Earlier this month I was delighted to present Reading the Migration Library and other publications of Light Factory Publications at Volume8 MTL L’Art et Le Livre / Art and The Book in Montréal. The events offered plenty of opportunities to exchange RML inventory and to sell some of the remaining RML3: Undercurrents and Folds publications. Big gratitude goes to Volume8 MTL (especially Louis Rastelli) for supporting RML and Light Factory Publications with a vendor table and for featuring us (Deanne Achong, Leah Decter, Lois Klassen, and Clare Yow) at the Symposium: Fourth Space Concordia University on October 2, 2025.
Here is a peak at the amazing items that traveled back from Montreal to the RML headquarters in Vancouver,
Performance Immersion Participation (2023) by Amandine Alessandra, Vanessa Benoit, Natalie Doonan, Yesica Duarte, Eva Giard (research assistant), Lorna Heaton, Erin Hill, Mariana Kasimakis, Simon Laroche, Dylan LePors, Laura Nanni, Sophie Valiergue (art direction), and Nina Vroemen. Montreal: Participatory Multimedia Performance Residency, Eastern Bloc. Edition of 20.
This alluring (and reflective) box that Natalie Doonan carried to the Art Fair to exchange, at the very last moment, asks “How do you invite the public to take part in your immersive performances?” It is a timely question to ask of Reading the Migration Library, which could be imagined as a performance that immerses people in creating publications, reading them, often in public events, and in exchanging them through revealing conversations and correspondences. How inviting has it all been? How immersive? In the Performance Immersion Participation box, there are cards describing the poetic ingredients, recipes (methods), and a few “chef’s secrets”. A recipe card for “Scrying/Scrutation” by Nina Vroemen describes a method of catching a view of the sky using a mirror and using it to reflect on “something you are feeling”. The recipe, “Pupil Cistern / Citerne de la pupille” by Erin Hill, is pale blue and proposes an activity of gazing into another person’s pupils, hoping to imagine what the other person sees. It includes this reflection,
As I gaze at the sky, I feel the site of my seeing. My open eyes interpret light into meaning. The luminous sun, the illuminated clouds. I soften my gaze to let the sky fall in; sight is a viscous, fluid phenomenon.”
And, from “Invitation” by Vanessa Benoit,
Chef’s secret – Colour this invitation with a quote by Deleuze: ‘Every desire is a desire of a context, in a context’.”
Pages of Mourning (2025) by Jennella Young, Brooklyn: The Free Black Women’s Library CANON Small Press Zine Project.
Jennella Young’s blue-coloured publication is a direct and creative response to Imani Perry’s Black in Blues: How a Color Tells the Story of My People (2025). Young’s title also references the creative prompt by Julia Cameron to begin the day with “morning pages” to clear the mind of ideas in need of grounding. Like a small scrapbook this publication uses portrait painting, collage, and handwriting to locate a cluster of responses to the colour blue. It was supported by The Free Black Women’s Library in Brooklyn, which describes itself as “a literary hub, social site, Black Feminist archive, and community care space in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn”. Jennella Young took copies of both RML publications by Deanne Achong for The Free Black Women’s Library.
Providence (2025) by S. Erin Batiste honours a group of women whose early twentieth century photos were found by Batiste in the New Orleans Public Library. Originally in the form of police photos (“mug shots”), Batiste saw in them much more. Her collages cause the reader to sit with the gravity of knowing that these images were likely the women’s only photos, but with that grim realization, we are offered Batiste’s imagining of the women’s untold stories and lives, taking flight in layers of colour and image. Batiste describes in the book how she hopes for the added colour and details to aid in their transition out of captivity into a “joyous daybreak to end the long night…” (back cover). The zine’s text is made up of cut out and layered words from a Virginia Woolf novel to further emphasize the women’s best and strongest selves.
Both S. Erin Batiste and Jennella Young traveled to Volume8 MTL from Brooklyn with the Kolaj Institute, and the makers of Kolaj Magazine.
The Space Between (2025) by Lisa Di Fruscia (from Field Notes from an Ordinary Life, Post Velum Vol II) uses photography to attend to the poetics of what is “often dismissed or unnoticed” in a visual environment. In-between scenes “remind me that the world is always speaking, even when I am not listening,” Di Fruscia writes. The way she is aiming to make a practice of seeing in a way that “finds beauty in the unresolved, and seeks connection beyond division” resonates with the reflection on life between polarities, Middling (Memoir and Archive) in the series Practices of Everyday Ethics (Light Factory Publications), so I made sure she had one in exchange.
Petra Mueller made the tiny Livre des Heures (2025) from her local grocery store’s newsprint flyers. Mueller is an artist who works in both over-sized and tiny registers, usually in response to industrial technologies and material processes. Mueller was excited to trade this mini-object for Zarf (Containers) by Jasmine Valandani.
Zara Hoseini, also took Zarf (Containers) in exchange for this circular cyanotype (sun print) on coffee filter paper. It is another artifact that gets me lost in all that blue filters: the sun-drenched sky, the stain of slavery, the delight of transition from one thing and place, into the next.
Lukas Mouton (from the photo club at University of Montreal) traded this packet of exquisite photos for Elisa Yon’s Repetition and Texture and Pattern in National Geographic (2017).
Eloisa Aquino traded Gloria Anzaldúa (2015, from The Life and Times of Butch Dykes Series) for Tierra y Libertad / Little México by Carlos Colín, and Therapies (2020) for Notas sobre un recorrido: el Centro de Procesamiento de El Paso / Notes on a Tour: the El Paso Processing Center by Gabriela Galíndez.
Meredith Carruthers and Ryan Van Huijstee from Concordia University Press each traded copies of RML3 publications for these mini-books from the Concordia U P catalogue:
- Arthur Erikson with introduction by Melanie O’Brian (2022), Arthur Erickson on Learning Systems, Montreal: Canadian Centre for Architecture and Concordia University Press.
- Cornelia Hahn Oberlander with introduction by Jane Mah Hutton (2023), Cornelia Hahn Oberlander on Pedagogical Playgrounds, Montreal: Canadian Centre for Architecture and Concordia University Press.
From Brasserie Dunham in Dunham, QC, an artist and brewer offered for exchange L’Étiquette #3 and #6, a free graphic newspaper that celebrates the art of drinking with unrestrained exuberance. Each newspaper-sized issue is filled with artworks and comics that are inspired by beer and alcohol. They are free for the taking at the brewery.
François Lemieux, a designer and editor behind Le Merle dropped by the table with the Autumn, 2017 back issue. Surprisingly prescient, it opens with an essay by David Thomas, “Lines of Fight: Toward a Social History of Noplatforming”. Nine years before Charlie Kirk, Thomas offers an analysis of how the focus on free speech used by the extreme right is a tricky strategy to infiltrate progressive spaces. Thomas writes, “For it is under the guise of free speech that the alt-right has made the bulk of its initial gains, promoting its genocidal xenophobic state…” (46) It ends with this redirection,
The fights taking place on university campuses are indicative of the fact that the rot has reached the foundations. The question that should occupy us is not how to resurrect the fallen totems; but rather how to salvage from the driftwood of the old order structures equipped to serve the interests of the many.” (48)
Thank you Montréal for sharing the sky and the books and so much more with me and the artists behind Reading the Migration Library!