SKOL Festival: October 12th, 2026

Festival SKOL

Place du Village

29.08 • 05.09 • 12.10

On August 29, September 5, and October 12, the SKOL Festival brings together, at the Place du Village, queer artists working in contemporary art who invite the public to create, exchange, and discover their practices through participatory workshops and performances.

We would like to thank the Ville-Marie borough, as well as the SDC Village for its support and the Village Allies Brigade.

10am-11am: KAMA LA MACKEREL

Storytime (details to follow).

Biography

Kama La Mackerel is a Mauritian-Canadian multilingual writer, visual artist, performer, educator, and literary translator who believes in love, justice, and individual and collective empowerment. Their practice blurs the boundaries of traditional artistic practices to create aesthetic spaces from which decolonial and queer/trans vocabularies can emerge. Both narratological and theoretical, personal and political, their interdisciplinary approach—developed over the past 10 years—is rooted in ritual, meditation, ancestral healing practices, autoethnography, oral history, archival research, and community arts mediation.

11am-1pm: GUILLAUME BRISSON-DARVEAU

Performance/workshop: CRISIS, clothing for an uncertain future

Open to everyone: 6 participants. This activity requires the use of a full-face helmet and is therefore not recommended for people with claustrophobia.

You are invited to take part in a workshop that will lead to a collective performance. We will explore being-together through gestures of trust, care, and guidance. Over the course of a slow procession that the audience will be invited to join, an ephemeral community forms, woven from simple gestures and presences. The performance offers a sensitive meditation on being together in otherness, on interdependence, and on the memory inscribed in bodies.

Biography

Guillaume Brisson-Darveau’s recent projects explore materials as sites of transformation, where bodies, narratives, and imaginaries meet. The works born of this approach sit at the crossroads of sculpture, performance, and fashion. He takes oblique paths — the imaginaries of science fiction, strangeness, or slowness — to convey the complexity of the human condition and give shape to a world traversed by possibilities, desires, and fears. He is an artist based in Tiohtià:ke/Mooniyang/Montreal. His work has been presented in Canada and internationally. He is currently pursuing a doctorate in art studies and practices at UQAM.

1:30pm-5pm: EVAN WOLFE

Workshop: Imagining A Queer Utopia

Imagining A Queer Utopia is a participatory workshop about how the news framed two public health crises affecting men who have sex with men: HIV/AIDS in the 1980s and 90s, and chemsex today. Working from archival newsprint at the Archives gaies du Québec alongside present-day coverage, participants warm up by rewriting each crisis in the other era’s language. The swap makes the framing visible: the moral panic around HIV, the pathologizing tone around chemsex, and how constructed both are. The workshop then turns to its central question: what would the news have said in a queer utopia? Together we write the articles that the world might have run. Drop in for a few minutes or stay for the whole session, no experience needed.

Open to all: 5 participants, In English

Biography

Evan Wolfe works in oral and public history, with a focus on queer memory and harm reduction. He records first-person testimony and has built public walking tours and audio archives of queer history in Berlin and Montreal. He is beginning a master’s at Concordia University, affiliated with the Centre for Oral History and Digital Storytelling, and practises ceramics at Céramique @La FAB. His work treats the archive as something to reopen and reimagine, not only to preserve.

3pm-4:30pm: ALEXEY LAZAREV

Workshop: Drawing Differently (Drawing and Collage in Three Minutes)

This workshop explores creativity through time constraints and intuitive decision-making. Participants begin with a series of 3-minute drawings made from observation or imagination. The drawings are then exchanged among members of the group. In a second phase, these fragments are reworked through collage to bring out unexpected associations and new compositions. The session ends with a collective presentation of the results and an informal discussion.

Biography

Alexey Lazarev is a multidisciplinary artist. Born in Saint Petersburg, Russia, he has lived and worked in Tiohtià:ke/Mooniyang/Montreal since 2012. He holds a BFA from Concordia University and the University of Hertfordshire (UK) and is currently pursuing a Master of Fine Arts (MFA) at Concordia University, part of which was completed at the Glasgow School of Art. Lazarev has presented his work in Canada and internationally. He has taken part in artist residencies and conferences in Austria, Germany, Japan, and the United States.

His multidisciplinary practice explores queer, migrant, and neurodivergent experiences, including the identity transformations that follow immigration, nostalgia for places that no longer exist, and the difficulty of expressing what resists direct formulation.

3:30pm-5:30pm: GAUTHIER KRIAÂ

Workshop: EMPORTE-PIECE

Open to all: 12 participants, In French

EMPORTE-PIECE is an ephemeral “think tank.” Its mission is to build a group of experts on plant biodiversity, and on seeds in particular. After a review of the current state of seed preservation and the issues it raises (conservation, the decline in their diversity, the transformations of agriculture in the 21st century), the group will be invited to imagine new plant species.

Participants will imagine the seeds of these new species. Through modeling and sculpture, symbolic gestures, participants will shape these seeds, decide on their composition, the conditions that would need to change on Earth for them to germinate, and what future they carry within them. Once modeled and sculpted, these seeds will be named, drawn, and catalogued on identification cards, allowing EMPORTE-PIECE to complete a study report on the conditions identified by the group for a better future to flourish.

5pm-6:15pm: ALEXIA VINCI 

Open to everyone: number of participants to be confirmed, Bilingual

Workshop: Exploring the body-territory

You’re invited to come move to the rhythm of our bodies’ memories and of the land. A movement and sharing session to root ourselves, to connect with ourselves and with what surrounds us. How can the textures of the land be embodied through our physicality?

All bodies and abilities are welcome.

6:15pm-7pm: Lauranne Faubert-Guay LAURANNE FAUBERT-GUAY

Performance: Friends & Hammers – Prelude

Friends & Hammers – Prelude is a solo performance that opens the choreographic workshop of Friends & Hammers: a first study for a collective performance about friendship and hammers. Drawing on the writings of Sara Ahmed and bell hooks, it envisions friendship as a political force, necessary for the emergence of communities, revolt, and trust; and the hammer as both weapon and tool, capable of dismantling oppressive structures and transforming the material and symbolic world. Rigour, solidarity, and queerness are at the heart of the creation. Hammer always in hand, a body traces, digs, and builds imaginary territories sheltered from bombs. Friends & Hammers – Prelude is a way of preparing the ground, of attuning body and tool, before the friends arrive. Because to use hammers among friends is to love the world enough to want to transform it.

Biography

Lauranne Faubert-Guay is a choreographer, performer, curator, and researcher in contemporary dance. At the crossroads of choreography and sociology, Lauranne develops a practice in which movement becomes a political and poetic laboratory. Grounded in queer thought, her approach explores the ways bodies transform and resist the logics of exhaustion, numbing, and extraction that shape existence. Her creations weave together emancipation, ordeal, and utopia through rigorous visual writing and an intensely alive physicality. From her choreographic work emerge spaces where other ways of inhabiting intimate and collective worlds can be invented. Since 2020, she has directed Devenir(s) corps, an organization that supports creation and promotes accessibility of the performing arts in rural areas.