Joliz Dela Peña
© Photo Credits: Andy Tran, 2026.
Trespassing the Timeline
— Montreal Monochrome XI — TRANSIENT
Performance by Joliz Dela Peña.
Friday, September 4, 2026 at 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.
In Trespassing the Timeline, the artist creates a collage of actions drawn from lived experiences and collective imagery, reimagining violent objects through their transformation into toys and games marketed toward children and younger audiences. Toy guns, ammunition, and playsets that reproduce the imagery of authoritative institutions become the primary objects of interaction between the performer and the audience.
A bubble gun, a toy machine gun producing a rat-a-tat-tat sound, a water gun, a hunting game, a police or military playset: these objects carry images that precede the stories we tell about them. Which comes first? The war story, the propaganda, the heroic saviour, the terrorist, the hunt? Through play, these narratives can become familiar before they are understood.
The performance brings these objects into a shared space with the audience, transforming their functions and associations through a sequence of actions, gestures, and games. By placing the apparent innocence of play alongside the realities of gun violence, state authority, and the mass deportation of immigrants, Trespassing the Timeline examines how violence is packaged, rehearsed, normalized, and passed between generations.
Artist
Joliz Dela Peña, also known as JDP 2009, is a self-taught interdisciplinary artist and a cultural worker born in the Philippines, now based in Tiohtià: ke/Montreal. Intimate connection to memories, identity, and immigration are recurring themes in Dela Peña’s practice. Through performance accompanied by installations, she pursues to relive realities, explore its complexities, and translate invisible tension/s into various visual and tactile qualities.
Shown in her work, she attempts to translate fragmented memories from her personal life as first-generation immigrant, drawing also from intersecting experiences, in order to construct an emphatic perspective. Her aim extends beyond mere contemplation, encompassing a dimension of activism.
Dela Peña’s work has been presented at various festivals across Quebec and Canada, including Art Souterrain Festival (Voies/Voix Résilientes, 2022), OFFTA (2023), Art in the Open PEI (2023), and Vibrance et Vacarme in the Bas-Saint-Laurent region (Caravanserail, 2024). Most recently, Dela Peña presented her work internationally in León, Mexico (Performance es utopia, 2025) and Tokyo, Japan (IPAMIA minimum/distance vol 9).
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.