An Assembly for the Cosmos

Artists: Marcela Armas & Gilberto Esparza, Tabita Rezaire, Skawennati, Suzanne Treister & Patricia Domínguez, Jesse Tungilik, Michèle Boulogne, Nonhuman Nonsense

The project An Assembly for the Cosmos unfolds across three venues: at MICA | Montreal Institute of Contemporary Art, at Galerie de l’UQAM, and at Adélard in the Bishop Stewart Memorial Church in Frelighsburg.

With the powerful influence of the private sector and the resurgence of grand national ambitions, the prospect of space colonization, as promoted in the discourse of the industry’s magnates, seems increasingly pervasive and inevitable.

It therefore becomes imperative to understand the origins of these structuring imaginaries and to grasp the vast range of other relationships to the cosmos that they obscure. In the face of these dominant narratives, enriching cosmovisions and amplifying anticolonial and non-extractive perspectives — toward the construction of shared, sensitive and plural futures — is becoming ever more urgent.

An Assembly for the Cosmos thus raises the following questions: how can we bring forward the imaginaries, sociocultural singularities, and ancestral, Indigenous, community-based and more-than-human knowledges in our relationships to the cosmos? By placing these planetary ontologies and sensibilities at the centre through contemporary art, is it possible to constitute an assembly for the cosmos grounded in intra- and interplanetary solidarities?