On Saturday November 12th, 2016 MICE hosted a Symposium on Transformative Justice in the Arts at The Theatre Centre.

Guest editor Radiodress and consultant Syrus Marcus Ware asked themselves and contributors a series of questions about healing justice as they developed Issue 2:

Is there a healing justice aesthetic? If so, what does it look/sound/feel like?How are social movements which mobilize healing justice using media art practices? How do disability arts frameworks expand the edges of media art? What is the role of technology in these experimental practices? How do these practices trouble contemporary institutional frameworks for production? How do they re-define authorship and reception?

What is the conversation these works generate around spectatorship and affect? How do questions of cultural appropriation contribute to participation in these artworks? What resources and support do artists need to produce these projects?

MICE used these questions as the starting point for a free one-day symposium. We hosted a program of short films addressing social change, and two cross-disciplinary panels with activists and artists working in Toronto and beyond to discuss the transformative power of healing justice practices.

Schedule
Screening: Approaches to Healing Justice
Fly in the Ointment (Peter Collins, 2015, 10 min)
sum of the parts: what can be named (Deanna Bowen, 2010, 19 min)
Encounter at Kwacha House - Halifax (Rex Tasker, 1967, 17 min)

Panel 1: Transformative Justice and Institutional Frameworks 
Sandra Brewster, Artist, Community organizer, SKETCH coordinator (Toronto)
Deanna Bowen, Artist, Teacher (Toronto)
Cecily Nicholson, Poet, Activist, Gallery Gachet administrator (Vancouver)

MICE Symposium - Panel 1 from MICE Magazine on Vimeo.

Panel 2: Social Movements, Technology, and Media Art 
Nasrin Himada, Independent critic and curator and prison abolitionist (Toronto/Montreal)
Michelle Latimer, Filmmaker and social justice activist (Toronto)
Esery Mondesir, Filmmaker and social activist (Toronto)

MICE Symposium - Panel 2 from MICE Magazine on Vimeo.

Keynote Address 
Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, writer, performance artist and educator.

MICE Symposium - Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha Keynote from MICE Magazine on Vimeo.

This symposium was presented in collaboration with The Theatre Centre. Their production This is the Point, a portrait of four individuals whose lives have been shaped, in part, by cerebral palsy, ran November 4–20, 2016.