By Àbigaïl Yartey.
When I was starting out as a queer indigenous filmmaker in the 1990s, there wasn’t a lot of us making work. Since then, there has been a lot of people who’ve gotten into this arena….for me it was wanting to bring back queer elders, or queer people who hadn’t been able to fully live out their lives….”
TJ Cuthand is a performance artist, filmmaker, writer, and curator who currently resides in Toronto, Canada. His work has been screened in festivals internationally, including the Tribeca Film Festival in New York City, Mix Brasil Festival of Sexual Diversity in Sao Paolo, ImagineNATIVE in Toronto, Ann Arbour Film Festival, Berlinale in Berlin, New York Film Festival, Outfest. His work is grounded in the bridge between indigenous and Western understandings of sexuality. Theo’s art is mainly autobiographical, but ties into current political concerns for his communities, including the Indigenous and Queer/Trans communities. He describes it as largely a practice of experimental documentary shorts. He first coined the term indigequeer in 2004, used as a way to acknowledge that not all 2SLGBTQI+ – the acronym used by the government of Canada to refer to the Canadian community, feel that ‘two-spirit’, which a term that refers to another gender role common among most, if not all first people in Turtle Island, North America, describes their identity. Indigequeer was first used to title the Vancouver Queer Film Festival’s Indigenous/two-spirit program.
Cuthand also makes video games, and his most recent was about a lesbian vampire who must learn to get her needs for blood and love met ethically by having conversations with people in a small urban space. He is currently engaged in editing a video about his transition to male, using photos and videos he took over the course of 18 months, of testosterone and having top surgery as part of his transition. He is also working on two features that fall under the category of Indigiqueer horror film. One involves themes that focus around MMIWG2S (Murdered and Missing Indigenous Women, Girls, and Two Spirits), and his other film is about resource extraction colonialism.
Since 1995 Theo has been making short experimental narrative videos and films about sexuality, mental illness, Queer identity and love, and Indigeneity, which have screened in festivals internationally.
In The Lost Art of the Future he reflects on the unmade art of queer people who have lost their lives to HIV and AIDS.
You reference the work of Terry Haines and the artist, Zachery C. Longboy as key influences on you. I got a sense of that in the film’s aesthetical components and imagery. Was there a deliberate choice on your part to change the viewer’s gaze or to change the perspective of the viewer?
In making the film, I think in a way I wanted to sort of give it layers and I was trying to think of some aesthetics that some of those videos all shared. They’re very different videos, but there were some imagery and sound that I wanted to keep from those videos. So yes, it was looking at the aesthetic and trying to be creative and recreate the sound.
Would you mind telling me a bit about the ritual that you perform in, The Lost Art of The Future? I know it’s based on the ‘Sun Dance’ ceremony, practised by native American and indigenous people.
Yes. I was piercing my chest and then hanging these like paper eagle feathers from it. That was recreating a ritual that Ahasiw Maskegon-Iskwew had performed in a performance piece at Grunt Gallery (Vancouver), where he pierced his chest with, and hung real eagle feathers off of them. I think the reason I picked paper ones [and not eagle feathers] was because I didn’t have enough feathers, but also to reinforce the idea that was a replication of an actual thing that had happened. Even Asahiw’s performance was replicating rituals that had happened at the Sun Dance, which is a very closed ceremony that’s not usually filmed by people. So, it was creating that space with the audience.
Do you mean, space to devote time to that performance for people to see?
Yes, I think just creating a sacred space around your body, and having this vulnerability, because I guess piecing yourself is a very vulnerable act. It’s also got overtones of violence to it, so yes, it’s complicated.
You get a real sense of different artist’s work, and influences of indigenous and queer artists who are referenced in the film. Do you think the work of indigenous, queer artists is a unique kind of place to come from, that you feel deserves to be platformed?
I think so. When I was starting out as a queer indigenous filmmaker in the 1990s, there wasn’t a lot of us making work. Since then, there has been a lot of people who’ve gotten into this arena, making all different kinds of work. So, I guess for me it was wanting to bring back queer elders, or queer people who hadn’t been able to fully live out their lives and become you know like, more well known. Or I guess more studied, just because their lives had been so much shorter. So for me it was important for me to talk about these indigenous queer men and the work they made, and I wish they’d been able to keep making.
What do you consider HIV and AIDS meant to people in the 1980s and 1990s when media and advertising embedded the image of a black tombstone for example in our collective memory? The 80s evidenced a homophobic mainstream culture, but now charities are pressuring government to end all new diagnoses completely, as antiretroviral therapies are used successfully to manage existing infections and prevent new ones, what would you consider HIV means today and beyond into the future?
I mean, we’re at an interesting point in time with HIV and AIDS, because I mean, HIV is more manageable. I’m taking PrEP so there’s ways to prevent it. That’s something we only dreamed of in the 80s and 90s, right? It was something hard to get to and finally we’re here. It’s kind of like – what’s next? There’s this place called Saskatoon, in Saskatchewan and they had an organisation called AIDS Saskatoon for years and years and years, and then more recently it switched over to Prairie Harm Reduction because they realised a lot of their users were IV drug users who they’d needed to do harm reduction work instead of with HIV and AIDS members that they used to have.
So, it’s interesting to see how the shift has gone from HIV and AIDS fighting to harm reduction in some places.
Yes, I agree. You’ve got many different dimensions within fighting the infection and stamping out HIV. Do you think it’s important for art to be shown in mainstream arenas and normalised in this way – marginalised and indigenous art, I mean – or do you think acceptability is contrary to the message artists maybe like yourself or Zachery C. Longboy do? Can artists thrive in their own respective places from outside of that?
I’ve been thinking about that. A lot of my work is about audience and who my audience is, and I’ve kind of come to the decision that my audience is two-spirit, indigiqueer people. At the same time, I’m okay with other people seeing it. Like it’s not a closed audience. I think there’s a place for it in the mainstream, I mean it’s just nice to know that people care about and think outside of their own community, and care about marginalised communities enough to platform them in like, big venues like the BFI or other places where I’ve screened work. I would love to do a series where I just go to different indigenous communities and show my work – and I have done that. At the same time I think it’s important other people see it, too.
What are you headed towards for future projects?
I just finished a video game about a lesbian vampire. It’s called Carmilla the Lonely and it’s a video game about ethics. I’m also working on a trilogy about climate change and trans climate migrants in the very early stages right now – it’s more of a documentary trilogy using the idea of spectacle.
Nice, was there anything you wanted to add?
These were men from my community, and they were very influential to me when I was emerging as a filmmaker. I’m happy to talk about them in my work today.
Àbigaïl Yartey is a writer living in London, currently studying MA Black British Literature at Goldsmiths, University of London.