Is Rape Too Real to Be Funny?

So what exactly does a comedy show about rape look like?

This year, local comedians Emma Cooper and Heather Jordan Ross managed to repeatedly sell out East Vancouver venues for their production Rape is Real and Everywhere, featuring comedians who are also survivors of sexual assault. If that sounds unlikely, you can be sure that there are a wealth of locals, like myself, who were excited at the prospect of going to a comedy show where we wouldn’t have to cringe at self-excusing comics deploying oppressive stereotypes for clichéd punchlines.

Rape is Real was just as I had hoped it would be: actually funny. The show is balance between jokes that “punched up,” reflections on the culture and legal system that allow so many survivors to go without justice, and personal stories that were nothing except brutally honest. For some of the comics, the difficulty of telling these stories was palpable, but the crowd provided claps, cheers, and kind words to help everyone through their sets. If being part of a supportive atmosphere contributed in any way to personal healing, then it was well worth the ticket price.

But can comedy make an impact as a political tool? Comedy in comparison to other kinds of storytelling is an insider/outsider artform. Punchlines need to be relatable to land.

It was no surprise that the vast majority of hands in the audience went up when Cooper asked at the beginning of the show if anyone was a survivor of sexual assault (and that no hands went up when she asked who in the audience was a rapist). The overwhelming response in Vancouver is telling us something about this specific conversation. Can many comedy shows with such a “narrow” focus take off so quickly?

In an interview with VICE, Ross says “I have this joke where I say: “I always hear from guys, they say, ‘If you can tell a murder joke, you can tell a rape joke, right?’ And my response is always, ‘I don’t know if one in three men in this room have been—murdered.’ I think we’re talking about something a little different here.”

Rape is Real and Everywhere has kicked off its national tour, and is by now heading east from Ottawa. The show will include local comics from each stop, all with stories of their own to tell and laugh about. Finding and knowing that this community exists, has similar struggles, and is willing to talk about it, can make all the difference.

-Sydney from The Media Democracy Project

What Good is a Feel-Good Narrative When it’s Up Against the Mining Industry?

What roles can different kinds of media take in fueling the public outrage necessary to create change?

It’s DOXA season again, and included in the documentary film festival’s selection this year is We Call Them Intruders, by local filmmakers Tamara Herman and Susi Porter-Bopp. The film was an entry point into the terrifying global impact of Canadian mines, as well as the actions Canadians can take to improve the situation.

We Call Them Intruders smartly steers away from discussing the implications of consumer demand, and also largely ignores human rights violations by Canadian mines on workers. Instead the film focuses on the economic impact the mines have had on the communities they are situated in. The filmmakers traveled to communities in Tanzania and Zambia in which many persons’ livelihoods have been displaced by Canadian mines. Meanwhile, little of the money made on their land has stayed in these countries to benefit its citizens, despite the continued promises made by these mines and local governments.

It’s a stripped down but focused version of global mineral extraction, digestible for younger students, but also fitting for Herman and Porter-Bopp’s distribution plans. The film speaks in simple but direct terms to the place of Canadian investments, pensions, and taxes in supporting the mining industry.

Their plan is to target schools and pension and investment groups with the film, which calls for divestment and local activism. We Call Them Intruders avoids placing blame on individuals, with the exception of the most obvious of Canadian villains, Stephen Harper. The filmmakers were quick to note in a Q&A following the screening that they did not expect our current government to do any better in promoting socially conscious mining practices internationally.

This was a stark contrast to the framework placed around mining in Dr. Alessandra Santos’ (from UBC’s Dept of French, Hispanic, and Italian Studies) lecture for The Vancouver Institute for Social Research, called “Dust, Media, and Invisible Materiality.” In Dr. Santos’ lecture, dust was the invisible evidence of our global production system, living in the bodies of mining labourers, and coming off of the technology in our pockets. In one of her examples, Dr. Santos uses the video game Phone Story, made for Apple and Android, in which you play a manager at a mine with the goal of preventing the suicides of labourers.

Santos asked the audience if that made the game makers hypocrites? Using a medium which utilizes the minerals mined by companies known for these kinds of working conditions? I’d wager that the game makers intended on exposing potential players to be hypocrites. The weapon employed here is pure shock, and can have just the opposite effect of We Call Them Intruders. Rather than feel empowered, it was hard to listen to the lecture and not feel paralysed.

For a narrative to make an impact on global social responsibility, we have to see the connections between our actions and their consequences in both the place we occupy in promoting and continuing global industries that degrade human and ecological rights, and the activism we can do to improve or stop these industries. But where exactly is the place to hold individuals accountable? What space do we leave for the discomfort caused by our complacency in participating in destructive global markets? How can media give us the outrage necessary to make change?

