and Digital Storytelling, a series of 8 workshops enabling a cohort of ten participants of Cambodian, Vietnamese and Laotian origin to reclaim their past. Through a participatory approach combining oral history, artistic practice and co-creation, participants will:
Document their own family histories through oral history;
Explore different artistic media to create from their own stories;
Share the process with a wider public through mediation activities.
The workshops and guest artists
Lasting 5 hours, each workshop includes a presentation by artists mainly from Southeast Asia and a practical portion to prepare you to do an interview with a member of your family or your entourage and to inspire you to create from your story.
Among the confirmed artists, we welcome Paul Tom, Kim-Sanh Châu, and Pascal Huynh. To find out more about the artists, follow Super Boat People’s Instagram account!
Most workshops are held in French, but participants will be able to express themselves in the language of their choice. Accessibility measures are planned: babysitting, universal accessibility, etc.
Fall 2024
Saturday, November 2nd, 10 to 4 PM
Saturday, November 9th,10 to 4 PM
Saturday, November, 30th,10 to 4 PM
Saturday, December 14th, 10 to 4 PM
Winter — Spring 2025
From January to June 2025, once a month! (dates to be determined)
June: Winter Window Exhibition planned
Where: Concordia University’s Centre for Oral History and Digital Storytelling, the Centre des mémoires montréalaises (MEM), and articule.
Selection process: Priority will be given to people of Cambodian, Vietnamese or Laotian origin of any generation. We particularly encourage the following to register: those of Cambodian and Laotian origin, those identifying themselves as male, and those over 45. Project facilitators will select participants according to their motivation and commitment, in order to create a diverse cohort.
Application deadline: October 19th, at 11:59 PM and the selected participants will be announced the following week.
If you have any further questions, please do not hesitate to contact us at superboatpeople@gmail.com
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. This will be the project's second edition.
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.
This project has 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.
