This event is free to attend for passholders, but will require advance booking. Passholders will receive an email with a booking link in advance of the event.
The Queer Care programme is curated and facilitated by LGBTQIA+ artists Cannach MacBride, Conal McStravck, and Mikki who have worked with queer and trans media and community care resources with cooperation from from Lothian Health Services Archive, Edinburgh, Tyne and Wear Archives and UK trans mutual aid groups and transnational LGBTQIA support groups, past and present.
Cannach MacBride (they/them s an artist working with performance, installation, writing, video, and event making – with and without institutions. Their practice focuses on relational entanglements, listening across—and being attentive to—difference, and working creatively towards an ethics of inseparability and interdependency. They are currently doing PhD research into listening as pluralistic creative practice, and they have also worked in the care industry.
Conal McStravick (they/them) is a queer, non-binary artist, writer, curator and educator born in Ireland and based in Glasgow, Scotland. This project at BFMAF continues McStravick’s doctoral research project “Learning in a fantastically public medium”: Stuart Marshall and Sound, Video and Television as Art and Activist media, 1968-1993, with events, exhibitions and publishing on Marshall and his context, between 2022-2026.
Mikiki (they/them) is a queer video and performance artist from Newfoundland whose work has been presented across Canada through self-produced interventions, artist-run centres, and public galleries. Alongside their artistic practice, they have worked in sexual health education since the early 2000s. Their varied roles—including sexuality educator in Calgary public schools, bathhouse attendant in Saskatoon, and drag queen karaoke host in St. John’s—inform their work in gay men’s health. Mikiki has also worked as a sexual health outreach worker in Ottawa, HIV educator in Montreal, and Poz Prevention Coordinator at the Toronto People With AIDS Foundation, and now leads a harm reduction outreach and HIV testing programme at a community health centre.
Palliative Care Workshop
Join a free participatory workshop exploring grief, communitarian care, and ways of imaging what we might palliate.
Led by Toronto/Tkaranto–based artist and community activist Mikiki, the workshop draws on models of communitarian grief work alongside visual and performative frameworks such as the “holographic will / death box”, the Swedish death-cleaning process, and “Pepper’s Ghost” to consider how care and palliation might be collectively imaged. Participants will engage in gentle exercises focused on somatics, parasympathetic nervous system regulation, and self-soothing strategies.
The session approaches communitarian grief work and care as forms of maintenance, connecting to Mikiki’s practice of death cleaning as an integral part of life.
This final workshop of the Queer Care Caravan also serves as the closing event of the BFMAF Festival and will include a culminating screening.