Eve-Tagny-Funeral-Garden
Eve TagnyFuneral Garden, exhibition view,
Plein sud, Longueuil 2022.
Photo: Simon Belleau, courtesy of the artist, Plein sud, Longueuil, & Cooper Cole, Toronto

Becoming Free and Modelling the Possible with Rage and Humour
An Interview with Nathalie Batraville

Ariane De Blois
Nathalie Batraville holds a doctorate (Yale University) and a post-doctorate (Dartmouth College) in literary studies and is an adjunct professor at the Simone de Beauvoir Institute at Concordia University. Her research centres on cultural productions of the Black Atlantic, including Haiti, through the lens of Afrofeminist, decolonial, and queer theory. She is also an activist for defunding the police and the abolition of prisons, a ceramicist, and the curator of the Instagram page @black_ceramicists.

I’m fascinated by the richness of her work and wanted to speak with her about how art, theoretical thought, and creation can contribute to ways of being and of imagining not beholden to hegemonic discourses and norms. As I have reservations about the notion of resilience, which, in my view, individualizes trauma and puts undue stress on victims of systemic oppression, I wanted to guide the discussion toward how creation helps to develop collective spaces open to encounters, mutual aid, empowerment, and lifting each other up.

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108-Esse-Resilience
This article also appears in the issue 108 - Resilience
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