DOXA continues at different venues in Vancouver until May 15^th. You can catch the remaining lectures in the Vancouver Institute for Social Research’s Spring Term, themed “Fantasy, Ideology, Media,” on Monday evenings at 7 PM at Or Gallery.

-Sydney from The Media Democracy Project

Reciprocity In the Wake of Goats and Grenades

“Surrounded by a possible serene beauty, grief and sadness, love and hate, what encounters do we inscribe into our psyches and into our beings, what can art do to fulfil a mandate of hope and agency. What can we contribute.” – thirstDays Project curator/artist-in-residence Jayce Salloum at VIVO Media Arts Centre

The subtitle of grunt gallery’s monthly series Spark: Fireside Artist Talks, points towards where the talks take place…

in the community and conversational site of the Native Education College Longhouse, over lunch in the afternoons. Last Thursday Cease Wyss, media artist and ethno-botanist, and Hans Winkler, a German artist and curator, sat down in the informal space to discuss their connection, observations, and work with Kaho‘olawe Island in Hawaii.

The conversation centred around the violent history of Kaho‘olawe, which was used to test bombs and explosives by the U.S. Army, who seized the island under martial law after the attack on Pearl Harbour in 1941. The bombing, combined with the island’s unique colonial plight of rampant goats (brought originally by Captain Vancouver in the late 18^th century), has left the island with an uninhabitable desert like terrain, with much of its land still unsafe due to undetonated explosives. The land has been “given back” to Hawaii and the Kaho’olawe Island Reserve Commission (KIRC) and Protect Kaho’olawe ‘Ohana (PKO) determines who has access to the island by invitation, usually only to volunteers and those with Hawaiian ancestry.

For the two artists Kaho’olawe was a site to explore a very valuable question in the project of healing: “what can we contribute?” The fulcrum for this work is, I think, a phrase Wyss during her talk that Thursday: the “cultural handshake.”

The handshake, or the site of human connection as a literal touch, is an interaction with Wyss that I feel privileged to have received one week prior to that edition of Spark. The program at thirstDays no. 02: Rematriation and other ruminations, at VIVO media arts centre, was closed by Wyss, who hosted a “reciproci-tea party,” in which she first instructed the room to get into a circle, an ideal shape for receiving, and gifted us tea that she had made from the plants native to the Squamish and Hawaiian lands of her ancestry.  In this practice she grabbed each person’s hands individually and thanked them.

This followed a piece by Skeena Reece, Touch Me (2013), in which Reece bathes another woman. They share what Tara Hogue, the Aboriginal Curatorial Resident at grunt gallery, calls “the severing of cultural, linguistic and family ties through the residential school system, and signal the need for forgiveness – on a personal level – to move toward trust.” Generosity was on display as a powerful agent, with each individual sent home with tea and caribou stew warm in their bellies, to sleep on what it means to have just received a gift.

thirstDays is an ongoing project that VIVO is embarking on this year which centers around the expressions of “love, intimacy and (com)passion in a geopolitical context,” and each event is a diverse presentation of poetry, video, ceremony, and performance that explore that space.

This project, and the site of the Lower Mainland, are not unique as sites of struggle and occupation. thirstDays searches for a way for individuals to contribute to healing the divides and learning from the anger that has been created by the continued cultural genocides of Indigenous peoples. I came away with appreciation for the land I am a settler on and the culture I was invited to take part in, as thirstDays asks an important question of those who attend: what is each person’s place within this struggle?

This place is geographical, political, and historical.  It searches to make connections with different times, places, and people, and it is not satisfied in narrowing its reach or restraining its energy. It’s the extension of Wyss’ “cultural handshake.”

So again, what is it we can contribute? In the case of Kaho’olawe, Wyss is using her practices as an ethno-botanist to help restore the plants indigenous to the island. She also has plans to start ephemeral art projects in collaborations with the Hawaiians who visit the island by using the shells and bombs found in the land.

For Winkler, he saw the nature of Kaho’olawe as a site of spiritual and cultural teachings as a very important part of preservation. This got him to seek out the aid of an ex-CIA hacker to help with the project of erasing Kaho‘olawe from official maps. It’s a project of sovereignty, to keep hidden one of the few places in Hawaii where access has not been granted to the general public.

Kaho’olawe exists as a refuge from commercial interests and tourism, and a simultaneous reminder of grief and destruction. It is interesting that the place that was stolen from its people is now one of the only places in Hawaii that Hawaiians can use to practise ceremony in peace. This and the history of the island have kept it as a deeply spiritual place for many despite its land having been visibly changed by colonialism. Wyss reflected the thorny idea that people go to learn their culture and language in “one of the heaviest places.”

thirstDays continues with No. 03 Harbour/Haven on April 28^th, and grunt gallery’s Spark: Fireside Artist Talks usually occur on the third Thursday of every month.

-Sydney from The Media Democracy Project